Street marketing

Street marketing is marketing or promoting products or services in an unconventional way in public places. The main function of street marketing is that the activities are done exclusively on the streets. Ambient Marketing uses other public places, such as shopping centers. Unlike typical public marketing campaigns that utilize billboards, street marketing involves the application of multiple techniques and practices in order to establish direct contact with the customers. One of the goals of this interaction is to cause an emotional reaction in the clients. The final goal of street marketing is to get people to remember brands in a different way than they are used to.

Street marketing was mentioned by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla marketing in 1984. Street marketing has adapted from only being used on the streets to a development of innovation to promote businesses. A method used by many businesses to promote their products is to distribute fliers, which sends a messages to customers to allow them to look at what they are trying to sell to their consumers. However, in today's society there are many more techniques which catch the attention of customers such as billboards, TV ads, Ads on the back of public transport and so on. Street Marketing has not been theorized until Marcel Saucet's work, a professor of the University of San Diego in his book Street Marketing, in 2013, in the book Routledge Companion to Future of Marketing (2013) and his articles in Journal of Marketing Communications and Décisions Marketing (2014). The first case study about street marketing was published at Harvard Business School in November 2014 (written by Lena Goldberg, Marcel Saucet and Christine Snively). Street marketing is more and more a non-conventional media used by startups and big companies: the latest book on the subject won the award of best American book 2015 in the category Business: Marketing & Advertising.

Street marketing is a subset of guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing is about the use of investing time, energy and imagination into a business campaign, Guerrilla marketing is very popular among large businesses as it uses tactics such as unconventional communications which allows the businesses to focus on low cost strategies and make a higher impact. The use of viral marketing and Engagement marketing help make this higher impact. Guerrilla marketing uses services which already exist such as social networking sites to try to help businesses increase in brand awareness, this could be spread by the technique of Word of mouth or by the internet/social media. By creating these viral messages it appeals to individuals who already have a use of high social networking skills. Guerrilla marketing selects their target market by targeting groups who already engage with different types of products. This will create a quicker and easier way of consumers seeing and responding to a product, and they will also be likely to share this experience with friends and family so it will spread faster. Like guerrilla marketing, street marketing has the characteristic of being non-conventional. However, it is limited to the streets or public places. Other forms of guerrilla marketing use other media and processes, such as the Internet, to establish communication with the customers. Some other examples of guerrilla marketing are viral marketing and experiential marketing. The goal of street marketing is to create experiences that meet the expectations for advertising. Street marketing uses different ways of trying to engage with their audiences. Some of the things they do to show this is by placing advertisements such as billboards and static ads in different locations where the public wouldn't expect to see them such as down manholes or behind large buildings. The good thing about placing these ads in random places is that when the public get around to seeing them they would be extremely intrigued and would take an extra moment to read what the ad is about. Street marketing doesn't just use ads but also uses young and enthusiastic brand ambassadors who give out samples and coupons to customers who stop and take time to answer questions. Giving these customers a choice of interacting with the products of brands makes a stronger impact on deciding to buy a certain item than passive advertising. Street marketing is available to a variety of different businesses due to its low costs and also because it is limited by a marketer's ambition and creativity. However, Street marketing is only available to businesses which are willing to put effort.

...
Wikipedia