Fast Food for Small Business Marketers

Walk into the local AT&T® store and you might have to poke around a while to know that they sell Apple’s venerable iPhone®. The Flash promo on the AT&T wireless store’s home page features smartphones from BlackBerry® and Samsung® with not an Apple model to be found. All of this despite the fact that Apple’s phone is hugely popular, with over 4 million units sold. Apple boasts the fastest growing market share of phones sold in the world, even though it’s not yet offered in many countries.
Wouldn’t your restaurant’s buffet table offer Tofu, if fully one third of your diners were vegetarian? Why push beef to your customers who suddenly want pork? As a customer, I don’t care about 200 kinds of carrot salad and cole slaw when the prime rib is tough or fatty.
If you believe that it’s important to match your products and services in accordance with customer preferences (and/or even anticipate those preferences), you may be happy to know that marketers for small companies actually have an advantage here.
With huge chain of command to convince, no stockholders to placate and no endless successions of meetings to endure, marketers inside small companies should be able to tweak menu offerings at a moment’s notice. And these days, any marketing advantage is nothing to sneeze at.