Books: Competitive SME: Building Competitive Advantage through Marketing Excellence for SMEs

David Hood

After many years of examining ‘what is wrong with businesses and why they are not really aligned with the market to make the most money’ which culminated in The Marketing Manifesto, I was encouraged to examine and address what needed to change specifically for the SME to become the competitive and agile modern business.

Small to medium sized businesses have distinct problems and opportunities, different from the larger ‘corporates’. Yet this difference is rarely appreciated when it comes to advice and ‘business gurus’ are still telling SMEs to ‘follow this path, just as big company x did and if you do, you will be similarly successful’. Time and again, the business development ‘chattering classes’ try to foist big-company ‘solutions’ on to SMEs; not recognising that the SME lives in a wholly different world where it does not have the resources, skill sets, money and power to affect those huge ‘re-engineering’ changes. Indeed, change made by large companies may even kill a small business if they try to emulate it.

It is surprising to many that the futureSME research unearthed the top 10 major issues for SMEs and found them to be directly related to marketing; many will not have seen this coming. But in our hearts, we know that as an SME our abilities to be competitive, engage with the market, position ourselves so that we become truly critical to the customer, are all issues that SMEs have considered to be mainly the domain of only the large corporates. This is, thankfully, not so. Indeed therein lies a huge opportunity.

Therefore, as the main problems and lack of realising opportunities lies with marketing, I have written ‘Building Competitive Advantage through Marketing Excellence for SMEs’ – to help SMEs walk their own path to creating superior competitive advantage – real advantage and indeed even do BETTER than the large companies; larger companies tend to be less nimble than SMEs ….. so the opportunity is clear and within their grasp. If they choose to grasp it!

(FOREWORD written by Jim Mather, past Minister for Enterprise in the Scottish Government)

1. Introduction
2. The Reality: Addressing Stress for the SME Owner, Manager
and Executive
3. Competitiveness and the SME: we want it; how do we get it?
4. Increasing Your Confidence: Leveraging what you have
5. Maximising SME Management: Making Better Decisions, Investments and Predictions
6. Your Unique Selling Proposition: Agility, the ‘Adaptive Organisation’, Profit and Revenue Improvement
7. Real Market Presence: Marketing on a Budget, Branding, Positioning and the SME
8. What do we really need to do? Timing Issues, Knowledge and Investment
9. Grasping the Opportunity – ONE, (MARKETING) : ‘Changing the Currency’
10. Grasping the Opportunity – TWO, (SALES) : ’Changing to managing the income (revenue) pipeline
11. Quick Wins (rather than Quick Fixes): What to Change, What to Change to, and How to Change
12. Optimising your Proposition and Making More Money