Guerilla marketing is getting more and more a great way to send your brand message out there. It gives marketing professionals an opportunity to use an original, cheap and innovative platform.

Unfortunately in the Netherlands it looks like the guerrilla troops aren’t well equipped to go to battle. Last month for example, CoolCat (a Dutch clothing brand) launched their new campaign ‘DanceBattle’. Nice concept to hook up with the youngsters, interested in dance and hiphop.

However, the big idea of this campaign consisted of putting up stickers on public property. Too bad, because it’s not original, it lacks creative and it’s far from daring. It just seems that globally better ‘guerilla’ thinking is done. Take this campaign for example:

Flies in a campaign? Brilliant!

Guerrilla marketing is not about “something funny”. It’s all about thinking outside the box! Take your ideas beyond their boundaries. Don’t think that if you once came up with a great tv commercial you are fitted or well equipped to do guerilla. It’s a whole other ball game!

Keep that in mind and try to avoid failures like this one.
What does TMF (a Dutch music channel), Ali B (Moroccan Dutch hip-hop artist) and fireworks have in common? NOTHING! Not funny, no message, not original – skip it, burn it!

I don’t want to be a pessimistic. Not at all, on the contrary. I believe the Netherlands has an enormous creative potential and is home to some of the best creative’s in the world. It’s a fact: Dutch advertisement agencies produced some brilliant work in the last decades and won many prices with it.

All I only keep thinking of is – that it’s time for the new, fresh, creative minds to stand up and man the battle stations!

I’ll leave you guys be, with this brilliant example of the Dutch creativity:

Just recently I developed an allergy for a verb. The thing about this verb is, that it inhibits failure. It is too often used and many people don’t understand the danger of it. They also don’t see that by the existence of this verb, talent is limited and opportunities thightend. The verb I mean here is ‘trying’

You shouldn’t be trying. You should just do. Nike understands the essence with their slogan: ‘Just do it’. Take for example the following phrases:  ‘I will try to help you…’, ‘I will try do make a painting…’, ‘I will try to organise a party…’ Just come out and help me, make the goddamn painting and organise that party. But DON’T TRY to do it.

Learn
If you don’t succeed in realizing what you do, it is not a problem. As long as you learn from it and get to understand why it didn’t work out what you were doing. Only then you will develop yourself! Just as a child cannot try to grow tall or a person tries to age. They just grow and get older. There’s no trying in these matters.

Just do it and if you find out you can’t, than thats it. Then you start learning until you can or you quit. But then again remember the saying: ‘A winner never quits, a quitter never wins’. Once you found out of what you’re naturally good at, you will succeed and things you do develop and go smooth.

Creative people don’t try to be creative, they simply are. So! Shouldn’t you be doing someting, instead of just trying?