I doubt that too many people would agree with the argument that marketing is by far the sternest challenge facing small businesses in Guyana today. You only have to take a cursory look at the scores of small businesses – both established commercial enterprises and small vendors – offering the identical products for sale to determine that in some particular areas of the retail trade, particularly clothing, linens and kitchen and household items – we are faced with a situation in which large volumes of commodities are chasing too few customers.
The challenge is much greater for those small retail businesses that offer imported goods – assorted plastic utensils, home decorations etc. – for sale. Small entrepreneurs in the retail trade have no control over these imports and must therefore select their stock from what the importers and distributors have to offer. You would think that if they had a choice most of them would opt for different choices in brands, for example and certainly in the types of goods that they offer for sale.
Part of the reason why both pavement and itinerant vending has survived and grown in the city has to do with the fact that the vendors have established relationships with the high street merchants who recognize that the streets and pavements offer a better vantage point for the ‘marketing’ of goods. If, for example, you were to visit many of the Regent street stores you will not fail to notice that their price structures are designed to attract itinerant and pavement vendors. Clothing, particularly, sometimes provides the vendors with the opportunity to secure markups of as much as fifteen per cent on their wholesale purchase prices.
What has evolved in the relationship between the high street wholesalers and the vendors is a mutually advantageous arrangement that allows both to benefit from marketing advantages afforded in the final analysis from selling on the streets. The wholesalers are able to sell larger volumes of their considerable stocks to the vendors and, in turn, the vendors are able to take their goods directly onto the streets. The streets are filled with vendors and the environment is far from hospitable but there are good days, anyway.
One of the interesting ironies of the vending trade has to do with the fact that while we have witnessed some measure of response to the clamour among vendors for arcades from which to trade, many of them who now own stalls in the Water street Arcade still conduct at least a part of their business on the streets. If you visit the Water street Arcade on any trading day you are likely to find several stalls shut tight and their owners hustling on the streets. What they clearly understand is that the volume of walk-by customers far exceeds the number of people who venture into the Arcade. The streets and pavements remain a better marketing vantage point.
Some types of small businesses, however, do not lend themselves to vending from the streets and are therefore confronted by greater, more costly marketing challenges. Two considerations inevitably arise in the pursuit of small business marketing; the first, of course, is money. Advertising of any type is costly and all too frequently micro and small businesses tend to budget minimally if at all for marketing.
The second consideration is marketing strategy. Many small business owners lack any serious marketing know-how and often employ costly strategies that bring them no real benefit.
For many small businesses marketing is no more than a passive pursuit that depends almost exclusively on waiting for customers to come; and even when they do there is no plan for customer retention. Then there is the word of mouth approach which means of course that you have control over the number of customers, who they are or the extent of their longer term demand for whatever product or service you offer. These approaches are particularly common in small, home-run poultry and food businesses.
While some small businesses invest modest sums in media – electronic and print advertising – there is often no mechanism for monitoring returns from media advertisements. Media advertising is a costly investment and small businesses that make such investments ought surely to have a plan which includes some mechanism for measuring returns on media advertisements.
A sizeable number of small businesses often tend to take marketing initiatives in the absence of any real plan. If you examine the print media, for example, you are likely to discover a number of what are best described as ‘one-off’ ads which are placed at random in circumstances where business may be a little slow. I call these hit or miss ads which are simply placed in the hope the consumers may see them and respond.
I believe that small businesses are more likely to succeed if they aim at specific target markets. Once you aim at the whole world your marketing becomes non-specific, non-directional and, invariably, more costly, since the whole thrust of your advertising assumes that your potential clientele is much larger than it is. A modest poultry rearing or bakery, for example, need hardly cast their marketing net beyond a few specific outlets and sometimes really no further than the immediate community in which they operate. In many cases a handful of leaflets and/or an appropriate and prominent sign advertising the particular commodity or service is less costly and more effective than resort to the wider mass media.
Many small businesses lack the capacity to test or measure the results of their promotional material. The problem here is that promotional material can be good or bad and in the absence of the tools with which to measure its effectiveness you are unable to fix it.
A critical failing of small businesses in Guyana is the lack of a customer retention plan. Customers support one business enterprise or another for a variety of reasons and unless the small business understands the reasons why customers support some businesses as against others it is very likely that their own businesses will diminish.
The most valuable asset that any small business can have is a customer data base. This, in the cases of micro and small businesses might be no more than a small notebook with names and telephone numbers. Customer data bases can help proprietors to track purchasing trends and allow them to target directly those customers whose patronage may have diminished.
These are basic marketing tips which small and micro businesses are likely to find useful in seeking to market their goods and services. Of course, effective marketing is likely to work best in circumstances where it is supported by high quality product and efficient service. The fact is, however, that businesses, both large and small, sell themselves.
