Mike Stopforth often speaks of a concept called Guerilla Kindness. There’s not much about it online though, so I thought I’d start the conversation about this as a business strategy.
Guerilla Kindness is an ongoing strategic approach undertaken by a company to surprise and delight people in the hope of creating a great story associated with the experience to pass on to their peers, and hopefully mention online.
Examples:
- Graham from Missing Link was sent a toy car by the call-centre agent at Outsurance when he crashed his car. He blogged about it, and many a reader of his blog (including me) was impressed by the remarkable courtesy and good humour displayed by the insurer.
- Aston Martin gave Mike the keys to a DB9 for a day after he wrote an article mentioning the vehicle. He subsequently blogged the experience, the post was picked up by some major sites and over 50 000 people read it. As a result and I’m sure quite a few of those have grown their appreciation for the company and its cars (I have).
Execution:
- An idea might be to organize a flashmob to clean up a really messy city street in an instant; paint an ugly building; plant a few hundred trees or organise fabulous suprises for random clients.
- The idea is not to brand the act, nor to publicize it yourself.
- Â Your intentions should be good, and hopefully someone will mention it of their own accord (that’s how things work in the blogosphere and the world of S0cial Currency)
- In other words it refers to random acts of kindness that are:
- Creative
- Unexpected, and
- Personal
(Drink from the CUP of kindness :-p)
- By the way, the more money you spend, the less it is trusted. Use some energy, thoughtfulness and time instead.
It’s a fun idea. I’m already working on my company’s Guerilla Kindess strategy for 2008.
I absolutely adore the concept of introducing humanness back to business YAY!!
We’re all so over the contrived stylised derivative marketing that gets slung at us the masses by the ad agencies to win market share.
But to win the heart of one person with a big mouth – now THAT builds story (that might get shared & traded & publicized & shown as a case study)
In your Attention Economics class Dave, you talk about Sticky Ideas & the nature of potent viral marketing. That the nature of something that has good sticky value is something that is unusual, surprising, and real, human scale & credible.
Things that have social currency.
This is quintessential to the gift economy that we see rising at the periphery of the market – it’s a dizzingly cute idea disguising some truly powerful business strategy.
Awesome post DD
Thanks MK. Yes, we can definitely have some fun with this one:)
First step – we’re kitting out the Huddlemind lab with a new kitchen and couches and will be offering free wi-fi for other bloggers in 2008.
Flashmobs and free events are being planned too.
I think the coolest thing with this strat is that we’re going to make budget available for the whole team just to surprise and delight customers as they see fit:)
Dave:
This whole concept is so counter-intuitive. I can’t say that the concept has ever been presented to me before reading your blog. But here in the States if you go to a store and see someone smiling and offering you something for no reason, there is almost always something that they want in return. So the idea of a company doing something without expecting anything in return is so different, that it would be certain to spark tons of goodwill for the company that did it.
Thanks Benin. Yes, this is the idea. I think the difference is sincerity – I think the random acts of kindness should be decided by the employees on the ground. not centrally decided by the marketing department.
An interesting view of the automotive industry. Where do you see the future of the industry, will it ever recover or will there be major casulties?
Now I understand the reference