Gorilla or Guerrilla?

An interesting error I've seen made more than once in this business: 

In emails or memos that reference the tactic of "guerrilla marketing" – eschewing traditional media for unconventional, attention-getting, and relatively cheaper message placements – the unknowing writer has misspelled it as gorilla marketing.
 
That, ironically, brings to mind the old "800-pound gorilla" designation for the biggest, most powerful brand in a given industry – one whose advertising budgets dwarfed their competitors' miniscule marketing dollars and thus had little for need for the cleverness of guerrilla advertising.
 
The term, incidentally, was coined by author Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book, Guerrilla Marketing. He based it, of course, on the concept of guerrilla warfare, i.e, small independent groups using ambush, surprise, and mobility to effectively battle against larger forces. 
 
Going back one step further, guerrilla is derived from the Spanish word for war (hence, "small war") and was how the Spanish described their resistance to Napoleon's French army during the early 1800s.
 
But back to my main point: Guerilla marketing is superfluous if you’re the gorilla doing the marketing.

Of course, there's also this kind of gorilla marketing, but we don't have to get into that right now:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fly Me Again

Image
We referenced this ad campaign in an earlier post , but it really deserves its own entry. This memorable/notorious American Airlines campaign appeared back in 1971, at the behest of National Airlines'  Lewis Maytag  who sought to modernize the airline and the image of its stewardesses.  (Yes, they were still known as stewardesses back then.) At the time, airline advertising had frequently based their messages on the friendliness and attentiveness of their stewardesses, but previous efforts tended more toward the chauvinistic end of sexism spectrum, treating them more like Ladies Of The Air than ladies of the night: (Despite the caveman ethos of the headline and illustration, if you click on the ad to enlarge it and read the copy, you'll see it's actually about men being so beguiled by their stewardesses that they often took them for wives -- after first mistaking wives for servants, I suppose.) But now, with the sexual revolution and women's liberation in full swing (an...
Read more

I wanted to like this ad, I really did

Image
When I first came across it, I (wrongly) assumed it was the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, using a very minimalist layout to catch attention and evoke emotion, sort of like they did with the Polaroid ads in the ‘60s . No logo, just a simple headline, and an intriguing illustration that tells you nothing about the product, only the elation it will inspire in the woman in the your life. What an incredible way to portray a woman leaping into the arms of her man, I thought, showing only what’s necessary to imply the situation, spurring the reader to imagine the embrace, the eyes, the kiss.   Brilliant, I thought. Then I read the headline.    “Wear an Arrow Shirt and you'll simply sweep her off her feet!”   No.   No, I don’t believe this ad, even for a minute.    The only way to sell this scenario is if the emotion implied feels true. Even in 1949, it’s hard to imagine anyone got this excited about a dress shirt. Unless he just got home from the service and t...
Read more

Not just hyperbole

Image
Maybe you've seen this classic Guinness poster, created back in the '30s and assumed that it was nothing more than silly hyperbole: And you'd be partly right. The idea is actually based on the high iron content of Guinness (probably from the water used), though of course, the benefit of this is exaggerated to an unbelievable extent in the poster above. That didn't stop the image from becoming so iconic that a pint Guinness became known as a "girder." The image also inspired this parody from Heinekin some 40 years later (though its likely that many young drinkers never realized its source), that both fit the idea into its own ad format and made the male sexual subtext even more implicit: (Best not to take any of this too seriously, though. In reality, the pictures in the Heinken ad would have to be reversed.)
Read more