Small Is Beautiful

Nancy and I were chatting about the issue of company size in the home improvement services sector. Many of these companies are small, but bigger than small would suggest. They're bringing in $1 million, $5 million, $10 million a year. They spend, collectively, a hefty chunk on marketing.

I thought about it a bit later in connection with the reputation issue. The big difference with a small company is that you have the means to be proactive and nimbly address process issues or problems with isolated individual incidents of customer dissatisfaction.

It seems like it's easier for big companies to do PR because they have whole departments for that. But between consumers' highly tuned BS-meters and antipathy built into the approach many members of the media take to business journalism, problems can spiral out of control. A few folks in the media can even do a pretty good job of orchestrating (at least a short-term) "takedown."

Imagine if your job was with PR with this grocery chain, for example. They were fined for a mouse problem at their warehouse. Those of us who know the stores and regularly drive by the warehouse might say "ewww" and that's the end of it. But it doesn't help that the person deciding which photo to show next to this story in the print edition of The Toronto Star decided to put up a shot of a truck with the company tagline - "We're fresh obsessed" - plastered across it. (Can you say "sarcasm"?) If you were in the PR department for that company you'd probably be wondering who (internally or externally) was waiting in the weeds to make you go eeeek! next week.

An advantage of small is that your advocates will be vociferous and will spread the positive word about you. But it takes effort. No PR department is going to put out your brush fires.

Labels: online reputation

Posted by Andrew Goodman
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