First things first, exactly what is guerrilla marketing? The term now covers a plethora of different marketing techniques but I rather like Marketing Terms' (www.marketingterms.com) definition, which says "unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results for minimal resources." Now, doesn't that sound like a great approach for cash strapped online businesses?

Take the magazine FHM, who projected a 60-foot high image of Gail Porter's backside onto the Houses of Parliament to promote its 1999 poll to find the world's sexiest women. Then there was IBM who employed a graffiti artist to paint pavements and walls in San Francisco and Chicago with the words 'Peace, love and Linux'. The site About.com sent out fake hitchhikers onto Highway 101 in the States to give out promotional masks to any kind driver that stopped to pick them up. These campaigns all focus on creating a buzz around a product or service; it's then passed on by word of mouth as people talk about in pubs.

Source: Viverdi

I recently bought a book about guerilla marketing and it makes great reading. I love the idea of coming up with a truly unique idea for very little cash and turning any exposure you do get into sales.

There are some great examples in this book so i thought id post a few of them here. If anyone would like to add to the list, please feel free.

These are innovative, original and creative marketing efforts but are by no means "guerilla" in nature.

They are attempts at cutting through the mass media clutter we find in television, radio and newspaper advertising—but ad agencies spend an incredible amount of time and money on these campaigns, which I agree are highly effective—but not guerilla in the way that the term was originally coined term.

Glad to find this thread again. Had to write a paper on guerilla marketing. Here's a guerilla tactic, that I came across while searching around:

In a campaign set to start Thursday, the U.S. arm of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ltd. will take "guerrilla" marketing to a new level. Its goal: to get consumers to pay attention to the new T68i, a mobile phone that can double as a digital camera.

In one initiative, dubbed Fake Tourist, 60 trained actors and actresses will haunt tourist attractions such as the Empire State Building in New York and the Space Needle in Seattle. Working in teams of two or three and behaving as if they were actual tourists, the actors and actresses will ask unsuspecting passersby to take their pictures.

Well, certain media commentators went into conniptions over Sony Ericsson's tactics. Among the offended is Matthew Lynn, a columnist for Bloomberg News, who blasted Sony Ericsson's guerilla marketers as "human spam."

With all due respect, he just doesn't get it. The urban-youth demo in question, far from being offended, is likely to get a kick out of the marketer's resourcefulness. After all, the actors fit into the environment and those consumers who were genuinely interested in theT68i received useful product information.