"Shop Local" is a marketing campaign.
It's not a business model.
Small Business Saturday – the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and the day after Black Friday – is a wonderful concept and a terrific marketing idea. My hat is off to whoever first came up with the idea. (If you’re from Neptune, you may not know that Small Business Saturday is an annual event, designed to encourage consumers to shop locally and support the small businesses across their local communities.) Well, I own a small business, so naturally I’m in favor of anything that will bring more revenues to my business, but there’s something about this concept that seems fundamentally wrong to me.
I’m a firm believer in free-market economics, and I don’t believe that any business should be considered “too big to fail”. But the flip side is also true, I believe. No business should be considered too small to fail either. And just as GM should have taken their licks for producing products that no one wanted and selling them for prices that no one could justify, I believe that small businesses are also answerable to the free market for their success or their failure.
Small Business Saturday is an outstanding marketing campaign and one that I fully embrace. But if your small business is to succeed over the long term, you must compete favorably in the free market, or go out of business. You must find a competitive edge that you can market 365 days a year, because most American consumers are looking for the best value for their money. If you can’t compete on price, then maybe you offer better service. Whatever it is that makes your offering a better value is the thing that will keep you afloat. And if you can’t provide the better value, no one owes you a living.
I know that my web design firm cannot compete on price with GoDaddy and the other big-box website companies. But my customers are those who value quality, customer service and actual marketing results, and are willing to pay a higher price in order to get the things that matter most to their businesses. That’s our competitive edge. What’s yours?
