What Is Guerrilla Marketing? Top Guerrilla Marketing Examples (2024)

SEO, social media campaigns, email, advertising, comparison engines—these are the usual suspects when we talk about marketing.

But marketing is about sifting through a world of possibilities and unearthing opportunities to get in front of your customers.

That belief is at the heart of guerrilla marketing—a scrappy, unorthodox, and aggressive approach to getting your brand in front of could-be customers by establishing your presence in the physical world around you.

In this article, you’ll learn the different guerrilla marketing types, plus unconventional marketing ideas you can use to increase brand visibility and generate buzz for your brand.

What is guerrilla marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is a promotional strategy that involves using the element of surprise to generate interest in your product or service. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, the main goal of guerrilla marketing campaigns is to do something so unexpected that your audience can’t wait to tell their friends about it.

Advertising executive and author Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term “guerrilla marketing” in the 1980s. Its name references guerrilla warfare, whereby smaller military groups can defeat larger, better-resourced armies with surprise attacks.

Similarly, the idea behind guerrilla marketing is to create an impact with a limited marketing budget.

Guerrilla marketing vs. online marketing

At its best, guerrilla marketing is the perfect bridge to bring customers online to offline. It nets you direct offline exposure via foot traffic that can be as targeted as the location you choose, as well as word-of-mouth buzz through people talking about and sharing your marketing on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, blogs, etc.

There’s also potential to generate press coverage if your idea is interesting enough, or even go viral if you’re in the right place at the right time for the right person.

Unlike most online marketing strategies, it can be hard to apply the granular “do, measure, improve” approach to offline guerrilla marketing. Instead, your guerrilla marketing ideas will succeed or fail on the merit of their creativity and execution. There’s also a little luck involved.

Guerrilla marketing vs. viral marketing

A successful guerrilla marketing strategy will attract lots of attention, and may even go viral on social media. The main difference is that almost any marketing campaign has the potential to go viral, whether it uses guerrilla marketing strategies or not.

There are four core types of guerrilla marketing:

1. Outdoor

Outdoor guerrilla marketing happens outside, in public. Think: unusual uses of outdoor advertising like billboards, posters, and trucks and murals, sculptures, and other eye-catching outdoor art installations.

Outdoor guerrilla marketing can take some pretty unusual forms. For example, the Seattle Mariners baseball team released 75 hot dogs via parachutes into the stands of T-Mobile Park as “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle played.

2. Indoor

Like outdoor guerrilla marketing, indoor guerrilla marketing happens in public places. The main difference is that indoor campaigns happen inside—for example, in train stations, malls, office buildings, or airports—while outdoor campaigns occur out-of-doors (on the street, in a stadium, field, public park, or public square).

An example of indoor guerrilla marketing is Spanish renewable energy company Iberdrola’s Turnstile Turbines campaign, which replaced six subway turnstiles in the Miromesnil station in Paris, France, with mini wind turbines that actually generated energy (0.2 watts per person) as people walked through them.

3. Ambush

Ambush marketing involves attaching your brand or product to an event without officially sponsoring the event—kind of like crashing a party. For example, strategically placing relevant billboards or posters near an event location, handing out related merch nearby, or organizing a flash mob.

The idea behind ambush marketing is to capitalize on the draw of a major event without signing an expensive sponsorship deal. For example, Nike is not an official sponsor of the Paris 2024 Olympics or the 2024 Euro Cup, but the brand capitalized on these two major sporting events by wrapping a building in the center of Paris with an enormous advertisement featuring French soccer star Kylian Mbappé wearing the red, white, and blue of the French flag (Nike did design France’s 2024 Euro uniforms).

You can also ambush other businesses’ campaigns—your competitors’ or complementary businesses you’d like to be associated with—by responding to their campaign with your own.

4. Experiential

Experiential marketing involves creating an environment for your audience to interact with. The Turnstile Turbines example above is a type of experiential marketing because subway riders physically interacted with the turnstiles.

Other types of experiential guerrilla marketing tactics include a brand “takeover” of an existing space (like the Hello Kitty bullet train in Japan) or a fully immersive installation (like the Flamingo Estate holiday pop-up in Los Angeles made entirely of gingerbread).

Ambient marketing is a type of experiential guerrilla marketing that involves creating a marketing campaign around the features of an existing environment. (People are still talking about the time Folgers took advantage of the steam coming from New York City’s manholes to create what looked like steaming-hot cups of coffee on the street.)

Guerrilla marketing campaign examples

Heyday Canning Co. Bean Swap
Jolie Skin Co. Truck
Graza “Wanted” Flyers

Guerilla marketing can be much riskier than other marketing strategies. Since its goal is to surprise, it’s hard to know how your customers will react. But a successful guerrilla marketing campaign can pay off.

Here are some examples of how small businesses have used guerrilla marketing to promote their brands:

Heyday Canning Co. Bean Swap

Instead of opening a regular pop-up shop to promote her flavored canned beans, Heyday Canning Co. cofounder Kat Kavner decided to do things a little differently. “[My brother] had this idea of doing a bean swap where you bring in a can of whatever beans you have at home and we swap you one-for-one for a can of Heyday,” Kat says on the Shopify Masters podcast.

“We don’t have a huge marketing budget, but the money that we do have, we really want to focus it on one thing and take a risk on doing something that we think is really creative and fun and has the potential to cut through the noise and help us grow some brand awareness for Heyday,” Kat says. “And with that in mind, we were like, ‘OK, so what could we do?’ And I kept coming back to that idea of the bean swap.

“We very quickly pieced together this vision of opening up a pop-up. Everything that we sell in the store is beans. We have Heyday beans and then we’ll also have bean merch. We’ll make bean hats and bean tote bags and bean socks and we started getting a little crazy with it.”

The bean store attracted a line around the block and quickly sold out of its stock—and, more importantly, it created buzz for the brand on social media. “I think we got honestly quite lucky on this one,” Kat says. “To come out of the gate with a viral TikTok success is pretty darn good, and we won’t always do that. We’ll do other things in the future and maybe they’ll totally flop and it won’t feel like it was worth it. But I think it’s really important that we just get comfortable with that risk.”

Jolie Skin Co. Truck

Jolie Skin Co. makes filtered shower heads driven by the idea that shower water is the root cause of most skin and hair issues. To bring this concept to life, Jolie created an advertisement designed to look like a dirty truck.

The Jolie trucks roamed New York City spreading the message: “What if we told you that your shower water was dirtier than this truck?” The “dirty” truck attracted plenty of attention.

“It has been, by far, the most successful form of marketing that we’ve done, measured by how many times it gets brought up to us or [posted],” Arjan Singh, cofounder and head of brand marketing and operations at Jolie Skin Co. tells Marketing Brew.

Graza “Wanted” Flyers

Olive oil company Graza promoted the re-release of its extra-virgin olive oil potato chips with old-school “Wanted” flyers.

Flyering isn’t exactly a novel marketing idea, but what makes this an example of guerrilla marketing is how Graza uses the format of a lost pet flier in an unexpected way: “EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL POTATO CHIPS Missing Since March 2024.” Passersby who scan the QR code on the tear-off section will be directed to Graza’s email newsletter sign-up page.

Guerrilla marketing campaigns FAQ

What is an example of guerrilla marketing?

An example of guerrilla marketing is the Seattle Mariners’ Hot Dogs From Heaven campaign. The baseball team surprised fans when dozens of hot dogs descended from parachutes.

Why is it called guerrilla marketing?

Guerrilla marketing comes from the term “guerrilla warfare,” which means using small-scale, fast-moving tactics to fight against a larger military. As a marketing tactic, it refers to using surprising and unconventional methods to reach a target audience and win their attention.

Is guerrilla marketing legal?

Guerrilla marketing is legal, however, you need to be careful you are not breaking the law while you’re creating the campaign or event. For example, you cannot graffiti any wall or street. You must get permission from the city or owner of the building before adding promotional material to it.

What Is Guerrilla Marketing? Top Guerrilla Marketing Examples