This paper is a discussion of Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing Excellence: The Fifty Golden Rules for Small-Business Success. Levinson continues to apply his concept of the "guerrilla mind" to questions of marketing; although this volume purports to be designed for small businesses, many of his rules are just as applicable to (and maybe more appropriate for) larger concerns. He begins by focusing on changing conventional thinking about marketing, then progresses through a series of steps aimed at doing business in a different kind of way than is often considered from a traditional sales-oriented marketing point of view. His guidelines, while breezily written and delivered in fifty bite-sized pieces, add up to an approach that focuses on long-term, customer-oriented ways of doing business, most of which make sense in an increasingly sophisticated, competitive marketplace.
Levinson argues that a thorough knowledge of marketing is essential to business success, including "the small but omnipotent details untouched by most marketing courses, unpracticed by many marketing departments" (x). He argues for approaching the subject of marketing with the attitude that certain rules exist, not to be broken but to be followed exactly, since most of them apply across the board to all kinds of businesses and exist for solid, proven reasons.
He divides his 50 rules into four general and fairly arbitrary categories. He begins with rules to change the marketer's conventional, traditional way of thinking about marketing to a more "guerrilla"-like approach. By this, he means an attitude that views marketing as both a game and the very serious key to genuine business success. These first 13 rules start with the caution that marketing is a cumulative process: "Your booth plus your letter plus your telemarketing plus your advertising presence plus your publicity plus your time and your patience finally combine to get the job done"...