Masterclass conversation (Darcy Juarez host, Dan Kennedy guest) explaining grassroots marketing: defined as bottom-up, manual-labor-driven marketing (originating in political "ground game") that complements — and often substitutes for — paid advertising. Kennedy argues most businesses (<5%) see truly organic word-of-mouth; others must create or simulate grassroots through organized manual efforts. He recommends layering grassroots under ad spend and, when budgets are limited, substituting time/manual labor for ad spend. A concrete local tactic given is the "five house rule": target a homeowner and the four neighboring houses because buy behaviors cluster in small local groups.
Chapters
What appears to be organic grassroots, which is what some people think of this as word of mouth evangelical activity on the part of our customers because we do such a great job that causes this bottom up swell of customer. It happens at the local level for some businesses, it happens on a national level for some brands. But we're probably talking about less than 5% of businesses and brands. The rest create and force grassroots activity that often looks organic when it is not, or sacrifices even bothering to look organic. And it is not. So, yes, looping back to your question. If you don't have money, you usually have time and regardless, you need to substitute manual labor for ad spend. Kind of that simple. But my point is, even when you do have money and even when you do the ad spend, you should still lay all the grassroots marketing underneath it. Foreign.
Hello and welcome to this month's masterclass. I'm Darcy Juarez, your host here with Dan Kennedy. And Dan, we get a lot of questions about this, so I really wanted to dive into it this month. And that is like the whole idea of grassroots marketing of, hey, I'm starting my business or I don't have a lot of money. So what are some of the things that I can do to use that manual labor as you talk about? So this month I want to talk about grassroots marketing.
So.
So can you start off by defining that for us?
Yeah. So first of all, manual labor's gotten a bad rap. You know, there's actually nothing wrong with it. It's still. So grassroots marketing is a term that comes from politics. It means bottom up, not top down. You can only do so much top down with advertising. So in the political realm, a lot of it has shifted to online, but not all. A lot of TV spins still, et cetera. But watch a campaign, what they call the ground game, how many offices they have in a state with a pro running it, and then how many volunteers they got, how many doors those volunteers go knock on, how many yards they get assigned, stuck in how many people they get to the potluck. This is all still essential. It hasn't gone away. And we're recording this, what, 20 days, 22 days or so from the 2024 election. And previously, when Trump won in 2016, he won without much of a organized ground game at all. But the whole thing was aberrant. He snuck up on the competition because nobody took him seriously. And he was a media force for free, earned media unlike anything. And he bumped ratings. And since nobody took him seriously, he got media everywhere, cnn, NBC, you know, wherever. And he Mastered the big giant rally, which is his version of manual labor. And from now until the end, for example, he's probably going to be doing three of those a day. Wow. Now, one of the reasons he probably lost in 2020 by very thin margin is grounding is the grassroots being organized. So he had a lot of enthusiastic evangelical people out there, but not organized, right? Not a room with 200 at a phone bank and a manager and all that right? Now, this time, Laura Trump has put a lot of that in place. So we shall see. But it's very hard, even as all this other media has come to us, it's very hard to actually win without the ground game, without the grassroots, without the bottom up. Now, what appears to be organic grassroots, which is what some people think of this as, has word of mouth evangelical activity on the part of our customers because we do such a great job. And so that causes this bottom up swell of customers. It happens at the local level for some businesses, it happens on a national level for some brands. But we're probably talking about less than 5% of businesses and brands. The rest create, enforce grassroots activity that often looks organic when it is not, or sacrifices even bothering to look organic. And it is not. Yes. Looping back to your question. If you don't have money, you usually have time and regardless, you need to substitute manual labor for ad spend. It's kind of that simple. But my point is you, even when you do have money, and even when you do the ad spend, you should still lay all the grassroots marketing underneath it.
So can you give us some examples then?
Sure. I'll give you one of the simplest, which is in the grassroots marketing book, it's called the five house rule. Okay? And so your house, the neighbor on either side, the house directly across the street from you, and, and his neighbors, okay? They all are a lot alike. The people who live in those houses are more alike than different. There's exceptions. But basically there's parts of my neighborhood where everybody has kids. There's parts of my neighborhood where nobody has kids. There's no rule about it. It's not, it wasn't organized by the community. It just happens organically. People with kids out buying a house see bicycles and basketball hoops and that's where they want to be. So their kids have somebody to play with. People with no kids see basketball hoops and bicycles and they want to be three streets over where it's quieter, right? So it happens really tight with five. Furthermore, they are all watching each other. They're right on top of each other. So almost nothing happens with your house that at least one or more of these five don't see it. If there's a truck in a driveway, they see it. If there's an ambulance, they see it. If you have guests over for a party, they see it and they're nosy. And if you buy something that is visible, they're aware that you bought it. Right. So kind of whatever one in this little five house area is buying, at least one of the others could. So let's say you get your roof replaced or you get the new thing they spray that buys you an extra five years on your roof. Chances are these houses were all built about the same time. Yep. The roofs are all wearing out at about the same time. Yep. So as soon as the roof repair company gets one, they should be able to get another one within the five.
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