Shops, high streets and trade shows

Walk high streets and shopping centres – get a feel for what’s going on. Go to trade shows and when you’ve researched where’s best and worked out how to operate there, show at one. As an exhibitor said recently, ‘Big distributors go to these events in a buying mood, or at least in a looking mood.’ As a small business your most important assets are nimble-footedness, a curiosity of spirit and an irrepressible desire to learn. Feed that desire by keeping close to your market.

Drink inspiration

Stay inspired by reading, surfing the web, talking, thinking, trying new ideas. Clare Blampied, MD of Saclà (the top-of-the-range Italian sauce maker that has just celebrated 20 years in the UK), finds her inspiration as a 24/7/365 ambassador for the brand. Someone as enthusiastic and responsive to new ideas is wasted in an office and needs to spend their life listening, laughing and spreading the good news about their brand. She’s good at all three. And she isn’t running a small business – it turns over about £30 million – but she behaves as though it is. Which is what all good businesses do: think big and act small. Lesson: All brilliant marketers need to stick to detail and never stop pitching their stories about their business. It’s inspiring to hear and creates an inspiration loop.

Do you really know your real customers?

I was quite polite about research earlier. But, like MBAs and HR, old-fashioned research has become too much about process and that ghastly expression ‘checking for negatives’. Some leaders of companies avoid research because they think they know better, some because it’s so expensive, but there’s a better reason. Research is a lens through which we see the past, what people think top-of-mind or what they think we want to hear. Here’s what business start-up and head of HotSquash (www.hotsquash.com) Darren Sydnick said: ‘It’s crucial to plan but I planned far too much. Get out there with your product, get feedback and test your segmentation. F*** the research companies who offer focus groups!! Just speak to people.’ (Darren is not given to bad language. So he must have really meant it.)

Look for the problems – the niggle points

Things that slightly irritate you are corrosive in the end. As Richard Brown, managing partner of Cognosis, the management consultancy, put it, ‘It’s the gap in a market where creativity is’, and that gap is often the irritation gap. Examples: unusually nice beer glasses like Peroni’s do ‘brand wonders’ and make up for those ordinary glasses that make going out feel like going down. Example: not knowing when the next bus is coming now solved by ‘arrival-time due boards’ – puts buses back on the map. Example: The Times discount scheme whereby grumpy ‘as an “austerity measure” I’ll stop taking The Times at £400 or so a year’ is transformed into my being a lifetime customer (for the time being) at £250 or so instead.

It’s the little things

Ever since the Betty Crocker cake-mix brand was transformed by a bit of interactive advice – ‘just add an egg’ (previously, with the egg included, no one wanted to buy it) – it’s been clear that the little things can swing the votes. Politics enlightens us. One headline can do it.

So what are your little things? This book is about the big thing of marketing. So I asked Simon Woodhead, the founder of one of Britain’s newest vineyards, Stopham, ‘How much of your time has been spent on marketing as opposed to production and other stuff?’ His reply chilled me and thrilled me too:

‘Not much … we’ve focused on getting the best-quality grapes and wine. The distribution and customers have resulted from this quality. We’ve also been lucky with contacts. And there’s a buzz around English wine right now.’

Thrillingly self-confident in one of the most competitive markets I know, and thrillingly right in asserting the key need to get the product right, it’s also chilling because he highlights the big issue for new businesses – pressure of time and focus.

Lesson: No one can beat a pathway to your door if they don’t know you are there with a great product. (But Jane MacQuitty of The Times calls the Pinot Gris ‘a triumph’, so well done.)

Never-ending conversations

Get around you as many people as you can who make you laugh, think and think again. You need a mentor if you’re a new business. You need a bouncing board and someone you can moan to. And it’s easier in retail or the restaurant business because that’s what your customers do the whole time. Good local restaurants build unspoken partnerships with loyal customers – very much a zeitgeist relationship in marketing.

What I love is when you can go off-menu and get what you want without a word – ‘Hi Paula, can Peter knock me up a plain omelette that’s nice and runny?’ There’s a restaurant like that round the corner in Brighton called Blenio’s, with a Roux Brothers-trained chef, that has the best front-of-house in Britain. If you can balance service and product like this you’ll win.

How tough can it get?

However tough it gets, the people best placed to deal with it are going to be small, nimble and flexible. They are going to be businesses that listen to their customers. Their resilience and good humour are vital. No one wants to buy from a miserable, surly malcontent. The next time a taxi driver says ‘It’s a recession, mate, it’s over and I blame them Poles,’ say ‘I feel sick. Stop the cab at once and let me out.’

One of the toughest sectors is the charity world, where you are dependent on altruism and social need to survive. Petit Miracle trains homeless and unemployed people (many of them women) to do interior design and learn the skills to enable them to give a flat the individuality and style of its occupant. Everyone deserves the chance to learn something aspirational, useful and life-enhancing. Tough as things will always be for the Petit Miracles of this world, having a vision and a reason for carrying on pitching your good idea is what makes charities specifically, and small businesses in general, so rewarding. Keep the faith and keep trying to show that your work can transform lives.

Marketing by showing what you can do

We keep on reading about the need for unexpected moments of generosity or sampling of products. If you are trying to sell musical instruments or high-ticket items such as electric organs, the smart people lend them to a prospective purchaser to try and see if they like them. (Hopefully they’ll fall so hopelessly in love they won’t want to be parted from them.) Sample your wares. Do speculative work so potential customers see what you can do. A designer I know called Jess Wood, who set up and runs A Little Zest, did this. ‘Have a look at these’ she said and hopefully something good will happen as the person to whom they were presented for free was knocked out by the gesture.

First impressions are critical

We are in the perception business in marketing. We add value by making people perceive something that’s ordinary as being extraordinary. In that respect we are economic magicians. Nowhere is that more important than in that first moment people come across you in an advertisement, or on the web, or in your shop. Nicole Urbanski opened a boutique in Brighton in October 2011. First impressions? Well, like Helena Rubinstein, I could smell success. It was minimalist and confident. My wife loves it. What was interesting is Nicole has managed to make a clothes shop feel like a very upmarket delicatessen.

The lesson is to take advantage of that first moment and give people a canapé of your offering – a taste that makes them want more. At that first-impression moment all businesses are in the same place, regardless of their size.

Love your customers

Margaret Heffernan, in her book Women on Top, explains one of the reasons why in the USA female entrepreneurs are twice as likely as their male counterparts to succeed. They have an unquestioning, almost unreasonable love of their customers. And customers need it. They need to be listened to, stroked and, yes, challenged. A PR company in Reading with a long list of clients, called C8, does that but their acid test is keeping in constant touch with them. Their MD is a never-still client-stroker, 24/7 asking: Are you OK, is there anything you need?

Successful marketing on a small scale

Being small means you can focus. It means you can become a real expert. Stories such as those listed below are not so uncommon. What these young entrepreneurs are discovering is if you have a good idea don’t just try it; go for it. But also market it well to your target audience. Name and presentation count:

1. Trevillion Images is in the business of finding great and original images for book covers. They are innovative, international and specialist.
2. Jibbitz loved Crocs (those brightly coloured casual shoes) so they focused on creating decorations for Crocs – charms and that sort of thing. So successful were they that Crocs bought them.
3. ‘Debbie & Andrew’s’ sausages from Harrogate are the best sausages I’ve tasted. Originally the brand was called ‘Manor Born’, but the redesign of the brand (giving eponymous craft credentials) won them a Design Council award and hugely increased sales before being acquired.
4. Linda Owen-Lloyd runs ‘Children’s Book Illustrations’ because, she says, ‘that’s what we know best’. (Isn’t that great?)
5. The world of youthful developers of apps for smartphones, doing it for fun and earning perhaps 75p an app sold, are finding to their surprise that their pocket money has in consequence leapt to £50,000.