Guerrilla Marketing: a resource for environmental communication?

by Andrea Stecich

Covered market in Valencia. It’s 9 A.M. Careful gazes scan tomatoes, more expensive than usual, and are enamoured by bright colors of the fabrics and clothes. Suddenly, the butcher starts to sing an aria waving his ax, followed closely by the greengrocer, and then the cheese seller, the cloth merchant, the florist and so on. The music and the songs are spreading more and more under the market’s cover. Some astonished but delighted passers-by are singing softly a classic music opera’s tune.

Here's an example of guerrilla marketing, organized by the Valencia’s Opera to promote their shows. In slang we talk about flash mobs and it’s one of the most interesting (and less invasive) aspects of guerrilla marketing. Indeed, the name immediately calls to mind the idea of urban warfare: the aim is to win, neighborhood after neighborhood, everyone's attention on a particular topic. The methods are numerous, often original, and bordering on the illegal: stickers, posters, stencils’ adhesion on all available surfaces (floors, walls, arcades, shop windows) and in large quantities, creation of flash mobs and viral web campaigns. If the message is able to disrupt the passer-by, maybe desecrating the usual visual and cultural codes, the result can be explosive. 

The subject is very interesting and appealing, so that Turin’s Fitzlab association decided to organize a meeting about it. At the conference’s table were sitting Luisella Carnelli (Fitzcarraldo association), Carolina Lucchesini (Officine Corsare’s co-founder) and Nicola Facciotto (Kalatà advertising agency). They explained that this particular marketing interpretation, born in 1984, aims to go beyond traditional communication via two pathways: unlimited originality, up to breaking laws, and viral invasive messages. Using these weapons, the traditional communication’s effectiveness results enhanced, reaching (actively) a great number of citizens. This unordinary “fire power” costs: typically, a guerrilla marketing campaign is more expensive than a traditional one, because basic communication’s costs (guerrilla can’t do much without them) are added to those typical ones of guerrilla marketing, which often requires hundreds or thousands of stickers, stencils, flyers or postcards.

However, in front of the positive experience represented by Officine Corsare (dealing a socio-political theme), a question arises: what kind of application for guerrilla in environmental communication field? Speakers don’t say anything about it due to the subject’s complexity and variability. It’s not easy to judge it. However, if in cultural sectors, by nature highly creative ones, unconventional approaches to promotion and communication are tolerated, in the environmental field conditions seem to be generally different, limiting the number of available tools for a guerrilla approach. Among these ones, flash mobs and viral web campaign, if properly customized for each case, represent valuable tools to realize an unforgettable and participated communication campaign about environmental protection’s issues. In summary, guerrilla marketing is a surplus value for every informative campaign, but only if declined to be appropriate depending on the scope, particularly in environmental communication, as well represented by the awareness campaign, realized by Auckland City (New Zealand), on correct waste collection, named “Beautify your city”.