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The Guerrilla Marketing Revolution by Jay Conrad Levinson and Paul Hanley

The full title of this book by Jay Conrad Levinson and Paul Hanley is

The Guerrilla Marketing Revolution: Precision Persuasion of the Unconscious Mind“.

In my review at Amazon.co.uk, I gave it a Four Stars Rating. This means I think it is Good.

An interesting start to a new way of marketing to the unconscious brain

It seems to have become a traditional method of marketing. You present yourself as selling the new improved version and then you knock the old version but don’t really deliver anything new.

This delivers.

Unfortunately Paul Hanley, the main author, died a few months after publishing this book in 2005. Jay Conrad Levinson died in 2013.

While Guerrilla Marketing has always claimed to based on the science of psychology and the study of human behaviour, this is the first Guerrilla Marketing book to make the link clear. Some of the content is marketing based on Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) but it makes clear that the book is not about NLP.

A quick quote from the introduction:

“Guerrilla Marketing focuses on providing information in such a way as to affect the decision-making process in prospective purchasers…This book describes ways to influence people at the biological level, by physically accessing parts of their brain that they would not usually be aware are part of the decision-making process…”

The book includes the following chapters:
1 – Why market to the unconscious mind?
2 – Appeal to your prospects’ unconscious
3 – Language as a tool
4 – Precision persuasion
5 – New Guerrilla Marketing memory strategy
6 – Writing for the unconscious mind
7 – Congruence and your marketing identity
8 – Make marketing success a habit
9 – Act like a child
10 – New weapons for your arsenal
11 – The future of Guerrilla Marketing

I’m an active reader and I have highlighted a lot of the book.

My only two criticisms of “The Guerrilla Marketing Revolution” are:

1 – The book makes various claims and I would have liked to see them back up with evidence or references to supporting materials. For example, the claim that to sell you have to move away from a pain based approach to a gain based approach which makes the customer excited about buying is controversial. I would like to see the psychological evidence to back an idea that feels right in some situations but goes against what many sales and marketing gurus and methodologies preach.

2 – The book feels like the primer for a second book “Putting The Guerrilla Marketing Revolution To Work”. While the book has some “how to do this” advice I want more. With the author’s death, there is no second book.

Since the book was published, the science of neuromarketing has evolved. This means that through the use of MRI scanning, experts can see what messages are triggering what kind of responses in the brain. Some of these books are extremely hard going but I think Neuromarketing by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin is very readable.

It is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

There are many thousand of business books, you can see the full list of my reviews at Business Books Reviews by Paul Simister. I’ve also narrowed these down to a list of the 12 Best Business Books For Business Owners & Entrepreneurs.

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