Size, Quality, and Perception

A true capitalist will tell you the definition of business is someone out there waiting to steal your customers. If you’re a big company, it may be the little guy you go “feh” to who seems content picking up scraps from your table but really has a far bigger appetite. And if you’re the small guy, you may be thinking your lunch doesn’t have appeal to the biggies until the day you wake up starving to death.

A good '10s marketer learns to keep looking over his shoulder for that special competitor who wants to eat his meal while a fantastic marketer is constantly seeking ways to do things better and better and better, so the customer’s eventual choice is his brand over the monster’s.

Regardless of whether a company is gigantic or puny, it pays to act small while continuing to think in the biggest possible way. That may sound obvious, but people forget that image matters most. When someone says to us, “I’m not big enough for that,” we think Go away, fool.

Who’s to say who’s ready for what?

Consumers want to feel the company they buy from has their, and only their, absolute best interests at heart; so for them that means being treated respectfully as sole beings and not units in some amorphous lump.

In the past, before we all played on today's lovely equal playing field, mass production was appealing to consumers because they knew the product they bought was identical to all others from the factory. A brand name represented consistency and predictable quality assurance. It was nice.

Some quality was known to be “better” than others, and better remained a differentiator among brands for a while. But better came to be taken for granted and eventually became an issue only when something went wrong.

Today, we live in post-quality America. Consumers don't choose that way any more; they assume (and I do too) that based on the fact the brand got as far as it did that it and competing products will perform flawlessly; they expect swift action if somehow a manufacturer or a distributor screws up.

Mass production has lost its competitive edge and being big for being big’s sake got tossed away. This is a good time to be small, act big, and question the manner in which everything was done before you. Because in the end, you're going to try something different anyway.

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Twitter @laermer