The impact of surprise guerilla marketing on customer behavior

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the impact of guerilla marketing (i.e., guerilla ambient marketing and guerilla sensation marketing) on customer behavior (i.e., customer purchase intention and customer brand attitude). The survey was held in May 2023; the questionnaire was distributed to a convenience sample of 450 customers of three malls in Jeddah city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The analysis was conducted by IBM SPSS and AMOS using 344 retrieved responses. Exploring research factors, confirming goodness-of-fit, and testing the hypothesized effects, the results indicated that both dimensions of guerrilla marketing had significant effects on both dimensions of customer behavior. However, the effect of ambient marketing on customer purchase intention was greater than its effect on customer brand attitude. Conversely, the effect of sensation marketing on customer brand attitude was greater than its effect on customer purchase intention. The paper concludes that ambient marketing has more power to boost customer purchase intention in comparison with sensation marketing, which is suitable for elevating customer brand attitude. For that, enterprises are required to try nonconventional marketing practices such as guerilla marketing in order to change customer behaviors. Further studies should use other dimensions of guerilla marketing and target more customers from different locations.