Virtual Entrepreneur

Using Sex To Market & Brand Your Small Business

‘The whole idea of guerrilla marketing is to transform cold prospects into consenting partners.’ Jay Conrad Levinson

by Todd Mintz - SEM pdx:
Levinson’s brilliant article makes analogies between sex and guerrilla marketing… here, I´ll focus on a couple examples where sex was blatantly used to market small businesses in atypical guerrilla fashion. Both examples offended people and ruffled feathers. Why was one a brilliant success and one a colossal failure?

In early May, Chicago commuters were greeted with the following billboard:

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It caught the eye of every U.S. media outlet. Lots of people hated the sign, especially those that viewed the sign as actually encouraging divorce. Due to improper permitting, the City of Chicago forced it to be removed, which kept the story in the media for a longer period of time. When a new version of the sign went up, news coverage continued giving the firm even more exposure.

Were there tangible results? The lead lawyer of the firm appeared on network television and the local news stations provided saturation coverage of the story. Alexa shows huge traffic spikes to their website. The firm got links from the Wall Street Journal and the Tom Leykis show. Variants of their ad slogan appear close to 30,000 times in Google. Almost every prospect in their target market likely knows of the firm (or at least the ad) and in an industry where few lawyers create any ads (let alone memorable ones), this firm has grabbed incredible mindshare by advertising with this sexy billboard.

The ad likely resonated with people because it portrayed divorce and the opportunity to be single as a hedonistic fantasyland so far removed from the truth (for most of us) that a viewer can suspend reality long enough to laugh, remember the image/message, and tell all their friends. The word-of-mouth around Chicago must have been tremendous. Through their billboard, the firm has branded themselves as the Chicago divorce lawyers that everyone knows. They should now reinforce their display advertising with SEO / PPC / Social Media Optimization to make their branding as strong online as it is off.

By contrast, I found via SEO-Blokes a story published on an online marketing agency website entitled ‘How Website Design Got Me Laid‘ (link no-followed), which is a textbook example of how not to brand your business with sex. Read on…