Wake the agency! Saddle up the consultants! Loose the hounds! Small Business Season is practically here, and there is much to do before we start stalking our quarry through the underbrush of the economy. And when they break into a clearing, our aim must be true for we have only 31 days to shout at them.
Do I sound a little bit cynical about “Small Business Month?” Good. Do I sound like I feel a bit guilty? Give me time. Back in 1979, our friends at Business Development Bank of Canada created a week in the otherwise dull middle of October for Canadians to reflect upon and appreciate the value of small businesses. A great thing for the engine of the economy and the primary creator of new jobs. (American small businesses are clubbed in May.)
Then they hit up corporate Canada for a bit of sponsorship money to fund seminars and research. Most of us ignored them. That is, until about 2001, when we collectively “discovered” the small business market and converged on them like white paint on a rental car. And from that day to this we’ve been making a mess of Small Business Week.
The first thing we did was make it into Small Business Month (it’s a much easier print buy that way). The we fiddled with the exact meaning of “month”. This year, we can expect to hear the first horn in mid-September, and I think the last beagle will be put away in the middle of November. So it’s really Small Business Two Months these days.
And like the fox or the grouse, it’s gotta suck to be the Flavour of the Month (or two). Ignored for the most part through the year, small business owners will wake soon to find their in-boxes festooned with special offers, their recycle bins overflowing with junk mail and their phones ringing incessantly with time-limited offerings of the very finest kind.
Big company marketers across the land put up their feet and congratulate themselves on making their smaller brethren feel more popular than the sushi table at the marketing awards dinner. Meanwhile entrepreneurs everywhere are feeling shouted at, exploited and slightly grubby from all the attention.
I think it’s time we ceded the fourth quarter back to Hallowee’n and budget meetings. Let the BDC have its week back to advocate for small businesses instead of setting them up for a corporate ambush.
If this is truly a key segment for your products, why not spread the joy all year? If you really exist to respect and serve small businesses, why shout at them one month and force them into a consumer call queue the next? And why, pray tell, would you gum up their year-end with new offers and products instead of launching them when small businesses (especially retailers) are ready to listen, say in January.
Friends, it’s too late to stop the carnage this year so let us resolve in 2013 to abolish this cruel hunt. Let us launch products and services and offers all year long. Let’s invest not in self-serving twaddle but in processes and programs that truly serve and support this segment. Let us stop punishing small businesses for being smaller than big and bigger than a teenager.
Now where the heck did I leave my riding boots?
Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com
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