small-medium business

Jeff Jarvis discusses the notion of advertising as failure:

"The ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there. It’s only in the case of failing at that idea that one needs to advertise."

Go check out his post because he expands significantly on this idea in three video segments.

I see the logic, at least in cases with these characteristics:

• A given company and its given product have existed long enough to develop any reputation, good or bad.

Greg Sterling reminds us why we all chase advertising dollars from locally focused, small and medium businesses:

"We're in a recession; everything is down including local. And local is harder than other segments because of some of the factors mentioned above. SMBs are hard to sell to and they don’t spend lots online. But there are millions of SMBs online in various forms today. As I've argued before, from consumer behavior perspective, local/offline is a much, much bigger deal than anything else going on online. It's just often hard for people to see it."