Partner Article

Time for small businesses to be remarkable

I recently listened to an old, but still excellent presentation on idea diffusion given by the American entrepreneur Seth Godin. In it, Godin asserts that mass marketing is dead and, as he puts it, if you continue to attempt to market average ideas to average people then you are unlikely to achieve the success you crave, writes Howard Robinson, PR and Communications manager for Ingenious Britain.

He espouses the notion that promoting ideas, products or services to the broad, average middle of society will see your offering lost beneath the tidal wave of marketing information, opportunities and choices most of which none of these people want and will ignore. It’s hard to argue with him.

Most tellingly, though, Godin says producing something merely very good may no longer be enough. The challenge for all of us is to produce something remarkable, not only in its quality but also in its literal meaning, worthy of remark. He likens it to driving past a cow on a roadside. Everyone, he says, will pay little attention to the cow because we all know what a cow looks like But if the cow was purple - now that would be worthy of remark. The key is to make our work stand out and to identify groups of people, however niche, who will share a passion for what we are saying, selling or writing, enough to not only try it for themselves but also to spread the word to those they know.

For small businesses, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. It is difficult to be remarkable in an environment that encourages you to play it safe, especially if your business is competing with larger, better known businesses with bigger budgets, greater resources and better reach.

Taking Godin’s thoughts on board, though, we are convinced that the ingenious nature of Britain’s SMEs makes this a real possibility. It must be about identifying and finding communities of people who may be interested in enough in what we are doing. Our products and services must be sufficiently mainstream that they are not too much of a challenge for people to consider, but stand-out enough to be worthy of remark. More importantly, Godin asserts, once you have found your community, don’t bother targeting those who aren’t going to be advocates. Then I just have to hope that my community feels passionate enough to become ambassadors for what you are offering. Here, small businesses can score. They can create the quirky more easily, deploy targeted marketing more cost effectively than ever, focus relentlessly on customer service and engagement and, by virtue of their independence, be more fleet of foot in their decision making to anticipate or respond to changing market demand. In so doing we must show our customer bases that there is something in it for them; not necessarily financially, but emotionally such that they will want to spread the word about your amazing cup cakes, great web designs or groundbreaking new apps.

Godin’s right. For a small business that isn’t yet well known, chasing the mainstream may be a fool’s game. Better to build your own communities so that your offering can be discovered and enjoyed and the word spread organically or, at best, virally.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ingenious Britain .