Recap: Developing a Guerilla Marketing Plan

Recapping Chapter 4 of Guerrilla Marketing by J.C. Levinson for SBH Labs.

In order to develop a guerrilla marketing plan, it's crucial to have your core story, or a story involving the people to whom you're telling the story and your solution to the problem you're trying to solve with your company. This is all about positioning: how are you perceived in the minds of your consumers? For SBH Labs, the core story is people looking for healthy, chemical-free, solutions for energy boost and skin care. 

Levinson also advises not to limit your target market. SBH Labs' target market is health conscious people for their best-selling product nuCaffeine. However, I believe they are missing an entire segment by not targeting fitness people. Having a calorie-free caffeine additive that you can control would be great in the fitness world. Goodbye pre-workout jitters! Another segment possible is people who suffer from diabetes. Drinking energy drinks is detrimental to their health. These products are loaded with sugars. BrainShot and nuCaffeine solve that issue for them.

Levinson also goes on to talk about emerging markets in 2008. Although the numbers have changed since, the message is still relevant: explore other markets.

Clarifying Your Position

Levinson advices you measure your position against the following criteria:

1. Does it offer a benefit that my target audience really wants? nuCaffeine offers pure, unadulterated, concentrated caffeine. It is versatile because it can be used in many ways to fill in as many needs as possible.
2. Is it an honest-to-goodness benefit? Yes. SBH Labs prides itself on clean ingredients. Nothing more than what you absolutely need.
3. Does it Truly separate me from my competition? Yes. SBH Labs offers combinations of ingredients not found anywhere else in the market.
4. Is it unique and/or difficult to copy? For nuCaffeine, SBH Labs uses a natural flavor that acts as a bitter blocker. The formula is top secret but the owners have shown me documentation that it is natural (no artificial flavors) and it comes from a plant. No other product in the market offers bitter blockers for pure caffeine liquid.

The Seven-Sentence Guerrilla Marketing Strategy

Levinson mentioned earlier the event-word marketing strategy. I believe we will get to it at a later chapter. Right now, we're formulating the seven-sentence marketing strategy by answering the following prompts:

1. The purpose of the marketing
2. How you'll achieve this purpose
3. Your target markets
4. The marketing weapons you'll use
5. The niche and your position and what you stand for
6. The identity of your business
7. Your budget

The purpose of SBH Labs marketing is to motivate current Amazon customers to order from the SBH Labs website, or to entice new customers to try the SBH Labs products by ordering through the website. This will be accomplished by positioning SBH Labs products as clean and trustworthy products that put an emphasis on health and clean ingredients over everything else. The target markets are health and wellness, fitness, caffeine-aware, and diet-sensitive markets.

The marketing tools we plan to use include social media; SEO and SEM; informative blog posts; email marketing; pop-up events; sponsoring conferences; and a website linked to many others influencers that are prevalent in each market. The niche that SBH Labs occupies is health and wellness, with an emphasis on clean and natural ingredients. Our identity will be of expertise, care and concern for health and wellness, and quick response to customer concerns or feedback. Ten percent of sales will be allocated to marketing.