Merry Mischief Marketing Inject a sense of humor into your marketing campaign. Author Ray Simon will tell you how.

Viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, interruption marketing. .. does marketing a homebased business always have to be so violent?Enter Mischief Marketing, a book full ofmarketing techniques created by Ray Simon that's actually abarrel of yuks for both the marketer and the marketee. The book isavailable at Amazon.com, but it's also available forfree-that's right, gratis-for download fromwww.mischiefmarketing.com.We've asked Simon to share a few of his rambunctious tacticsfor homebased businesses.

HomeOfficeMag.com: What is mischief marketing?

Ray Simon: When Steven Spielberg was young, he lackedconnections in the movie business. So he snuck onto the lot atUniversal, found an empty office, moved into it, put his name inthe building directory, and pretended to "work" theredaily for a whole summer. Not long after that, he networked himselfinto his first directing job. That's mischief marketing.

Mischief Marketing documents innovative, bizarre, funny(and sometimes barely legal) marketing strategies used by famouspeople throughout history.

HomeOfficeMag.com: What is Mischief Marketingnot?

Simon: Notice that in the story, Speilberg didn'ttarget an audience of millions. His mischief marketing campaigntargeted a small group-namely those with clout in Hollywood.What this illustrates is that mischief marketing-in its pureform, anyhow-is not about marketing yourself to themasses. It's about marketing yourself to others who can marketyour work (or your philosophical message) to the masses. In thebook, we call such people VLPs: Very Leveraged Persons.

HomeOfficeMag.com: Is there any way a homebased businessthat sells a product can use Mischief Marketing to reach a broader,but targeted, audience? Let's use for an example a woman whoproduces and sells decorative pillows from her home.

Simon: You could show "historical" footage [inmarketing materials] of your pillows among civil war battalions, inthe lap of the Mona Lisa, as a fig leaf for Michelangelo'sDavid, in place of Venus de Milo's arms. . . and so on.

Or form a bogus right-wing organization that proposes to putdecorative pillows on the private parts of all nudes or CalvinKlein models. Then pretend to be infuriated by their unauthorizeduse of your product.

HomeOfficeMag.com: How about a homebased business thatsells a service, such as graphic design?

Simon: Approach a top agency. Send a series of badgraphic designs. Make them so hilariously awful that they circulatearound the office. Have them arrive on Fridays, so people will lookforward to them. Then send your real designs.

HomeOfficeMag.com: What should mischief marketersnot do?

Simon: They should never be pushy, rude orintrusive.

Linda Formichelli has written for more than 70 magazines,including Entrepreneur's Start-Ups, Redbook,Woman's Day and Psychology Today. You can visit heronline at www.twowriters.net. She also runs a site that'sagainst intrusive advertising at www.badads.org.