One of the strategic marks of the digital industry might happen with tectonic movements to narrow the gaps between brands and small businesses, big brands and companies. This is not going to happen all at once and not in all categories, but it is already budding in areas such as fashion, food, financial services and consulting.
Why is it feasible to expect an erosion in the market share of large brands in the future?
- Small Business-Friendly Promotion Platforms – Google and Facebook consider the SMB segment as their main growth engine for the next few years, so they invest resources and creativity to get these businesses to use their promotion platforms. These platforms enable every business, with any budget, to create a presence and generate leads for sales.
- All marketing activity is leaning towards focusing on micro segments, where big brands do not enjoy any significant advantage. In addition, micro-budget marketing is more efficient than huge, expensive campaigns.
- Sales platforms like Amazon do not discriminate between large and small in terms of presence and market efficiency. Amazon’s promotion and presence mechanisms are available to any business owner or brand, enabling them to locate their target audience and create a relevant proposition for it.
- The Z and Y generation – digital natives – is not characterized by high brand loyalty
- Digital marketing is based on relations with potential consumers. Marketing managers of some major brands have yet to internalize the change in the nature of the marketing dialog.
- Branding and positioning, which in the past were based on massive brand marketing activity, are now concentrating on creating consumers’ involvement and turning them into brand promoters. The main term in branding and positioning is Emotional Engagement.
When it comes to Emotional Engagement, a small brand that works against a micro segment has often the advantage of understanding customers, producing value, retaining customers by developing a rewarding digital relationship, and creating a true dialog that reaches a significant level of attention.
- Small businesses have often been established or run by digital natives who are more hands-on in digital marketing than their large competing companies. These young people also quickly adopt new technologies and platforms. For example: Visual search, voice services, integration of technologies such as virtual reality and blockchain / crypto based solutions in marketing programs, and of course collaborations with relevant Influencers in their category.
- Automation in the development of platforms and products. Today you no longer need huge budgets to set up and launch applications, sites, chatbots, and other digital features.
What do small brands need in order to accelerate market erosion?
Implementing a Micro-segmentation strategy based on – micro-publishers /micro budget.
- The assimilation of differentiation technologies are as yet to be found in the Blue Ocean regions – visual search, voice search, blockchain, etc. Big brands will move in these directions much more slowly.
- Collaborations with relevant influential teams.
- Specialization in launching and selling products and services on Amazon
- Collaborations with corresponding small businesses. It is also possible to establish a local network of small businesses that support each other in promoting and expanding supply (packages).
- Investment in communities of committed consumers – preferably focus on the most important segment – the Passionates of the category. They will make the difference between branding activity – positioning of small and large brands.