Unscrewed: The Consumer’s Guide To Getting What You Paid For (by Ron Burley) provides some strong tactics for resolving customer service problems where you know you’re in the right. It’s a great way to learn how to market your needs to an organization, guerrilla marketing, and also how to improve your own business’s customer service.

Ron drew upon his background as a broadcast journalist to create 5 key strategy principles:

1. The Principle (“A company will do only what is in its financial self-interest”). Therefore, if you have a problem, you need to show the company that satisfying your needs is in their best interest.
2. The Purpose (“The purpose is to reclaim money, assets, or equity while minimizing time and effort”). It’s not about getting (emotionally) even, it’s simply a business transaction.
3. The Promise (“It will cost much more to ignore me than to take care of me, and I am willing to spend an unlimited amount of tie and energy to get what I’m due”). You’ll be making yourself into a nuisance for the expressed purpose of ensuring other consumers won’t become victimized.
4. The Power Tools (“Technologies that you use to leverage your position with your opponent”).
5. The Plan (“…is designed to recover what you are due; it includes an acceptable goal, adversary research, a specific strategy, and an honest assessment of the situation”). The plan matches the situation with your resources to get the result you’re after.

Each of his strategies are based on an in-your-face little-crazy approach. If you threaten a business person with a lawsuit, bodily harm, or to damage their reputation, you’ve eliminated the opportunity for a quick resolution. Instead, you call upon your Free Speech Rights to tell people about your true story. A zealot is hard to ignore.

Each strategy is detailed using a real-life story. He gives a background to the problem, his solution, the result, and an examination of the specific of why exactly the solution worked.