Guerrilla Creativity: Make Your Message Irresistible with the Power of Memes

by Jay Conrad Levinson and Jay Conrad Levinson President

Book Overview

The guru of the Guerrilla Marketing series, which has sold more than one million copies, shows small business owners how to cut through the clutter of new information with simple, powerful ideas that customers will find irresistible.

Today, with more than four thousand marketing messages assailing consumers daily, it is more important than ever to create an original, appealing, and memorable message. Marketer extraordinaire Jay Conrad Levinson...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618104682
• ISBN13: 9780618104680
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Harper Business
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Disruption, Attention, The Tipping Point and the Meme

I read this book and wrote this review from the creative POV.If you happen to have read Jean-Marie Dru's Disruption, Ken Sacharin's Attention! and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, you should read this one too.Jay is right. Many of the creative people working in advertising agencies are still living in dreams. They should wake up.Although it says it's a marketing book, I think it's a perfect one and a must read for all advertising people, especially the so called creative.All along we know how to find the USP, how to fix the positioning and how to differentiate, but most of the time we failed to manage what to communicate or what to achieve.What worst is that, don't know why, we have the mentality of doing ads equal to having fun. We just are not business-minded or serious enough in this tough yet fastest changing business world!Simply put, meme is great idea. It has the power to use the easiest understanding way to convey the most complicated message and leave a long lasting impact to change the consumer mind to love and buy your product or service. May it be a symbol, a slogan, a jingle or an action, it can be and have to be used through different disciplines. The ultimate benefit of meme is creating profits.By reading this book we can learn what is meme, how to create it and conquer it. To a certain extend, this book is indeed a meme in today marketing industry.

Become a real "meme" machine!

Marketing guru Levinson declares all-out guerilla warfare on cheesy, ineffective, downright bad advertising and marketing with this book on a marketing approach that could transform the marketplace.While the "memes" concept has been around for some time, Levinson is one of the first to apply and evaluate the concept in the marketing arena. And, as the Godfather of guerilla marketing -- with it's emphasis on low- and no-cost techniques -- Levinson gives readers a well-thought, and reasonably documented analysis of how a single powerful meme can propel a business or product to the public eye, generating business (and more importantly, REVENUE) almost without effort.He also provides many examples of memes that work, tells why they work, and then shows readers how they can get started creating their own memes. An engaging, easily read book, GUERILLA CREATIVITY is one of Levinson's best yet with little fluff [a fun, but overlong comparison of marketing & seduction] and a ton of useful information [especially on generating and developing ideas]. This is a must-have book for anyone involved in marketing or business development.

Required reading for business owners

There are two reasons to read Guerrilla Creativity. One is to become familiar with a term that will undoubtedly grow in importance during the coming years. Meme is a deceptively simple word that, when successfully employed, can jumpstart your business's visibility from obscurity to front-of-mind awareness. In his typical conversational writing fashion, Jay Conrad Levinson describes the steps you should take to create a meme for your business, one that will instantly communicate the essence of your business and the benefits it offers. Your understanding of the concept is enhanced by the numerous examples included. Equally important, however, Guerrilla Creativity provides a context for using memes. So you not only learn how to create a meme, you learn how and when to put it to work in a variety of media. If it's been a while since you've read Jay's Guerrilla Marketing, you'll find this book not only breaks new ground but provides a concise, highly accessible overview of the principle tenets of Guerrilla Marketing--the marketing that has contributed so much to so many businesses, small and large alike. In terms of immediate usability, few books offer as much immediately usable books as Jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing series. The series contains no short-lived CEO ego, just concise, useful informations that continues to be valid, decade after decade.

Memetic Branding

Please realize, this book will be of limited interest to traditional memeticists. Levinson's use of the word "meme" is not a traditional one. Levinson defines a meme as a self-explanatory symbol, using words, action, sounds, or picture that communicates an entire idea. If you are a marketer, or interested in persuasion, this book is a great read.At first, I disliked Levinson?s repeated use of his new term Guerilla creativity, which also happens to be the name of his soon to be published book. I grew to recognize that for the purposes of his book, Levinson needed a new word. Creativity is a vast subject . Levinson needed a notion separate from the general word "creativity." "Guerilla Creativity" is intended to be persuasive. Levinson explains, "Creativity has often been defined as the combining of two or more elements that have never before been combined. Guerrilla creativity embraces this definition but carries it further to actually cause human beings to change their minds to the point where they want to purchase what you are offering to sell." This is the heart of what I try and do daily as a professional marketer.I read a lot of business books. Most of the time, I hear a different perspective and have a couple nods of appreciation at how an author articulated a familiar scenario. Occasionally, I come across a book that empowers me to see structure where I hadn?t seen anything before. I was exhilarated reading Malcolm Gladwell?s The Tipping and have since adopted seeing certain targets as extraordinary consumers who also have the ability to serve as Mavens, Connectors or Salesmen. If you haven?t read Gladwell, you have a fascinating experience available to you. Some books have the capacity to unfurl new paradigms in readers. GUERILLA CREATIVITY is one such book. Levinson introduces the reader to the word "meme" and introduces the field of memetics as it relates to marketing communications.This is a much-needed discourse. As opposed to pointing out all the elements I?ve enjoyed and appreciated in GUERILLA CREATIVITY suffice it to say that after reading the first 20 pages of Levinson?s text, I was able to improve my business presentation on memetics. If you have read this far in my review, you should buy the book.