From dancing on the street to dating online: evaluating guerrilla street marketing performance

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to explore how marketing communication professionals assess the performance of street guerrilla marketing campaigns. The article is based on a literature review and qualitative interviews with 20 marketing communications professionals from large internationally recognised marketing communication agencies and smaller independent guerrilla marketing communication-specialist agencies. Professionals carefully and purposefully select appropriate environments and combine distinctive instruments to track cognitive, affective and behavioural responses. The effects of guerrilla street marketing are moving from performance on street level to acquiring and quantifying online diffusion. The results of the study are important for both researchers and practitioners who design and organise campaigns as well as users of alternative out-of-home media channels. Understanding the practices of experienced professionals helped to identify practical techniques used to evaluate contemporary street guerrilla marketing instruments. This article is one of the first to explore the effects of contemporary guerrilla marketing on the street as well as online.