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Guerrilla communication, visual consumption, and consumer public relations
Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 303–305
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Public Relations Review
Short communication
Guerrilla communication, visual consumption, and consumer public relations Melanie Joy McNaughton ∗ Bridgewater State College, A-7, 291 South Finley Street, Athens, GA 30605, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 24 September 2007 Received in revised form 20 February 2008 Accepted 26 March 2008 Keywords: Guerrilla communication Public relations Circuit of culture Visual consumption
a b s t r a c t Guerrilla communication has grown into an increasingly prominent strategy adopted by large corporations such as American Express, BP Amoco, Chrysler, Hershey Foods, and Pepsi. In its attention-grabbing instantiations, guerrilla communication points to the convergence of advertising, marketing, and public relations in consumer communication practices. This essay also considers guerrilla communication’s place in the circuit of culture. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Guerrilla communication originated as a means for small businesses with small budgets to grab consumers’ attention, an approach developed in Guerrilla marketing (Levinson, 1984). From these roots, guerrilla communication has grown into an increasingly prominent strategy adopted by large corporations. Guerrilla communication is the blanket term used to describe unconventional methods of grabbing consumers’ attention which traffics in shock value to “cut through the clutter.” As such, guerilla communication denotes consumer communication practices that stand well outside the bounds of the mainstream, and sometimes well outside the bounds of common sense and decency. This essay explores guerrilla communication, a consumer communication practice which while garnering significant attention in media, industry, and consumer circles has garnered little in the way of critical academic investigation. I argue that guerilla communication illustrates a convergence in consumer communication between advertising, marketing, and public relations at the same time that it problematizes traditional interpretations of consumer communication’s place and function in cultural cycles of production and consumption. Two examples of guerrilla communication include assvertising and BumvertisingTM . Assvertising was a 2004 campaign developed by Night Agency (self-described as “Earth’s foremost creative marketing company” on their assvertising campaign website, www.ass-vertise.com) to promote a fitness class, titled “Booty Call,” for the New York Health and Racquet Club. Assvertising, as one might suspect, employed well-formed, underwear-clad backsides as billboards to advertise the class and generated high degrees of media attention. BumvertisingTM is a trademarked communication campaign which used homeless persons (“bums”) to promote interest in PokerFaceBook.com: panhandlers were paid a fee to tack a PokerFaceBook.com placard to signs they used to solicit money from passersby. 1. Guerrilla communication: consumer communication convergence Advertising, marketing, and public relations share much of the same territory, an intersection born out in buzz about guerilla communication tactics as well as in industry literature. Guerrilla communication functions as advertising given
∗ Tel.: +1 706 548 4124. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2008.03.031
304
M.J. McNaughton / Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 303–305
that it presents products to consumers, functions as marketing because guerrilla campaigns are intended to drive sales and increase mindshare, and functions as public relations because guerrilla communication traffics in media events and publicity. I maintain that to fully appreciate guerrilla communication and its cultural operations, we should not understand guerrilla communication singly as advertising, marketing, or public relations, but as an inextricable collective of these three practices. One of guerrilla communication’s most obvious instantiations as advertising is body advertising campaigns, for example GoldenPalace.com’s campaign which hired a man to streak across the field at the 2004 Super Bowl with the company URL on his back, a communication tactic which illustrates the guerrilla communication cross-over between advertising and public relations. Moving to marketing, we can see that guerrilla communication is aptly positioned as marketing. Industry experts argue that traditional modes of marketing have not only become fragmented by the internet, the wild proliferation of television channels, and the mobility of media, traditional modes of marketing have become so familiar many feel they are ineffective—especially among teenage and college-age consumers. Guerrilla communication is viewed as the solution to reaching these target markets. Guerrilla campaigns that generate buzz prompt word of mouth communication, using teenagers to market products and services to peers, who are much more interested in listening to their peers than a message directly generated by a company. Although advertising and marketing functions are integral to guerrilla communication, I argue that guerrilla communication finds its primary power in its function as public relations. Public relations is a notoriously slippery practice to define, but is most commonly understood as publicity management. Guerrilla communication is intensely focused on generating publicity. Night Agency’s assvertising campaign is a strong example of this: the assvertising campaign received coverage “in the New York Times, on CNN, and even the BBC World, and that the website had a million hits the month it was launched” (PR News, 2005). In this figuration we also see that public relations is intimately connected to marketing. M. Sachs (1996) highlights the interconnection between public relations and marketing when she observes that public relations boosts marketing functions “by helping to shape the messages to be carried by word-of-mouth ” (p. 21). 2. Guerrilla communication and the circuit of culture The circuit of culture is a concept developed by cultural studies scholar R. Johnson (1986–1987) which describes how cultural elements move through processes of production and consumption. Johnson pinpoints four moments in this cycle: production, texts, readings, and cultural integration. Soar (2000) finds that the circuit of culture is often high-jacked by the operation of cultural intermediaries such as advertising creatives, stating that the short-circuit “is one in which the cultural intermediaries act as producers and consumers” (p. 431). Curtin and Gaither (2005), as well as Hodges (2006), similarly investigate how public relations practitioners function as cultural intermediaries. Short-circuiting takes place when cultural capital (for example, advertisements) is designed more for peer recognition and validation than public audiences. Before public populations can interpret the text and produce feedback that is integrated into the circuit of culture, cultural intermediaries pick up and evaluate these texts, forming a tight loop of production that operates with little thought to, involvement with, or response from the audiences to whom it is ultimately directed. Soar (2000) writes that short-circuiting thus “effectively circumvents both consumers at large and the marketing routines to which the intermediaries ostensibly adhere to reach them” (p. 433). Taking assvertising as an example, using Soar’s model it is easy to position this campaign as short in the circuit of culture. For instance, Night Agency correlates the success of the campaign with the number of inquiries they received from the campaign, not the volume of inquiries New York Health and Racquet Club received from the campaign. Such markers of success frame assvertising as a communication strategy more oriented toward industry accolades than client or consumer benefits. However, although guerrilla communication can be successfully framed as a short-circuiting of cultural processes, using the short-circuit model to understand visual communication practices misses some important functions. Using work by marketing scholar Schroeder, I argue that we can only frame guerrilla communication (and other visual enterprises such as traditional advertising) as short-circuiting practices if we ignore visual consumption as a form of consumption in its own right (Schroeder, 2002). Visual consumption, the practice I assert guerrilla communication is founded upon, is increasingly important to today’s media-driven society: so much so that Schroeder asserts we are moving to a commodity consumption model driven not by goods but by images (2002, p. 5). Clearly, as practices explicitly designed for arresting visual impact – seen in the emphasis on publicity – guerrilla communication campaigns are constructed as visual products, the communication practices themselves becoming the commodities to be consumed. In this, guerrilla communications embodies a shift from producing and marketing goods to producing images as goods. Guerrilla communication practices thus strikingly illustrate a second cycle of consumption at work in consumer communication practices, a cycle connected to consuming representations, not concrete products or services. Attending to the ways in which images (be they static or interactive) are a form of commodity in their own right reframes visual communication practices that aim for high visibility (instead of sales) as a different cycle of consumption, rather than a short in the circuit of culture. This is not to say that guerrilla communication does not short-circuit processes of cultural production and consumption, but rather that to only consider guerrilla communication and other advertising practices as shorts in the cultural system ignores the way these practices are commodities themselves.
M.J. McNaughton / Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 303–305
305
3. Conclusion Guerrilla communication not only illustrates an industry turn to nontraditional modes of communicating with consumers, but also illustrates an interesting convergence in the communications industry. This shift is echoed in industry literature which increasingly pushes the value of guerrilla communications as a driver of consumer interaction (For example, see Ries & Ries, 2002). Illustrated by guerrilla communication, the differences between advertising, marketing, and public relations may not lie as strongly in the specific tasks addressed by advertising, marketing, and public relations, but in how organizations and practitioners choose to delimit these areas. As advertising, marketing, and public relations practices become progressively more visually focused, visual consumption will play an increasing part in the cultural roles played by these practices. By its outrageous nature guerrilla communication calls attention to itself as a short-circuiting practice oriented toward cultural intermediaries and affirms this orientation to the extent that campaign success is measured by peer accolades. However, this short-circuit model is profitably problematized by considering the ways in which such so-called short-circuiting practices function not as practices which side-step public consumption but as practices of visual consumption. The full paper is available from the author upon request. References Curtin, P. A., & Gaither, T. K. (2005). Privileging identity, difference, and power: The circuit of culture as a basis for public relations theory. Journal of Public Relations Research, 17(2), 91–115. Hodges, C. (2006). “PRP culture”: A framework for exploring public relations practitioners as cultural intermediaries. Journal of Communication Management, 10(1), 80–93. Johnson, R. (1986–1987). What is cultural studies anyway? Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology, 16, 38–80. Levinson, Jay Conrad. (1984). Guerrilla marketing: Secrets for making big profits from your small business. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. PR News. Can guerrilla-style tactics work effectively in PR? Retrieved December 11, 2005, from http://www.prnewsonline.com/prn topstory.htm. Ries, A., & Ries, L. (2002). The fall of advertising and the rise of PR. New York: Harper Business. Sachs, M. (1996). Marketing communication. In A. Gregory (Ed.), Public relations in practice (pp. 19–32). London: Kogan Page Limited. Schroeder, J. E. (2002). Visual consumption. New York: Routledge. Soar, M. (2000). Encoding advertisements: Ideology and meaning in advertising production. Mass Communication & Society, 3(4), 415–437.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Public Relations Review
Short communication
Guerrilla communication, visual consumption, and consumer public relations Melanie Joy McNaughton ∗ Bridgewater State College, A-7, 291 South Finley Street, Athens, GA 30605, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 24 September 2007 Received in revised form 20 February 2008 Accepted 26 March 2008 Keywords: Guerrilla communication Public relations Circuit of culture Visual consumption
a b s t r a c t Guerrilla communication has grown into an increasingly prominent strategy adopted by large corporations such as American Express, BP Amoco, Chrysler, Hershey Foods, and Pepsi. In its attention-grabbing instantiations, guerrilla communication points to the convergence of advertising, marketing, and public relations in consumer communication practices. This essay also considers guerrilla communication’s place in the circuit of culture. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Guerrilla communication originated as a means for small businesses with small budgets to grab consumers’ attention, an approach developed in Guerrilla marketing (Levinson, 1984). From these roots, guerrilla communication has grown into an increasingly prominent strategy adopted by large corporations. Guerrilla communication is the blanket term used to describe unconventional methods of grabbing consumers’ attention which traffics in shock value to “cut through the clutter.” As such, guerilla communication denotes consumer communication practices that stand well outside the bounds of the mainstream, and sometimes well outside the bounds of common sense and decency. This essay explores guerrilla communication, a consumer communication practice which while garnering significant attention in media, industry, and consumer circles has garnered little in the way of critical academic investigation. I argue that guerilla communication illustrates a convergence in consumer communication between advertising, marketing, and public relations at the same time that it problematizes traditional interpretations of consumer communication’s place and function in cultural cycles of production and consumption. Two examples of guerrilla communication include assvertising and BumvertisingTM . Assvertising was a 2004 campaign developed by Night Agency (self-described as “Earth’s foremost creative marketing company” on their assvertising campaign website, www.ass-vertise.com) to promote a fitness class, titled “Booty Call,” for the New York Health and Racquet Club. Assvertising, as one might suspect, employed well-formed, underwear-clad backsides as billboards to advertise the class and generated high degrees of media attention. BumvertisingTM is a trademarked communication campaign which used homeless persons (“bums”) to promote interest in PokerFaceBook.com: panhandlers were paid a fee to tack a PokerFaceBook.com placard to signs they used to solicit money from passersby. 1. Guerrilla communication: consumer communication convergence Advertising, marketing, and public relations share much of the same territory, an intersection born out in buzz about guerilla communication tactics as well as in industry literature. Guerrilla communication functions as advertising given
∗ Tel.: +1 706 548 4124. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2008.03.031
304
M.J. McNaughton / Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 303–305
that it presents products to consumers, functions as marketing because guerrilla campaigns are intended to drive sales and increase mindshare, and functions as public relations because guerrilla communication traffics in media events and publicity. I maintain that to fully appreciate guerrilla communication and its cultural operations, we should not understand guerrilla communication singly as advertising, marketing, or public relations, but as an inextricable collective of these three practices. One of guerrilla communication’s most obvious instantiations as advertising is body advertising campaigns, for example GoldenPalace.com’s campaign which hired a man to streak across the field at the 2004 Super Bowl with the company URL on his back, a communication tactic which illustrates the guerrilla communication cross-over between advertising and public relations. Moving to marketing, we can see that guerrilla communication is aptly positioned as marketing. Industry experts argue that traditional modes of marketing have not only become fragmented by the internet, the wild proliferation of television channels, and the mobility of media, traditional modes of marketing have become so familiar many feel they are ineffective—especially among teenage and college-age consumers. Guerrilla communication is viewed as the solution to reaching these target markets. Guerrilla campaigns that generate buzz prompt word of mouth communication, using teenagers to market products and services to peers, who are much more interested in listening to their peers than a message directly generated by a company. Although advertising and marketing functions are integral to guerrilla communication, I argue that guerrilla communication finds its primary power in its function as public relations. Public relations is a notoriously slippery practice to define, but is most commonly understood as publicity management. Guerrilla communication is intensely focused on generating publicity. Night Agency’s assvertising campaign is a strong example of this: the assvertising campaign received coverage “in the New York Times, on CNN, and even the BBC World, and that the website had a million hits the month it was launched” (PR News, 2005). In this figuration we also see that public relations is intimately connected to marketing. M. Sachs (1996) highlights the interconnection between public relations and marketing when she observes that public relations boosts marketing functions “by helping to shape the messages to be carried by word-of-mouth ” (p. 21). 2. Guerrilla communication and the circuit of culture The circuit of culture is a concept developed by cultural studies scholar R. Johnson (1986–1987) which describes how cultural elements move through processes of production and consumption. Johnson pinpoints four moments in this cycle: production, texts, readings, and cultural integration. Soar (2000) finds that the circuit of culture is often high-jacked by the operation of cultural intermediaries such as advertising creatives, stating that the short-circuit “is one in which the cultural intermediaries act as producers and consumers” (p. 431). Curtin and Gaither (2005), as well as Hodges (2006), similarly investigate how public relations practitioners function as cultural intermediaries. Short-circuiting takes place when cultural capital (for example, advertisements) is designed more for peer recognition and validation than public audiences. Before public populations can interpret the text and produce feedback that is integrated into the circuit of culture, cultural intermediaries pick up and evaluate these texts, forming a tight loop of production that operates with little thought to, involvement with, or response from the audiences to whom it is ultimately directed. Soar (2000) writes that short-circuiting thus “effectively circumvents both consumers at large and the marketing routines to which the intermediaries ostensibly adhere to reach them” (p. 433). Taking assvertising as an example, using Soar’s model it is easy to position this campaign as short in the circuit of culture. For instance, Night Agency correlates the success of the campaign with the number of inquiries they received from the campaign, not the volume of inquiries New York Health and Racquet Club received from the campaign. Such markers of success frame assvertising as a communication strategy more oriented toward industry accolades than client or consumer benefits. However, although guerrilla communication can be successfully framed as a short-circuiting of cultural processes, using the short-circuit model to understand visual communication practices misses some important functions. Using work by marketing scholar Schroeder, I argue that we can only frame guerrilla communication (and other visual enterprises such as traditional advertising) as short-circuiting practices if we ignore visual consumption as a form of consumption in its own right (Schroeder, 2002). Visual consumption, the practice I assert guerrilla communication is founded upon, is increasingly important to today’s media-driven society: so much so that Schroeder asserts we are moving to a commodity consumption model driven not by goods but by images (2002, p. 5). Clearly, as practices explicitly designed for arresting visual impact – seen in the emphasis on publicity – guerrilla communication campaigns are constructed as visual products, the communication practices themselves becoming the commodities to be consumed. In this, guerrilla communications embodies a shift from producing and marketing goods to producing images as goods. Guerrilla communication practices thus strikingly illustrate a second cycle of consumption at work in consumer communication practices, a cycle connected to consuming representations, not concrete products or services. Attending to the ways in which images (be they static or interactive) are a form of commodity in their own right reframes visual communication practices that aim for high visibility (instead of sales) as a different cycle of consumption, rather than a short in the circuit of culture. This is not to say that guerrilla communication does not short-circuit processes of cultural production and consumption, but rather that to only consider guerrilla communication and other advertising practices as shorts in the cultural system ignores the way these practices are commodities themselves.
M.J. McNaughton / Public Relations Review 34 (2008) 303–305
305
3. Conclusion Guerrilla communication not only illustrates an industry turn to nontraditional modes of communicating with consumers, but also illustrates an interesting convergence in the communications industry. This shift is echoed in industry literature which increasingly pushes the value of guerrilla communications as a driver of consumer interaction (For example, see Ries & Ries, 2002). Illustrated by guerrilla communication, the differences between advertising, marketing, and public relations may not lie as strongly in the specific tasks addressed by advertising, marketing, and public relations, but in how organizations and practitioners choose to delimit these areas. As advertising, marketing, and public relations practices become progressively more visually focused, visual consumption will play an increasing part in the cultural roles played by these practices. By its outrageous nature guerrilla communication calls attention to itself as a short-circuiting practice oriented toward cultural intermediaries and affirms this orientation to the extent that campaign success is measured by peer accolades. However, this short-circuit model is profitably problematized by considering the ways in which such so-called short-circuiting practices function not as practices which side-step public consumption but as practices of visual consumption. The full paper is available from the author upon request. References Curtin, P. A., & Gaither, T. K. (2005). Privileging identity, difference, and power: The circuit of culture as a basis for public relations theory. Journal of Public Relations Research, 17(2), 91–115. Hodges, C. (2006). “PRP culture”: A framework for exploring public relations practitioners as cultural intermediaries. Journal of Communication Management, 10(1), 80–93. Johnson, R. (1986–1987). What is cultural studies anyway? Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology, 16, 38–80. Levinson, Jay Conrad. (1984). Guerrilla marketing: Secrets for making big profits from your small business. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. PR News. Can guerrilla-style tactics work effectively in PR? Retrieved December 11, 2005, from http://www.prnewsonline.com/prn topstory.htm. Ries, A., & Ries, L. (2002). The fall of advertising and the rise of PR. New York: Harper Business. Sachs, M. (1996). Marketing communication. In A. Gregory (Ed.), Public relations in practice (pp. 19–32). London: Kogan Page Limited. Schroeder, J. E. (2002). Visual consumption. New York: Routledge. Soar, M. (2000). Encoding advertisements: Ideology and meaning in advertising production. Mass Communication & Society, 3(4), 415–437.