Introduction (to the eBook)

Today marks my 29^th year working as a marketing professional. I moved to New York on Sunday, June 1, 1980 and started work at NW Ayer the next day, June 2. It has been a fun 29 years, I’m happy to report. It has also been a very educational 29 years.

In truth, I have been a student of marketing and advertising a bit longer, having fallen in love with the advertising goddess in 1976 as a junior in the Grady College of Journalism/Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Three years later I was a graduate assistant in UGA's MBA program and became a small business consultant with UGA’s Small Business Development Center, at the time the largest small business development center in the country. I mention this because I have felt for many years that smaller businesses continue to struggle as they try to implement marketing strategies and tactics that were more appropriate for larger businesses. Many of those strategies and tactics just don’t work for small businesses.

Small businesses (those with less than 100 employees) have distinct advantages over many large businesses. Critically important is their ability to develop and manage their brand reputation much more easily than larger businesses can. But no one ever tells this to small businesses. Instead, almost every consultant or agency tells them that they must play by the rules that large, multi-national businesses pioneered and follow to this day. Not only is this inaccurate, but it is a major time and money waster for the small business. There are many strategies and tactics that small businesses can and should use to compete with their larger competitors that their larger competitors would have trouble emulating. And that is what a distinctive marketing strategy should be: a direction that not all can follow.

Small businesses have distinct advantages over many large businesses.

Read on, especially if you own a small business. This book will explore ideas that made large businesses successful, but also other strategies and tactics that larger businesses cannot implement because, frankly, they have just gotten too big to do certain things.

And that is good news for small businesses everywhere.

Thanks for reading. And, please comment on ideas that move you.

More to come.

bpm

June 2, 2009