Use of Nontraditional Marketing Techniques in Awareness Campaigns and Their Impact on Audience Attitudes and Memory Towards the Cause

Abstract

Amid all the advertising clutter and noise people are surrounded with, marketers are always thinking of new ways to reach their target audience to be able to sell products, services, or simply change a behavior or attitude. Thus, introducing new ways to reach the audience was inevitable. When non-traditional marketing techniques first appeared, their main aim was to fight the clutter caused by traditional marketing. Guerrilla marketing, one of the types of non-traditional marketing, is defined as marketing that aims at using unconventional ideas in uncommon places or ways to create a buzz among the audience. For the purpose of this study, the two guerrilla techniques that are focused on are ambient marketing and wild posting. This study examined the effect of guerrilla marketing techniques on the memory and attitudes of private university students, ages 17-23, through an experimental study conducted in a private university in Egypt. The researcher discovered a meaningful correlation between exposure to guerrilla techniques and audience memory towards social causes. Results also showed that attitudes towards causes that were presented through guerrilla techniques changed significantly compared to those that were presented through non guerrilla techniques. Moreover, the ambient technique was the most memorable out of all the presented techniques. It was also noticed that recognition and unaided recall scored higher than aided recall