Disrupting a market is tough, but it’s even tougher when you fail to use every weapon in your marketing arsenal. My startup recently launched a guerrilla marketing campaign that showed me how valuable this type of marketing could be for early-stage Indian software-as-a-service startups.
We organized a flash mob at our largest competitor’s biggest conference in Washington DC. It was a success – we found more prospects, created noise, got media attention, and we generated a mostly positive reaction. Here’s how we did it.
Taking on the market leader
Ambush marketing or guerrilla marketing is as old as marketing itself. The rivalry between Pepsi and Coca-Cola has created some wonderful case studies of how this kind of marketing works. More recently, Samsung trolled Apple during the launch of the most recent iPhone 14.
Freshworks has also run many campaigns along these lines – examples include the famous Freshworks versus ServiceNow campaigns and, of course, the #Failsforce blimp campaign.
However, it seems to me that early-stage India SaaS startups have rarely attempted such guerrilla marketing tactics.
There is a cultural mindset that we need to overcome: In India, we rarely see brands taking each other on openly and there is a belief that we need to play nice.
But that isn’t enough if you want to disrupt a market – which means taking on the strongest player in the industry. Guerrilla marketing allows you to take on the leader and grab the attention of customers and the industry.
The industry leader has already done the work of getting customers and partners to attend the event, so if you run a well-tailored “gatecrashing” then you build brand recall among prospects and also win the respect of the competition.
Blueprint to a gatecrashing
How you should organize your “gatecrashing” will depend on what it is you’re trying to achieve, but here’s what we did:
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Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock
By Arvind Parthiban
Sourced from TECHINASIA