Guerrilla Marketing + Lost and Found = Light Bulb

by tyler on 01/8/2008

Guerrilla marketing is one of the more creative outlets that startups can use to get noticed. One of my business partners, Gabe Shultz of Bored Sketchbooks fame, came up with a great guerrilla marketing idea that involves using his companies lost and found (and I’m suppose to be the marketing mind between the two of us).

When an item is found that is deemed lost, that item is returned to the receptionist. The receptionist will take a picture of the item and email everyone in the company looking for the owner. If you turn in an item with a large URL printed the front of it, you can get that URL in front of many eyeballs, depending on the size of the email list of course. The picture above is from the actually email sent out.

I know what you are already thinking, but my company (or most companies) don’t take pictures of lost and found items. A more typical response is to send a text email letting everyone know an item has been found. If the most recognizable characteristic of that item is a URL (as the example in the picture above), how will the receptionist report it? Most likely by including the URL in the body of the email, which is even better than the picture because it will be easier to put in a browser.

Now that is guerrilla marketing.

There are 2 comments in this article:

  1. 8/01/2008Jeff Gwynne says:

    Tyler-

    Great article. I love guerrilla marketing. In the late 90s, early 00s, I was VP of marketing at a high tech start-up. At the time, there was a huge amount of competition in getting noticed. (They could have made a reality TV show about it.) One of the big things was awards given out at trade shows, which, most of the time, had nothing to do with the merits of the products or services under consideration.

    At the first trade show that we were in an award competition, we handed out laminated cards (the size of a business card) promoting our company and solution. Then someone on the team decided to paste them in all the bathrooms (over all the “appliances”). After that, people starting saying “oh, you’re the bathroom guys”. Whatever – we won the award.

  2. 8/01/2008Gabe says:

    Nice article indeed! And I have faith you would have thought of it before me if you worked where I work. It was one of those ideas immediately followed by a “duh, I should have thought of this weeks ago.”

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