It rains more in Berlin than it does in England, especially during the cold and dreary months of winter, so enticing Germans to vacation in Mexico with a cloud that literally rains tequila is probably pretty effective. And this isn’t just a cloud-shaped installation that pours a mist of tequila out of a showerhead or something equally predictable – it’s a real cloud of tequila condensation that turns liquid in response to vibration, timed to coincide with real-life rain outside.

United States-based creative agency LAPIZ teamed up wit the Mexico Tourism Board to create an ad specifically tailored to boost German tourism to the sunny, margarita-soaked nation. Installed in Urban Spree, a Berlin art gallery, the project mimics the look of natural clouds by containing condensation within a cumulus-shaped sculpture. You can see the mist rolling off the cloud in Instagram videos of the installation.

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A flash of lightning heralds an oncoming tequila storm, and onlookers gather to hold a shot glass under the cloud. It’s the third year in a row that Lapiz teamed up with the tourism board to get Germans to Mexico, and it seems certain that this would be their most successful effort yet. Who doesn’t like free tequila? “This time, we combined the Mexican thing Germans love most, tequila, with the type of weather they like the least, rain, and created the Tequila Cloud,” they explain.

The thirty-foot tentacle that appeared to have washed up on the beach in Portmeirion, Wales was what drew the onlookers in, but it was the edible kraken that kept them. Beach goers who gathered around the dark purple-black appendage to stare at it in wonder were led to a tent where they found similar tentacles on a smaller scale – made of cake.

A ‘Kraken Hunter’ in an intricate steampunkish costume performed an ‘edible autopsy’ on the questionable remains within the tent, serving up large chunks of what turned out to be spiced rum cake, including a football-sized eyeball.

The beach installation was part of a viral marketing campaign by Kraken Rum at Festival No. 6, an annual music event that draws thousands to an Italianate village on the Dwyryd Estuary.

The cake calls to mind another incredibly realistic culinary creation: a snake cake that looks so much like a real viper, you’d hesitate to go near it with a knife.

Over the past month, WebUrbanist has explored the ins and outs of the weird world of guerrilla marketing. What was once a fringe movement in the world of advertising has become much more popular and mainstream since the 1980s, when marketing expert Jay Conrad Levinson introduced the concept to the world at large.

But what is guerrilla marketing, exactly? If you’re still scratching your head about what this guerrilla stuff is all about, step onto the tour bus as we take one more look around. Keep hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, please. We’ll review the highlights at each of our stops. Feel free to hop off and visit any of the sections that interest you, then hop back on to navigate the rest.

1) The History of Guerrilla Marketing

In part one of our gmarketing series, we took a look at how advertising went from boring, educational, and sometimes downright false ads to the entertaining spectacle we know and love today. Jay Conrad Levinson, author of many books on the subject, is credited as the father of Guerrilla Marketing. His ideas paved the way for small businesses to compete in the marketing arena with the big companies, ushering in an era of innovative and sometimes extreme marketing ideas. But Levinson’s ideas aren’t just about getting the customer’s attention: companies have to be ready and willing to back up their advertising with excellent products and services.

2) The Origins and Evolution of Guerrilla Marketing

Have you ever wondered how guerrilla marketing got so popular? J.C. Levinson’s book was only part of the equation. The main reason guerrilla marketing took off was its incredible effectiveness at breaking through our advertising blinders. The first instances of guerrilla marketing were radical for their time, but the techniques continued to develop. Girls convincing men to buy them drinks was suddenly more about marketing than about flirting. Even rappers got into the game when Run DMC released a song called My Adidas, sending sales of Adidas through the proverbial roof.

3) Major Corporations Go For Guerrilla Marketing

Although J.C. Levinson’s ideas were geared toward the small business evening the playing field against bigger rivals, major corporations soon began using guerrilla tactics to sell their products. Their efforts aren’t always rewarded, especially when existing customers feel like the big businesses are overstepping their bounds or being deceitful.

4) Guerrilla Marketing Versus Viral Marketing

Advertising executives are under a lot of pressure to make their campaigns successful. At some point, it occurred to some ad people that they could make ads so irresistible that they would actually be passed around willingly by customers. The result: self-propagating advertising. Guerrilla marketing sometimes takes the form of a viral campaign. The viral campaign happens organically and spontaneously; if it’s pushed too hard by its creators there’s a pretty good chance it’ll never get off the ground. Some of the most successful guerrilla marketing campaigns have taken the form of viral videos or websites.

5) Guerrilla Marketing for Social Causes

So far, our guerrilla marketing tour has focused on businesses and making money. Nonprofit organizations need to spread their word, too, and today many of them are turning to guerrilla marketing tactics to reach their target audience. The Red Cross has created some of the most ingenious and eye-catching socially aware guerrilla marketing messages.

6) 10 Different Types of Guerrilla Marketing

Did you know that guerrilla marketing isn’t just about putting up some posters or creating a rad short video? It can take on nearly any form. From strangers chatting with people on the street to making a product really hard to get hold of, marketers have lots of sneaky, amusing, and intelligent ways to get you to want what they’re selling.

7) Is Guerrilla Marketing Right for You?

You don’t have to be a business (big OR small) or a socially conscious nonprofit organization to reap the rewards of guerrilla marketing. You can use unconventional techniques to land a job, get a date, or promote your talents. Of course, if you’re a small business owner you should know that guerrilla marketing isn’t all about the flashy message. It’s essential to back up the advertisements and never disappoint your customers. As quickly as guerrilla marketing messages can spread, negative feedback spreads even faster.

8) The Future of Guerrilla Marketing

We can’t see exactly what is in the future for guerrilla marketing, its devotees, and the public who alternately loves and hates the constant advertising. But as we become more commercially oriented, it seems that advertisements are popping up nearly everywhere. Will we soon see ads on any and all available surfaces? Will the forehead tattoo ad become mainstream? Perhaps, but one thing that’s sure is that future advertisements will be even more difficult to tell apart from real life.

We’ve reached the end of our guerrilla marketing tour. We’ve seen some amazing sights and gained some valuable knowledge about the world of advertising. You’ll probably find yourself looking differently at ads now that you know the secrets that marketers use to grab your attention. We hope you’ve enjoyed your tour, and you’re invited back to re-visit all of your favorite stops at any time. Please watch your step as you exit the bus.

Welcome to part six of our eight-part Guide to Guerrilla Marketing. In our journey through the captivating world of guerrilla marketing, we’ve seen some interesting sights. The birth of the concept, its evolution, the big corporations that play the guerrilla game, the viral nature of some campaigns, and gmarketing for social causes have all caught our attention as we stroll along Advertising Street.

Coming up on your left is a peculiar little place. It’s a squat building with the windows blacked out. A security guard stands sentry over the single entrance and regards passers-by suspiciously. This, friends, is where new guerrilla marketing methods are cooked up and shipped out hot and fresh to you, the unwitting consumer. The details of what goes on in there are tightly guarded, but we’ve got a key.

One of the main advantages of guerrilla marketing is that it’s unexpected. It catches us off guard and causes an emotional response: laughter, shock or sadness are great sellers. It’s easy to see why marketers would rather you didn’t know just how they’re using guerrilla marketing to their advantage. If you know their secrets, you may just stop responding.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that marketers are a clever bunch. They are well versed in the principles of human psychology that make us want to buy what they’re selling. Anyone who has ever taken a marketing class will probably recognize the psychological principles used to sell us things: reciprocity, authority, consistency/commitment, social proof/acceptance, and scarcity/urgency. And in the methods we’ll explain below, you can find each and every one of those principles. In this installment of our guerrilla marketing series we will take a closer look at some unusually interesting types including ambient marketing, presence marketing, grassroots marketing, wild posting, undercover marketing and astroturfing.

We took a look at viral marketing back in part four of this series. This is a highly visible form of guerrilla marketing these days. A viral campaign can’t be planned or predicted, but it is dearly hoped for by marketers. A successful viral campaign uses existing communication networks (you tell two friends, they each tell two friends, and so on), doesn’t require much in terms of resources, and has the potential to be unstoppable. If you’re giving something away, even better. Remember Gmail invites? They were somewhat difficult to get at first, so everyone wanted one.

Ambient marketing allows a business to create brand recognition without necessarily pushing their products. One excellent example is the Dancing Grass Vans of London. Owned by renegade smoothie makers (and brilliant marketers) Innocent, the vans are covered in real, growing grass and can often be seen around the city making deliveries and drawing stares. Because they serve a real purpose (delivering smoothies), the vans don’t look like advertisements. But do you forget the name of a company with grass-covered vans? Never. Leading up to the release of the Simpsons Movie, 7-11 transformed some of their stores to look just like Kwik-E-Marts, complete with weird Springfield-type products. This ambient marketing campaign was ridiculously effective.

Presence marketing is along the same lines as ambient marketing. It’s about making the business name recognizable and familiar and always there. You know that saying, “out of sight, out of mind?” It goes double for products that don’t maintain a constant presence. This can be achieved through product placements in movies and TV shows, stalls at local festivals and markets, regular Twitter updates, or whatever else makes that product name visible daily. Small businesses and entrepreneurs with modest marketing budgets often find that presence marketing delivers an excellent return for their investment. All they really have to do is be visible.

Grassroots marketing is gaining popularity like – well, like a grass fire. A grassroots campaign can take on many forms, but for the most part it is about winning customers one-by-one rather than on a very large scale. Some grassroots campaigns have elements of presence marketing (like posting on message boards relevant to your business) or viral marketing (like the above user-generated Sony ad). A successful grassroots campaign is all about building relationships and emphasizing the personal connection, not about broadcasting your message and hoping potential customers are listening.

Wild postings may seem old-fashioned, but they are still wildly popular with indie bands and products that want to portray that indie image. Have you ever walked down a city street and seen a wall plastered with multiple copies of a poster for a movie, concert, or alcoholic beverage? Those would be wild postings, and part of their effectiveness lies in the way that they can make us believe we’re witnessing something momentous. Most of us would love to have a poster from the wild posting days of the Beatles, right? So you’d better grab that Smirnoff Ice poster now while you can, right?

Would you rather have your advertising handed to you? Tissue-pack advertising was made popular in Japan, but today it’s spreading to infiltrate the rest of the world. Knowing that advertising fliers were almost never accepted, much less read, Japanese businesses began to hand out pocket packs of tissues with ads on them. This simple but ingenious marketing method works because, well, who would turn down free stuff? Because the giveaway is a useful item, it stays close to the target consumer until it’s been used up. These days, you’d be hard pressed to find pocket packs of tissues in Japanese shops because they are so readily available for free.

Undercover marketing, also known as buzz marketing, is said to be one of the more devious ways of marketing to the masses. Remember the “buy me a drink” girls from part two of this series? These lovely young vixens were being paid to create a buzz around a certain beverage without ever letting you in on their dirty little secret: they were being paid to be so friendly. Undercover marketing/buzz marketing is all about selling something to someone who has no idea they’ve just witnessed a sales pitch.

Astroturfing is widely considered to be the slimiest of all guerrilla marketing practices. It involves creating an artificial buzz about a product or company, and it’s mighty risky in the information age. Postings are created in online forums, singing the praises of a certain product or service – but they aren’t made by the public. They’re made by shills, or people associated with the company who are paid to express a positive opinion. Astroturfing is rampant online in forums and blogs (actually “flogs,” or fake blogs), but you can still see the odd IRL astroturfer wandering department stores, lobbying Congress, and writing letters to newspaper editors.

Alternative marketing is referenced consistently by marketers, but it is by nature challenging to define. It may be best defined as publicity that looks like it is completely removed from the company itself. For example, when Paris Hilton’s Sidekick was hacked, sales of Sidekicks jumped overnight. While T-Mobile probably (maybe?) had nothing to do with that publicity, it was excellent marketing for them. In fact, it has been suggested more than once that the whole event was an orchestrated publicity stunt. Alternative marketing takes a good deal of imagination and a healthy dose of luck to pull off. If the public finds out that they’ve been duped, it will spell disaster for the campaign.

Experiential marketing is increasingly embraced by all types of companies and brands today. It’s becoming easier for us to tune out and ignore advertisements today, so experiential marketing aims to give you an experience rather than send you a one-way message. Experiential marketing lets you interact with the product and associate your immediate emotional responses with that brand. The Charmin Pottypalooza bathrooms at state fairs and the semi-permanent ones (now gone) in New York City are an unprecedented example of effective experiential marketing.

How many of these methods have you seen just this week? With new concepts being rolled out all the time, it’s not always easy to spot when you’ve been targeted.

See More of Our 8-Part Guerrilla Marketing Series:

Guerrilla Marketing 1: History of Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing 2: Origins and Evolution of Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing 3: Major Corporations Go for Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing 4: Guerrilla Marketing versus Viral Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing 5: Guerrilla Marketing for Good Causes
Guerrilla Marketing 6: 10 Types of Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla Marketing 7: Is Guerrilla Marketing Right for You?
Guerrilla Marketing 8: The Future of Guerrilla Marketing