The guerilla marketing strategist gives an in-depth look at how to leverage consumer behavior as a means to influence, engage and motivate their purchasing decisions.
Michael Leifer is the president and CEO of guerilla PR, Inc., which provides successful ideation and communication strategy, as well as proven campaign execution. At guerillaPR, he has worked with brands that include Sony Electronics, General Mills, Isuzu, Snapple, Overseas Film Group, First Look Pictures, Yahoo!, Broadcast.com, RewardTV and more.
Jodi Harris: You started out as a cultural anthropologist, even going so far as starting UCLA's World Arts and Culture major course of study. How did this lead you to a career in marketing?
Michael Leifer: Well it definitely wasn't a direct pathway. In college I wrote a multimedia thesis paper on the LA Punk Movement from 1977-1982 and interviewed the Slash punk bands, the Melrose used clothing store owners, the zine publishers, the club owners and promoters, the poets, the fans, the filmmakers and many others.
After graduation, I thought at best I would somehow acquire a job with the Peace Corp or the UN. Then, in the early 90s the advertising industry started to shift. Chiat Day hired anthropologists as account planners to provide more well-informed insight and communication programs for Nike and other brands, and wouldn't you know it, all of a sudden anthropologists had some value. Imagine that?
Media buyers and brand managers started to demand a higher level of understanding about their target consumer demographics, psychographics and segmentation. What better person to hire then someone who was trained in world arts and cultures to study, demystify and chart out the lifestyles, behaviors, motivations, values, incentives, trends and habits of subcultures internationally? Guess I got lucky.
Harris: Were you involved in the whole dotcom explosion?
Leifer: In 1989, I was the founder and president of C3Live, a webcasting and syndication company that was fairly successful and distributed content non-exclusively via Yahoo! Broadcast.com. Michael Smith, who had produced and directed hundreds of shows for Telemundo and Univision, was our producer and director. In addition to producing A-list celebrity and model-laden invite-only events, we started creating private label video player skins before it was commonplace, and syndicated the content to all the sponsors' websites with pre-roll commercials and surrounding banner advertisements. After it played online, we then would make the content available for broadcast to internationally license.
Harris: Your agency, guerilla PR, works in a lot of non-traditional means of advertising. What is your overall philosophy for connecting with consumers?
Leifer: People want to be communicated with, and not just cast upon. We are in a whole new paradigm of advertising and marketing that is based upon a two-way interactive dialogue, where consumers are part of the marketing design and process.
In terms of executional strategy and tactics, I like to keep it simple.
Go to where your consumer is and hang out. Listen. Then, listen some more. Then, speak with (not to) them, in their own language, in a way that is relevant to them. Once there is a comfort level, then you may want to leave something with them to remind them of the conversation, such as a URL link, a MySpace address, a flyer or something else.
Of course, it helps to do your homework and know the DNA of your brand, product or service. One-to-one informational interviews in a storytelling style (vs. focus-groups) are perhaps the best way to glean the most accurate information. This interview process allows you to validate who your exact subcultural targets are, to determine which groups even want to be associated with your brand and to fine tune your messaging, tone, power words, imagery, themes and channel usage.
Harris: One of the key components in many of your campaigns has been direct-to-influencer marketing. Could you explain how this works?
Leifer: Using a cultural-anthropologically-based method, we map out, both online and offline, who the key-influencers are by different demographic, lifestyle and interest groups, using psychographic pre-qualifying criteria combined with proven seasoned experience, and then we put them into our database.
For the online space, we then reach out to the gatekeepers of influence, such as writers, editors, webmasters, blog owners, network owners and online celebrities.
We then design a quantifiable way of documenting the outreach with fairly conservative projections so that our clients can watch the program and provide recommendations during the process to refine the efforts and messaging. We put everything into an ROI of cost against campaign reach to provide our clients a CPM or CPL or CPA comparison formula. This allows them to evaluate it against their other top-line media buys. Typically we are about 500 to 800 percent less than our clients' other traditional media buys, are much more highly targeted and provide better results.
Harris: guerilla PR also specializes in working with trends and social movements. What interactive tools & techniques have you found work best when trying to leverage behavioral trends to influence consumer's purchasing decisions?
Leifer: Psychodemographics are very worthwhile in being able to analyze the values, incentives and motivations that influence and allow you to predict behavior over time. Psychodemographics create a quality tool that can easily be used in conjunction with traditional broadcast methodologies and research such as Mediamark, which tracks the media being used via tens of thousands of yearly in-home interviews. Certain psychodemographic groups, such as "experiencers" are the quintessential influencers, as they are novelty seekers, have the largest rolodexes, adopt technology quickly and are the types who go to movies on opening weekend and buy consumer electronics before others in their social clusters, to reaffirm their position in their group.
Certain blogs, like Joystiq, Engadget and Boing Boing, are good at providing a window on what's going on.
I have found that using psychographics as one transparency, with online research of the new breaking products, together with lifestyle transparencies and demographic historical data allows for a better understanding of the target.
Now what guerilla gets paid for is translating that insight into action by coming up with customized non-traditional platforms that have ROI attached to them.
Also, many people claim to have exclusive access to the "influencers" or "trend setters," but really all you have to do is find the people that multiple people reference in conversations and you can find the influencers.