Psychology in marketing is still a rather untapped landscape. Since I stepped into the ring and became a guerrilla author in writing Guerrilla Social Media Marketing with Jay Conrad Levinson I have come across all kinds of misunderstanding, misuse and abuse of the term guerrilla marketing. Today’s podcast was inspired by what I can describe as a well meaning (or possibly not) but off-base commenter on the Creative Guerrilla Marketing blog.
I decided instead of just replying in the comments section that I would take the time to respond in the form of a podcast. Why? It’s so vital to understand the role of psychology and community in Guerrilla Marketing.
I also think it’s important to establish that Guerrilla Marketing is well defined, and it’s body of wisdom and definition that is widely accepted and used by over 20 million readers of the Guerrilla Marketing Series of books. Some people will take pieces of the body of wisdom and use them to suit their outlook on marketing but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In addition to this just because you slap the term guerrilla on a book, blog post or marketing campaign it doesn’t make it guerrilla.
Here are the facts:
* The term “guerrilla marketing” was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson and popularized by his best selling book that was released in 1983. Guerrilla Marketing uses unconventional means to achieve conventional goals, it relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. (We added community on-top of time, energy and imagination for Guerrilla Social Media Marketing because of the vital role it plays in social media marketing).
* Since then over 20,000,000 (that’s twenty million) books have been sold and read in Jay Levinson’s Guerrilla Marketing series of books making it the #1 best selling series of marketing books in history. Jay’s definition is the original and most widely accepted definition and grows by 1million readers and fans per year.
* Guerrilla’s apply and use the 19 Guerrilla Marketing Secrets (Principles).
Instead of paraphrasing why true guerrillas must understand and depend on psychology, I have posted in Jay’s own (timeless) words the importance:
Guerrilla marketing does not rely on guesswork because wrong guesses are so darned expensive. Instead, it relies upon psychology as much as possible. Psychology used to be a body of theories. Today, many of those theories have been debunked while others have been transformed into laws, actual laws of human behavior. Guerrillas lean on these laws because they want certainty to be a hallmark of their marketing.
There are 15 things that all guerrillas know about psychology as marketing is slowly transforming from guesswork into science:
* Purchase decisisons are made in the unconscious mind. People may say the words consciously, but they process the data in their unconscious.
* We now know how to access the unconscious mind. The way to do it is with repetition. Put these two thoughts together — purchase decisions are made in the unconscious, and you can access the unconscious with repetition, and you begin to understand the entire process of marketing.