From Dancing on the Street to Dating Online: Evaluating the Effects and Outcomes of Guerrilla Street Marketing

Abstract

Street guerrilla marketing uses features, artefacts and brand ambassadors in the urban environment in an innovative way to provoke customer engagement. The evaluation and classification of contemporary street guerrilla marketing are not reflected in the advertising literature yet. Understanding professionals' views on guerrilla marketing practices and evaluation is vital since they are responsible for developing and executing operations on the street. Using qualitative interviews with 20 practitioners from the Benelux Union, Canada, UK, US and France, this study revealed how they evaluate the responses of those observing or participating on the streets as well as online viewers. Practitioners carefully and purposefully select appropriate environments and combine distinctive instruments to track cognitive, affective and behavioural responses on street. The focus of large advertisers moved to acquiring and quantifying online diffusion rather than responses on street level. Understanding the practices of these professionals helped to propose practical guidelines and techniques to evaluate contemporary street guerrilla marketing aimed at cognitive, affective and conative communication. These guidelines are some of the first for evaluating the effects of contemporary guerrilla marketing on the street as well as online.