I recently had a meeting with a gentleman who owns a number of motels. He just purchased an older motel and wants to use Guerrilla Marketing to turn it around. We spent some time going over his target market, niche, and talking about things he had tried in the past. The man had only recently heard of Guerrilla Marketing and told me a story that shows sometimes you can be a Guerrilla and not know it just by using a little time, energy and imagination. He said that many years ago he had a tour bus full of passengers stop at one of his motels for the night. (Anyone who has a motel on the side of an interstate loves to have tour buses stop for the night.) The next day, before the bus left, he took a shoe shine kit out in the parking lot and shined the bus driver’s boots. Needless to say, the driver never had service like that before. From that point on whenever that driver was anywhere close to that motel, he would take his passengers there for the night. The motel owner said that five years later the driver still talked about that shoe shine!

The formula here is very simple. He used some imagination to come up with an idea as crazy as shining the bus driver’s boots. It would be crazy to most people, but he looked beyond that and saw the potential value in it.  He used a little time to get the shoe-shine kit and go out into the parking lot.  He used some energy to actually shine the boots.  He said that after five years the driver is still talking about that shoeshine, which means that for five years he has been showing up with a busload of guests for that motel.

That attention and extra business is from one shoeshine.  Think about how much more effective it could be if incorporated into a Guerrilla Marketing Plan! What if he had been using that as a Guerrilla Marketing weapon all this time, offering a free shoe shine for every tour bus driver? A lot of times it is the little things you do that have a significant impact on your business.