Creative Marketing Approaches

In my Brand Aid book, I provide examples of more than 50 different creative approaches to marketing brands and their products and services. Some are designed for small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Others are intended to be outrageous to break through communications clutter. While others are intended for B2B brands. Many are types of guerrilla marketing and several involve some form of publicity. Here are some of the ideas that I outline:

• Conduct classes that lead to product knowledge and usage
• Create a brand magazine or newsletter
• Create a brand museum
• Hold contests
• Offer free product trial
• Create artificial product scarsity
• Devise publicity stunts
• Beta test products with select customers
• Hold product preview parities for some of your best customers
• Create a brand membership organization
• Hold special events for your best customers
• Start a blog
• Write a book
• Write articles and submit them to appropriate publications
• Hire people to use your brand's products in front of large groups of people
• Advertise where people need to wait (bus stops, subway cars, above urinals, etc.)
• Advertise on the sides of vehicles
• Include brand messages in the signature lines of email messages
• Create a brand speaker's bureau
• Start a YouTube channel for your brand
• Advertise on rooftops

Very few organizations have unlimited marketing budgets and many organizations have just the opposite, very limited marketing budgets. There are many ways to build brands with limited funds. I recommend that you explore as many of these as possible regardless of the size of your marketing budget.