The most prevalent areas in which the small businesses have problems
are Sales/Marketing (40.2 per cent),
Human Resource Management (15.3 per
cent), and General Management (14.3 per
cent). Specifically, Promotion, Market Research, and Training are the most frequently encountered problems, all of which are knowledge or skill related, reflecting the general shortage of expertise in small business sector.

It is not that these smaller businesses are not doing any marketing – they would not be in business if they were not – but that the effort in marketing lacks professional input and expertise. And, when businesses turn to the published literature for help, they find that writing on marketing focuses on larger organisations. Managing marketing activity is a different beast within a department of 10 people compared to the owner/manager developing their own marketing.

Regardless of the view among smaller businesses that marketing is a weakness many smaller businesses are very good at marketing. SMEs may even be more responsive to the market and far more flexible than their larger competitors. But these businesses still look enviously at the big consumer brands and wonder how they too can achieve such awareness and provenance. Marketing in smaller businesses tends to concentrate on sales and promotional tactics rather than on the big strategic issues.

And herein lies the problem. Despite the perception, that such wide awareness requires lots of Marketing expenditure, it is actually the lack of strategic competence and knowledge amongst SME owners/managers that prohibits effective Marketing and market awareness of the SME offering. Sales and Marketing are often either lumped together wit Sales taking a precedent over Marketing. As Paul Fifield writes:

Remember:
Sales is about ensuring the customer buys what the company makes. Marketing is about ensuring that the company makes what the customer wants to buy.

Both areas require a different professional skill set and mindset. Companies, regardless of size, should not be lead by either mindset or preference. They should be market-led, not inside-driven. But that is another aspect of the problem altogether.

There are however, fundamentals that can make all the difference. These are Consensio’s SME brand observations based on market experience and marketing literature:

• cultivate brand emotions
• build corporate and product/service brands and understand how to use them
• integrate marketing and brand development
• develop matching brand affiliations
• create a consistent brand logic
• link the brand to the people and personalise it
• Document your logic and keep experimenting with the right media mix

Ten Years later, and without quantifying the number of businesses in WA, I am assuming the same Marketing issues still apply to our SME’s.

She did not make an effort to hide the label (and why would she, since the bottle was recognisable anyway). Her image, nipping from the bottle was shown on the large screens and recorded. Later on she asked for somebody to ‘give me the Coke, err I mean, some of that unnamed beverage‘. Suddenly she was conscious that she gave the soft drink giant a huge free wrap. I am hoping she does not have a deal with Pepsi. Her circle of influence in Australia is big and the pulling power she possesses would certainly be of interest to any other brand.

Typically, ‘personalising the brand’ is described in Brand literature as ‘..powerful role models within an organisation, such as a media savvy CEO’s like Richard Branson or Anita Roddick‘. Aaker and Joachimsthaler (2002,79) talk about the concept of personalising as litmus test of organisations. Often, if a company does not have a role model, it makes one up that embodies the values and vision the organisation likes to stand for and asks the question: What would (our role model) do? Would he/she like it?

Pink, like so many artists has to be her own true north on this, as she embodies her own organisation and is her own CEO. Very rarely are brands so entwined with emotions than in the music and film industries. I wonder what litmus test Pink uses to determine her brand alliances?

“Intangible assets are the the reason marketers get out of bed in the morning”.

According to Olding, assets that make up brands, reputation and customer value are only slowly coming to the attention of other senior executives particularly in Australia.

Quantifying brand performance has senior marketers and finance executives fighting to grasp each other’s language and context.

“Quite simply, successful brands require effective marketing and financial management”

Major contributing factors to the communication gap are:

• A culture of departmental silos
• mistrust in the marketer’s measurement skills
• underestimation of the importance of brand from the senior management
• limited and fragmented relationships between departments

Olding goes on to cite two Australian business case studies illustrating her point that only a joint collaboration and coordination between Marketing and Finance achieves deeper brand equity.

She goes on to quote Prof. Don Schultz, who is summarizing the standard of Australian brand management as too little up-front investment in resource allocation and too much time spent on measuring past performance.

This is a very poignant article which is very appropriate to all firm sizes and industries across Australia. How often does your CFO/Accountant partner with the Managing Director, and the CMO/Marketing Manager/Coordinator in your business to discuss the next year in a brand panel?