The ‘Small’ getting a Big Chance

Small really isn’t a bad-connotative descriptor when it comes to business anymore (I’m staying off personal and human-related issues on this one).

The age and time has come when a small business can have the same or larger impact on the bigger picture as large corporations. It is not that we have become small-minded, or that a hippie-vibe is setting in where there a thorough rejection to larger companies; I think it can be much more easily explained through the ‘communication era’ phenomena we’re living in.

Never before humans experienced such an easy and rapid transmission of information. The telephone, the fax machines, and finally the internet have allowed all of us to be in touch with each other (even if we’re thousands of miles apart), and share information in the sharpness of a second.

If we rewind ourselves a couple of decades in time we would find a very different world. One in which communication messages were heavily and mainly distributed by large media corporations (even in media there were less viable options). These media corporations offered their airspace firstly to big-huge businesses from all around the world. Since small-er business couldn’t really afford to pay for their message to get through, the message-world was dominated by the mammoths. As a result of this the BIG brands enjoyed the fastest and highest-impact positioning within consumers.

Returning to our day and time, the panorama is completely different. The media options have grown (mainly due to the internet and democratization of content), the cost has decreases significantly, and more smaller businesses are interested in communicating with their consumers. You see? A big change for small businesses.

Now the real key behind this functional change is whether small business owners and managers are up to the task of recognizing the new tools and putting them into good use.