In the last few years, “brand awareness” became one of the most popular buzzwords in the digital marketing world. Every week, I receive marketing emails from digital consulting agencies telling me how they can help me “build brand awareness” or “increase brand awareness”. That sounds great on paper, and I think brand awareness can be a positive thing. However, what I’m seeing is that the necessity of building brand awareness has become overblown, especially for small niche businesses on a limited marketing budget. I wish I had time to ask these marketing agencies what they mean exactly by “increasing brand awareness”, and I suspect some of them are preying on businesses with limited knowledge of marketing strategy.
Continue readingMonth: December 2021
In the last article, we looked at how small businesses can take advantage of commercial, technical, and marketing economies of scale. But there are two more types of economies of scale that I’d like to talk about: network and managerial. Let’s see what small businesses can do to exploit these.
Continue readingAs you probably already know, economies of scale are cost reductions that occur when companies increase production. When you open an economics textbook and you read about it, you might find examples about company XYZ ordering 1 million units from their supplier instead of 100,000. I remember being a college student and learning about these economics concepts; it did not feel much different than learning about trigonometry in middle school: “When am I going to use this outside the classroom?” was my immediate thought.
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