You don't know what you don't know

Abstract

SME’s are often launched by individuals that may not have intended to run a business. The greater proportions of those SME’s were launched in order to secure revenue whilst controlling personal destiny. Consequently, marketing knowledge under these circumstances is often rudimentary or worse non-existent. It becomes distilled to a single purpose of advertising - circumventing other valuable associated marketing disciplines. As a result, expensive errors occur where there is a lack of alignment with pricing, product availability, customer service, etc. Primarily, digital communications are popularly presented as the panacea; the assumption of a strategy exists only secondary to this. Effective communications are organised around a requirement to deliver a message to an audience, not being able to position and target the most appropriate audience often results in expensive mistakes because of the lack of marketing knowhow. As such, this approach to marketing communications is a contributory factor to the level of business failures in the UK (Watkins 2014).