Pondering Guerilla Marketing

Have you ever heard of guerilla marketing? If not, odds are that you have experienced it in real life. The purpose of guerilla marketing is to have consumers “seeing things that they aren’t used to seeing, creating something that lives in the context of what they do but is out of context with what they are used to” (Christians et al. 181). It is easier to understand what this definition means once you break it down from real-life examples. “Guerrilla marketing involves unusual approaches such as intercept encountes in public places, street giveaways of products, PR stunts, or any unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources' (Bhayani et al. 438). Guerilla marketing is often seen in public spaces, often with heavy foot traffic & tourist destinations. Imagine you are walking through Times Square and see a giant popsicle melting on the street. This is so startling because you would never expect a popsicle to be so big and in the road even though you have seen plenty of popsicles before. This very odd encounter leads you to be curious to the purpose behind its presence. Upon further inspection, you see there is a logo for Bounty paper towels nearby with their catch-phrase “makes small work of BIG spills.” You may just think that this is a clever marketing strategy and go-about your day. However, the next time you are in the grocery store and see Bounty brand paper towels you will think of this marketing strategy & decide to try them out. Would you be more likely to pick the Bounty paper towels over another brand?

This is guerilla marketing and from the example above you may be thinking that there aren’t any ethical dilemmas with clever marketing strategies. That is where you would be mistaken, many companies and brands take the idea of guerilla marketing too far and end up causing harm to the consumer it was trying to connect with in the first place. Guerilla marketing is very relevant in today’s society because of how over-the-top marketing needs to be in order to catch the attention of a consumer. Guerilla marketing is very important today because of social media as well. If a campaign is out-of-the-ordinary enough, it will begin to be shared on social media. For most brands, becoming a trending topic on social media due to an unorthodox marketing scheme is a very big sign of a successful campaign. Guerilla marketing can be very impactful for increasing brand recognition and brightening the days of the by-standers who witness these campaigns. However, there have been countless examples of guerilla marketing being detrimental to the consumer’s trust in corporations as well as blurring the lines of ethicality. We will be unraveling the difficult question of if guerilla marketing is ethical. “Guerilla marketing tactics are an intriguing ethical area. At one end, we see private enterprise at its most inventive, working sometimes ingeniously to reach potential customers and sell them something. At the other end, we have practices that some have labeled deceptive, intrusive, and offensive” (Christians et al. 163). This paper will deep-dive into the case study, implement the potter box, and use the ethical standpoints from class to analyze guerilla marketing more closely.

The case study that will be analyzed is titled “Case 23. All is Not What it Seems: Pondering Guerilla Marketing” taken from Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning. This case study unpacks 3 different instances where corporations used guerilla marketing to advertise their product and failed. There are many different reasons why these companies failed, some being due to ethical dilemmas or just lack of common sense. In order to better understand how guerilla marketing is controversial through an ethical lens it is important to give background on some notable shortcomings throughout marketing in the 21st century. The first campaign in the case study is Sony Ericsson’s “fake tourist” ploy in 2002. This example of guerilla marketing used actors pretending to be tourists and asking for photos in Time Square in New York City. This was in an attempt for the unsuspecting participant to become curious about the new cellphone they were being asked to take the photo with. While some might think this was rather clever, many of the people who were involuntarily brought into the marketing scheme by displaying an act of kindness were not happy with the deceit. “It’s absolutely unethical to deceive people like this, It’s taking advantage of the kindness of strangers and that’s pretty low,” said Gary Ruskin from Commercial Alert. One of the main aspects of guerilla marketing is non-disclosure, many times it is used in order to create curiosity and buzz but in this circumstance it was disrespectful to the people who were going out of their way to do a favor for a stranger. Rob Walker from the New York Times Magazine said “and thus, an act of civility was converted into a branding event.” The second guerilla marketing fail discussed in the case study was The Cartoon Network 2007 Bomb Scare. In an ill-thought out marketing campaign for The Cartoon Network’s new show, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, there were dozens of electronic devices planted across Boston. These battery operated devices were complete with wires and robots showing the “middle finger” and were found under bridges, on buildings, and telephone poles. By no surprise in a post-9/11 America, the Bostoners mistook these for terrorist devices and the entire city shut down in a panic. Turner Broadcasting System’s (Cartoon Network’s parent company) paid Boston $2 million to compensate for the traumatizing campaign that still to this day has left a mark on many frightened Bostoners. The last example of guerilla marketing failing to achieve its intended goal was the Ex Machina Tinder campaign. This campaign was put together in order to promote the new movie Ex Machina that was premiering at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas in 2015. This movie is about life-like robots creating relationships with the people who created them and brings into question their ability to gain consciousness. The marketing team created an automated Tinder profile for the robot in the movie, Ava. This profile worked using AI to achieve matches with potential “suitors” and begin chatting with these unsuspecting users. Once Ava began a conversation with a user and had asked them some basic questions the user would be sent a link to an Instagram page promoting the movie. While this marketing stunt was met with tons of praise on Twitter, some people felt blindsided. One of the people involved in this case study, Connor, fell victim to the scheme and ended up chatting with Ava on Tinder. Although he had to tip his hat to the clever marketing, there is still a feeling of being deceived that does not seem ethical. “The effort seemed to have been a success; Connor had to admit that the whole thing was harmless and “impressively deceptive.” Still, he considered himself to have been duped” (Christians et al. 163).

In order to decipher whether guerilla marketing is ethical or not we need to break it down. There are many aspects that play into guerilla marketing so being able to understand the different components is important. We are able to define, label, and analyze the different aspects of ethical dilemmas by using the potter box method. “The Potter box advocates the division of ethical reflection into four main steps: the first two are descriptive and seek to generate the relevant information for subsequent discussion and decision-making, and the latter two are normative or prescriptive. This model works as a system by which each of the four dimensions or steps is mutually interlinked” (Franquet-Santos-Silva and Ventura-Morujão 329). The first section of our potter box is “definition,” this is where we need to define all facts/issues arising in the situation. One of the issues we see is that guerilla marketing strategies are encouraged to be used by private businesses and are for many marketers the only way to keep their jobs/gain promotions. We also need to take into account that there are many harmless campaigns that use guerilla marketing and are actually enjoyed by the public, much like the Bounty campaign. On the other side of this, we know that depiction goes against appropriate advertising and marketing. As we saw in the examples from the case study, many people are not happy when they realize they have unknowingly been involved in a marketing scheme. Even when these ploys are seemingly harmless, people dislike the idea of big corporations using them like in the Sony Ericsson’s “fake tourist” campaign. The second section of the potter box asks us to determine the values and beliefs that contribute to the situation and decisions made. These values can range from aesthetics, professional, logical, moral, sociocultural, etc. In the situation of guerilla marketing there are the values of the marketers and of the public. The marketers put value in profit, aesthetics, and being professional. The public believes in logic, morals, and the truth when it comes to marketing. The third sector of the potter box is the principles we see arising in the ethical dillemma. We will dive deeper into these ethical standpoints later in the paper but for now we will give a basic overview to complete the potter box. The ethical philosophies that we can apply to guerilla marketing from this semester are utilitarianist, John Rawl’s perspective, deontological, & consequentialist. The final section of the potter box is “loyalties”. We will analyze who the decision maker has loyalties or allegiances to. The decision maker in this dilemma is the marketers and therefore the corporations who employ them. The corporations have loyalties to profit, stakeholders, reputation, and consumers. Now that the potter box has been completed there is an understanding of the complexities of guerilla marketing. It is important to use potter boxes when doing ethical decision making because it unpacks the reasons of why something may or may not be ethical to different parties. With this in mind, we will be able to better analyze the ethical standpoints that were taught this semester & hopefully decide if guerilla marketing is ethical.
Ethics are at the root of every decision we make. Many of us do not know the origins of the ethics we abide by in our everyday life but these frameworks all have names and people who created them. Throughout this semester we have been learning about the philosophers who believed in these standpoints and why they believed it was the correct way to live. We then were tasked with puting our knowledge to the test by looking at countless case studies in order to better understand the media. This case study is no different, there are many ethical viewpoints in which guerilla marketing can be argued. Utilitarianist, John Rawl’s perspective, deontological & consequentialist viewpoints are the most fit for the analysis of guerilla marketing. The first standpoint is utilitarianism, this means “Act in such a way as to generate the maximum quantum of well-being, happiness, or utility”, or in Bentham’s words, “the greatest good for the greatest number” (Bentham). This leads us to look at guerilla marketing through this lens; is the “greatest good” achieved when people have virtually no choice but to participate in a promotion that is possibly created by big capitalist corporations? It depends. There are plenty of instances of guerilla marketing that bring joy to people and do not inflict any pain. However, we have seen from the case study that some campaigns can lead to pain like in the example of the Cartoon Network bombscare & it could be argued that deception of any kind is inflicting pain. The second ethical persepctive comes from John Rawls. This is the idea of ethicality through the veil of ignorance. The veil of ignorance is when someone is able to step back and look at a situation without any bias from their life circumstances. “Principles, interests, moral and religious beliefs, social positions inevitably tear the veil apart” (Coretti). When we look through the veil of ignorance we put ourselves into the shoes of the public. We would not want to be deceived or used as pawns in marketing schemes to make money for large corporations who do not care about the individual person. The next standpoint is deontological, this is when someone uses generally accepted rules to guide actions. When using guerilla marketing, the marketer should adhere to the 4A’s (American Association of Advertising Agencies) code of conduct. Some of the rules that are broken when using guerilla marketing are seen in some of the campaigns discussed in the case study. For example, “...supporting and obeying the predominant laws and legal regulations pertaining to advertising” and “Marketing messages that are intentionally discriminatory, offensive, false or stereotypical” (4A’s). The final framework is consequentialist. “...the ethicality of an action is judged by its ends rather than its means. Within this framework, it isn’t the manner in which the action is presented but the effect that determines the ethicality” (Christians 164). In this framework, many of the guerilla marketing schemes we discussed from the case study are seen as ethical. For example, although some people were angry about the “fake tourists,” sales of the telephone/camera were 54% higher in the cities that ran the promotion. Additionally, people on the internet and even those who matched with Ava dubbed the Ex Machina campaign to be a success and the movie ended up making 36.9 million in box office.

So, is guerilla marketing ethical? Like so many of the case studies we were presented with throughout this course, the answer is that it depends. If everything in life had a clear right and wrong answer then there would be no ethics to discuss. Ethics takes into account different circumstances and beliefs in order to make us as a society be more thoughtful. Throughout this course there has never been one 100% clear answer to an ethical dilemma, which is why it is a dilemma in the first place. Guerilla marketing, like most advertising, has the right intentions when putting together these campaigns. I think moving forward that marketers should implement things like the potterbox to understand all possible outcomes and reactions to campaigns. I also think that using resources like focus groups before going public with a campaign can help to determine all negative reactions to guerilla marketing and pivot accordingly. Using generally accepted rules as guidelines like the 4A’s before implementing guerilla marketing would also be a good way to avoid backlash. Guerilla marketing is the future of advertising. With social media and the trend cycle it is very hard to have an advertising stand out for any amount of time. Using shocking guerilla marketing is one of the surefire ways to have your product/brand gain recognition.


Bibliography

​“The 4A’s Member Code of Conduct.” aaaa.org, Mar. 2018,
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Christians et al. (2017) ‘The Commercialization of Everyday Life’, in (Eds.) Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning - 10th Edition.
Franquet-Santos-Silva, Miguel, and Carlos-Aurelio Ventura-Morujão. “The Potter Box Model of Moral Reasoning.” El Profesional De La Información, vol. 26, no. 2, Ediciones Profesionales de la Informacion SL, Mar. 2017, p. 328. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2017.mar.20.