Last Tuesday I argued the emphasis on using marketing to raise money undersells marketing. Today I’ll show how marketing can be used for society’s transformation through democratising the economy.
I’ve shown how the biggest change we have witnessed is approaches to marketing that were once inaccessible to all but a few for reasons of expense, are now available to all. These tools have a wider application than it may first appear.
Selling Bread and Courses
You may think online marketing is for information products only. So, you may be an educational charity, video your courses and make them available online. However, if I am a local baker I can’t put my bread online although I can still use the Internet to promote my business. If I can get my customers’ email addresses I could have a simple site with a blog and use it to tell my customers about my bread, share recipes, or ask for feedback about the types of bread they would like to see. I could do a product launch about a new recipe loaf. It would be small-scale for people who can get to my shop but it might work.
A baker could use content marketing and their story. How did they become a baker? They almost certainly have a story to tell. Working out their story and how to tell it may take a while but it is worth it and can be very effective.
These are approaches small businesses might have dreamed of just a few years ago. Today the main constraint is they don’t know what is possible. Once you know what you can do it is a smaller step to find out how to do it.
Collaboration
These changes open up potential for small businesses to work together, build their local economy and link between local economies to build wider networks where cash flows between people and not into offshore accounts.
As new tools have become more accessible, the powerful have turned to new tools to entrench their power. They use the internet to bolster their power and that is at our expense.
Taxes
Small businesses should be happy to pay taxes. It is their contribution to a society that helps them to do business. When powerful corporations opt out by going off-shore they show their true nature. They have no need to market what they are doing because they are not dependent on customers as they derive their income from investments and debt.
Regulation
We are told regulation disadvantages businesses. Actually it levels the playing field by ensuring businesses stay small, it increases the interactions between businesses and this is what builds local economies. Legislation must support the marketplace and not dismantle it. We have the tools to make it work, we need a state that allows it to happen.
We need to ask of the people who claim to support small businesses if they support corporations. Massive financial institutions and companies that receive government contracts are proving to be a brake on the economy. It is not true that private business is good at everything. We need a state that supports genuine small businesses and closes down the back-door deals with big corporations.
Concentration of wealth in the hands of the state is at least subject to democratic control. Support for the so-called private sector is actually support for the establishment, politicians and directors of industry. The same people rotate between state and the giant corporations and do not support the local economy.
The question is how can small business, with charities and other organisations active in the local economy, network to form a coherent opposition to the corporations and their political apologists? I believe that in the last few years we have found the tools we need to take that opposition to a new level, involving people who have perhaps never seen their work as political. How can we make a start?
