The father of Guerrilla Marketing,

On the 10th October 2013,  we were sad to learn of the passing of Jay Conrad Levinson, who died at the age of 80. Known as the “Father of Guerrilla Marketing”, Levinson wrote many books on the subject of business marketing, advertising, and PR, and here at Tribus we base many of our activities on his teachings.

One of the most important chapters he ever wrote is from his book Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and inexpensive strategies for making big profits from your small business, in which he shares sixteen gems of marketing wisdom. He believed that it was next to impossible to market a product or service successfully unless the following is put into practice:

1. You must have commitment to your marketing program
2. Think of that program as an investment
3. See to it that your program is consistent
4. Make your prospects confident in your organisation
5. You must be patient in order to keep a commitment
6. You must see that marketing is an assortment of weapons
7. You must know that profits come subsequent to the sale
8. You must aim to run your organisation in a way that makes it convenient for your customers
9. Put an element of amazement in your marketing
10. Use measurement to judge the effectiveness of your weapons
11. Prove your involvement with customers and prospects by your regular follow-up with them
12. Learn to become dependent on other businesses and they on you
13. You must be skilled with the armament of guerrillas, which means technology
14. Use marketing to gain consent from your prospects, and then broaden that consent so that it leads to the sale
15. Sell the content of your offering rather than the style; sell the steak and the sizzle, because people are too sophisticated to merely buy that sizzle
16. After you have a full-fledged marketing program, work to augment it rather than rest on your laurels

“Marketing is not an event, but a process . . . It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it completely.”

Thank you, Jay Conrad Levinson, for all that you’ve taught us.