How To Grow Your Business Rapidly with Minimum Investments

Today’s business environment never lacks information. Every one of us, as a consumer, is showered by thousands of brand messages every day, coming out everywhere from your smartphones, tablets, laptop, desktop, wristband, smartwatch, connected cars, or your connected house… Everything is evolving and adapting rapidly, including the ways how you do business.

In a traditional business environment, customers look for products and services that fulfill their needs; today, products and services look for customers. Wherever there is a need, there is a business. And if you are not able to follow the constantly evolving industry trend, your competitors will capture the opportunity and take your share at a rate that you could even imagine. Certainly, if you are a stronger and faster runner than your rivals, the situation could also be turned the opposite.

The key then, for virtually any types of business whatever industry or sector you are in, will be to stand out your message clearly and persuasively in front of your customers among the highly intensive and crowded marketplace. Yet, it might not be as difficult as you think. And it is not necessarily a huge investment to create a blast effect that’s normally referred to “unexpected excitement.” There is a way, which is gradually growing to be an essential marketing tactic in recent days, that any marketer who is creative, intelligent, faithful, distinct, empathetic and sometimes with a little humor could utilize with minimum investment. If you are not sure that you can handle this by yourself, find some help from those who can. You will be happy to see what you are rewarded.

So what exactly is that, that minimum investment? Guerrilla Marketing is the answer. What is it? And why is it so essential to help grow any type of business under any sort of economic conditions? Here is the definition from one of the best business books in 2014 receiving best customer reviews on Amazon.com that I recommend every true entrepreneur or any business professional who seeks success to read: Guerrilla Marketing and Joint Ventures: Million Dollar Partnering Strategies for Growing ANY Business in ANY Economy, written by Jay Conrad Levinson and Sohail Khan, author of the besting-selling books in the subject and most distinguished entrepreneur who founded successful multi-million dollar businesses.

“The main theory behind guerrilla marketing is that it employs a completely unconventional approach towards marketing and promotion, the foundation of which lies in the application of imagination, energy and time. The motive behind this new technique is to generate unique ideas that do not require much finance. The campaigns involve in guerrilla marketing theory are often interactive, unconventional, and mostly target consumers in totally unexpected places. ”

This is one of the most clarified and best structured definitions I have ever read, which covers the framework, the benefits and the features of a guerrilla marketing campaign clearly and concisely in a short paragraph. To help you get an intuitive picture of the concept, we are going to see a few multi-media examples (including images and video) that you may never see them before, for these outdoor guerrilla marketing campaigns were placed in a particularly limited space – Elevator. Yes, you may have heard the term “Elevator Speech,” but have you ever heard “Elevator Guerrilla Marketing?”

Before you reach the following pictures or video, think about it yourself for one minute – what sort of amazing, unexpected, and unconventional advertising you could place in such a limited space as an elevator? And then take a look at these actual campaigns, I believe some of them may surprise you or even shock you for quite a while.

Imagine on a regular Monday morning, you get up early as usual, without having your morning coffee yet, sleepy, and entered your office building. Then when the elevator doors opened, you saw such a scene (as shown in the picture below), what’s your first reaction? Step back immediately, deep breath, wide awake (and deep down inside, you just felt lucky that you did not rush in as you did when you were late, because otherwise you would have fell into pieces, no doubt).

But no fear, and do calm down please, for this is in fact no more than a simple stick on the floor of the elevator. Yet the alarming result is achieved because it made you wide awake, and the campaign was named “Maxwell House Morning Alarm” and conducted by the coffee brand Maxwell House. Customers may feel scary at first, but will then feel happy about the morning joke when they think it over, which make them feel like just drinking a cup of coffee, or take the action to get a cup of Maxwell coffee. That’s the blast and immediate effect of guerrilla marketing.

Let’s now take a look at the next one, which was undoubtedly created by one of the top brand marketer: Coca-Cola, as it always has its way of being over the top. Now, you may think, gosh, how much money or efforts they would have put in order to build such a huge ad, at least it looks big. However, the truth is it was completed by only two stickers (which won’t cost you as much as an outdoor advertising): one on the top of the elevator (designed as a hanging Coke Zero bottle), and the other on the front of the elevator (designed as a Coke Zero cup). That’s just it. Easy? Well, easy to execute, but not everyone could come out the idea. That is the very reason I mentioned earlier if you are not sure you could handle this yourself, you may want to find some help from those who have unconventional minds.

This next one, from Oreo brand, used similar medium as Coke did but I have to say they have smarter and more creative way to do this and it achieved more successful impression among new and existing customers. What’s more, the two previous ads were static, but this one is live, with the movement of the elevator. In order to get an exciting live experience how this ad works, you got to watch this 40-second video which live captured the blast effect of this innovative guerrilla campaign. It won’t give you much sense by seeing the static picture alone, but you’ll get to the whole picture after you watch the video. Don’t miss it, it’s only about 40 seconds and truly worth it.

The idea behind this campaign was based on our traditional dunk of an Oreo cookie into a glass of milk, but the effect was exaggerated artfully, especially when the audience sees it going live in a shopping mall. And strikingly similarly, it was completed by merely two stickers: one on the moving shaft (designed as an Oreo cookie), and the other on the stationary elevator component (designed as a glass of milk). How many turned heads? Well, you can only find it yourself in the video.

Here we’ve only seen three examples, but there are a few more unconventional and unexpected real campaigns that were placed inside an elevator. I will post another blog next week to follow this topic and share the examples with my dear readers. Please stay tuned and have a great weekend!

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And here's my follow-up blog: How To Grow Your Business Rapidly with Minimum Investments (Part 2)