Excerpted from transcripts of a conference on marketing held in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Feb. 27, 1987.

1984 is here, the problem is how to manage it. The answer we propose, gentlemen, is guerilla marketing. Just as the guerilla fighter must know the terrain of the struggle in order to control it, so it is with the multinational corporation of today. Our terrain is the world. Our ends can be accomplished with the extension of techniques already in the process of development.

The world market is now being computer micromapped into consumer zones according to residual cultural factors (i.e., idioms, local traditions, religious affiliations, political ideologies, folk mores, traditional sexual roles, etc.), dominant cultural fac tors (i.e., typologies of life-styles based on consumption patterns: television ratings, musical tastes, fashions, motion picture and concert attendance, home video rentals, magazine subscriptions, home computer software selection, shopping mall participation, etc.), and emergent cultural factors (i.e., interactive and participatory video, mobile micromalls equipped with holography and super conductivity, computer interfacing with consumers, robotic services, etc.).

The emergent marketing terrain which must be our primary concern can only be covered totally if the 304 geographical consumption zones already computer mapped (the horizontal) can be cross-referenced not only with the relatively homogeneous "conscious" needs of the microconsumer (the vertical). This latter mapping process has so far readily yielded to computer solution through the identification and classification of a maximum of 507 microconsumption types per macroconsumption unit.

Through an extension of this mapping, even the most autonomous and unconventional desires may be reconstructed for the benefit of market extension and control. Emergent marketing strategies must move further beyond the commodity itself and toward the commodity as image, following marketing contingencies all the way down. And here, precisely, is the task of guerrilla marketing: to go all the way with the images we create and strike where there is indecision (flowing from constructed situations without determinant outcomes just like the guerilla fighter).

For the multinational of today profits are necessary but not sufficient conditions for growth which our whole history shows to be equivalent to survival. We remain dependent on market control and extension. But now this requires more than the control of procduction and consumption - to grow we must sell a total image. Like guerrilla fighters, we must win hearts and minds. This task can be accomplished by constructing and reconstructing them all the way down in what can only be viewed as an endless process.