Posts Tagged ‘Small Business’

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NBC, NYT and Loyalty

by on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

In the course of an entertaining post about NBC’s current “two hosts, one spot” late-night nightmare, Dean Bairaktaris asks, “Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty? Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?” This is an insightful question, because the expensive and embarrassing contretemps has been presented largely as Jay vs. Conan, Old Guard vs. Young Turk, homespun vs. hip.

via mashable.com

via mashable.com

The potential impact on NBC as a major media channel has largely been ignored, except in posts like Dean’s, as Conan is widely presumed to be able to shift his audience, more or less intact, to Fox or another media outlet. But it’s fair to ask whether the broadcast networks actually have brand equity apart from the shows they carry. Is there an “NBC-ness” to the Tonight Show (or any other NBC program) that would not carry over to another network? That arbiter of absurdity, The Onion, would certainly say no.

The soon-to-be-announced decision by The New York Times to put some or all of its content behind a pay wall also involved a debate over the brand equity of the Times versus that of its content (in this case, the paper’s prominent columnists). An outstanding article in New York Magazine details some columnists’ concerns that in its pursuit of subscription revenue the Times would be sacrificing its position as a leading online news brand, giving up both traffic and influence (as well as premium advertising rates, apparently).

I think the two situations have a lot in common. In both cases, the underlying question was whether the locus of customer loyalty is the channel (NBC and NYT) or its content (shows and columnists). I’m not sure the answer is the same in every case. I don’t think broadcast TV networks are differentiated enough to generate brand loyalty, but I’m not sure that’s equally true of newspapers (I grew up reading the New York Times so I might be biased – or just conditioned).

For small businesses, the lesson is to think about what aspect of your brand your customers are loyal to, and not to assume that all customers are loyal to the same thing or for the same reason. You want the locus of loyalty to be your overall brand so that customers will stay with you as your business changes, whether those changes involve staffing, product assortment, location or even store closings. However, until you have the conversation with your customers, you can’t be sure that they are loyal to your brand or to your personable store manager, convenient location or frequent sales.

As a smaller business, you have the ability to engage with customers directly and provide an overall customer experience that embodies your brand’s unique promises and values. Larger brands often (but not always) provide a product experience that is not as closely connected to the brand. This is an advantage for smaller businesses which, unlike large brands, should never need to market brands and products separately. To leverage the direct connection with customers, treat loyalty as a two-way street. There are many ways to demonstrate your loyalty to customers, but the easiest is to listen to what they have to say.

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New Years Resolutions – And Lies

by on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

What would the first week in January be without a post about New Years resolutions?  Mine aren’t of the “get to the gym” variety. Instead, my plan for 2010 is to use the web – especially Social Media – more effectively.

In part this means learning to avoid what Penelope Trunk calls The 4 Lies About Social Media. (In her post these are more “myths” or “mistakes” than lies. I don’t know why she calls them lies but being provocative is a good way to get noticed. It helps your Google page rank, too. Hence the title of this post, which originally was just “New Years Resolutions” – and another resolution: to get better at writing for search engines.)

In my quest to improve my social media skills this year I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a team of well connected and highly creative colleagues. I want to make it clear that my skills (and deficits) are my own; Zavee, collectively, is poised for the leadership you expect of us. Another way of putting it is, my real New Years resolution is to become as smart as my staff! With that caveat in mind, here are some of my Web-related resolutions for 2010:

  1. Take better advantage of Linkedin. Penelope says that Linkedin is a great scorecard for the size of one’s network but it’s a “lie” to say that it’s useful for building a network. The scorecard aspect is useful (e.g., for employers who want to learn about how connected a job candidate is).  However, Linkedin is not for conversations, so it is not a good way to build a network. I see her point about conversations – it may be the only thing you can’t do on Linkedin. On the other hand, Linkedin provides many opportunities to get found, get noticed and get followed. Unfortunately, I haven’t really figured out how to use Linkedin efficiently and proactively – how best to use features such as starting discussions and asking questions. Fortunately, my marketing people don’t have that problem. So my personal resolution is to follow their guidance so I can understand Linkedin better and use it more effectively.
    2. Stuart Pilbrow via Flickr

    Happy New Year!

  2. Build our brand with Twitter. Penelope says that networks require conversations but it’s a “lie” that Twitter is the place to have them. She says Twitter is better for finding and following people with similar ideas and interests. We do use Twitter to keep up with tweets about Social Media, loyalty marketing and other topics that interest us, and tools such as TweetDeck and HootSuite make it easy to manage different accounts, searches and lists. However, I know that I have a lot to learn about creating a presence on Twitter and achieving the kind of scale that will enable us to use Twitter to leverage the Zavee brand. Fortunately, our community manager has a great deal of experience with Twitter. My New Years resolution is to learn from her how to build a brand with Twitter.
  3. Make Zavee Thinking more relevant. Penelope says that blogs are networking tools, not personal journals, and I certainly agree. I think I’ve been disciplined in how and what we write about on this blog.  I write from the small business perspective, whether I am posting about trends and concepts or about tools and techniques. For 2010, however, I intend to focus a bit more on practical solutions for merchants, including by posting about how merchants can get the most out of Zavee. Even this post, which is superficially about me, is really about how I can better be the “lead blocker” for merchants who are trying to make progress with unfamiliar tools and concepts.
  4. Use our Facebook fan page to help build our member community. Penelope’s fourth “lie” is that social media is no place for business. In fact, businesses are finding new and interesting ways to use social media all the time, and social media channels are constantly developing business-oriented tools and features. One example is Facebook’s fan page. We have one, and we want it to be the destination for our Zavee community. One way to do this is to use Facebook to extend the content we can deliver on the Zavee site. Facebook is great for managing events and user-generated content, both of which are important to us.  We will have more to say over the next few months about our member community and how Facebook fits into our strategy. For now, we’ll just say that our final resolution for 2010 is to build our community as we build our business, which includes being smart about Facebook.

See? Nothing too difficult there! Maybe I have time to hit the gym.

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2010: The Year of Social Shopping

by on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

As we come to the end of a most unusual year I’d like to provide an update on Zavee’s progress, as well as offer some additional thoughts.

Our most important news is that Zavee is almost ready to go live. We are finalizing the launch release of our software and expect to begin processing transactions by mid-January. We began our merchant sales efforts in November and already have signed up scores of local businesses in our South Florida launch market. Our consumer acquisition program will begin in January and ramp up over the next several months.

Shopping with Friends

Shopping, Socially

One of the most gratifying – and, frankly, amazing – things about the process of creating Zavee is the extent to which people who know what they’re talking about are saying the same things we are about Zavee’s core concepts. In short, Zavee is in the right place at the right time.

When we describe Zavee as a “social shopping” platform we recognize that this is a new concept for most consumers and businesses. Social media marketers, however, say that social shopping is poised for growth:

“Social shopping is really still in its infancy,” said Andy Lloyd, CEO at Fluid, an e-commerce technology company. This means retailers and solution providers are still thinking about how people connect with other people around buying decisions in an online environment and how they can facilitate those gatherings. “The challenge is people don’t know what social shopping is or what it does,” Lloyd continued, which is why the adoption rate isn’t very high yet.

Search professionals have been quick to see the advantages of social shopping for merchants, including advantages we discuss with merchants constantly: the ability to connect with customers, enhance credibility and leverage word-of-mouth.

From a consumer perspective, social shopping taps into basic principles of human behavior. Marketers increasingly recognize the potential of social shopping and are aligned with Zavee’s perspective on integrating social networking functionality with search and review capabilities:

In social shopping, you see recommendations and reviews that your friends have shared. You see items that your friends have purchased or brands that your friends have shopped with. This matters a lot when you’re shopping for a digital camera and are stuck deciding between three different models. Of course, the last 10 years’ worth of people’s purchasing histories and written reviews on Amazon may help you narrow your choice – if you can filter out the noise. But those reviewers are entirely anonymous to you, even though they may use a real name and have a rating history with the site.

We believe that 2010 will be the year in which social shopping comes of age. This clearly is good news for Zavee. We believe that our social shopping platform, which also integrates a cash-back rewards program and a mechanism for raising funds for local civic and charitable organizations, offers a compelling value proposition for merchants, consumers and causes. We can’t wait to prove it.

From all of us @Zavee, a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to all!

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A Few (More) Words About Word of Mouth

by on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Recently on Zavee Thinking we posted about how word of mouth (WOM) is simultaneously very powerful yet very fragile. It’s powerful because there is no stronger influence on a purchase decision than the recommendation of a trusted, knowledgeable individual. It’s fragile because so much can intervene to prevent that recommendation from being made and acted on. This post is about how merchants can make WOM less fragile by increasing the chances that a recommendation from the right customer will reach the right shopper at the right time. (Apologies in advance for the length of the post – this is something we think about a lot.)

The obvious place to start is at the point of sale, where the merchant has the most direct ability to influence customer satisfaction. Here we are talking primarily about intensity and latency: how strongly an emotion is felt and how long the feeling lasts. One clear way to increase the intensity and latency of customer satisfaction is to provide an over-the-top, mind-blowing, truly unforgettable experience at the point of sale (can we call it an OTTMBTUE?). That will certainly keep things top of mind! Unfortunately, the OTTMBTUE has a few drawbacks. First, not all categories and not all interactions are equally suited to blowing the customer away. Second, the typical means of providing an OTTMBTUE involves some form of payment to the customer, such as an upgrade or a free item. While merchants often have to make such a payment to an unhappy customer to right a wrong, applying that strategy in the hope of making a happy customer ecstatic can get very expensive – especially when the customer determines that she should be treated that way at every visit.

On the other hand, it is possible for creative merchants to create extremely high levels of customer satisfaction without giving away too much margin. One of my favorite examples is Tesco, the UK grocery chain. Stuck between a premium chain and a discounter, Tesco repositioned itself as a service-oriented brand. From 1995-2004 the company produced a campaign starring Prunella Scales and Jane Horrocks that used the tagline “Every Little Helps” (we would say, “Every Little Bit Helps”) to demonstrate Tesco’s commitment to the customer. If you’ve never seen this spot you’re missing a treat.

Another way to increase the latency, and perhaps the intensity, of customer satisfaction is to communicate with the satisfied customer early and often. Car dealers and some hotels, among others, get this half right: they email surveys to customers almost immediately but rarely follow up. If a customer gets a phone call after submitting a survey, it is more likely that the customer had reported a good experience or a bad one? Of course it’s important that merchants address issues raised by customers – but surveys may not be the best way to keep a delighted customer both happy and talkative. If a merchant can identify a very satisfied customer at the point of sale, a phone call several days later – just to chat, not to sell – can reinforce the feeling of satisfaction that the customer took away from the store. (Having conversations on social media is also a good idea.) The customer feels special because in fact she is being treated special. The merchant can’t treat everyone this way, and it may require an investment to learn which customers should be treated this way, but reinforcing customer satisfaction can increase the length of time the positive emotions remain top of mind and may even add to them.

Latency and intensity are both about time: the longer the customer’s intention to recommend the merchant remains top of mind the greater the likelihood that the customer will encounter someone who will act on the recommendation. Another factor is confidence. In order to act on a recommendation, the potential customer must have confidence in the recommending customer both generally and within the specific domain. If a customer is not someone who inspires confidence generally there is not much the merchant can do about it, but the merchant should know better than to treat that customer as a source of potential WOM.

via iproclaim.com

via iproclaim.com

However, the merchant can help a customer become more knowledgeable about the merchant’s domain and thereby increase the likelihood that a customer’s recommendations will be taken seriously and acted upon. Domains where the inherent level of difficulty is high are natural categories for this, and, indeed, internet legend Gary Vaynerchuck (almost 850,000 followers on Twitter) got his viral start posting how-to videos about wine on YouTube. Imagine a customer who leaves Gary’s store not just having received solicitous attention and paid a fair price for good wine but who has received an education, too. That customer not only is more credible as a recommender in the wine domain but probably has wine (and Gary’s store) top of mind for a longer period of time than otherwise.

The final point at which WOM is fragile also involves time: the person who receives the recommendation must be at or near the point of intention if he is going to act on it. Even if everything else lines up – a delighted customer leaves the store and immediately meets a friend who trusts her judgment generally and her knowledge of the domain specifically – the recommendation will not be acted upon if the friend has no intention of making an imminent purchase in that domain. Is there anything the merchant can do in this situation? It depends. If the friend has no interest in the merchant’s domain there is really no point to the recommendation. If this is not the case, however, the merchant can try to capture the friend’s contact information and leverage the recommendation as a reason to communicate with the friend (if the friend opts in). If the friend is disposed to trust the customer’s recommendation the merchant may be able to convert the friend to a customer the next time the friend is near the point of intention based on the prior, unsuccessful recommendation. Finally, by continually communicating with the satisfied customer, and indeed by repeatedly providing a positive experience, the merchant increases the likelihood that the customer will again encounter the friend (or perhaps a different one) closer to the point of intention.

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Black Friday and Small Business

by on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Is there such a thing as Black Friday for local businesses? I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

The whole notion of Black Friday is that it’s the “official kick-off” of the “holiday shopping season.” The quotes are because shopping doesn’t strike me as an activity like, say, deer hunting, that needs to have a “season” with start and end dates. In fact, both the shopper-as-hunter metaphor, with credit card-wielding consumers stalking elusive bargains between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the notion of a shopping season itself, seem more than a bit contrived.

The “shopping season” traditionally has been when large retail brands make a big fourth quarter investment in both promotional pricing and advertising to communicate those promotions. Car dealers do the same thing, with end-of-model-year clearance sales that combine price cuts with big media buys and creative that focuses on price.  The only difference is that the calendar isn’t as kind to car dealers: there isn’t a natural period for this promotional push. In other words, the “shopping season” concept is simply a marketing strategy for merchants that have enough margin and marketing budget to load their marketing when they believe consumers are closer to the point of intention.

image from http://static.squidoo.com

image from http://static.squidoo.com

In fairness to the big brands, shoppers may indeed get a bit of a thrill standing in a crowded line before dawn waiting to storm a big-box retailer and bag one of its “doorbuster” specials. Generations of women experienced a similar frisson whenever Loehmann’s had a sale. (However, it appears that both consumers and retailers have learned from last year’s Black Friday, where some stores were the scene of too much excitement.)

Another reason for questioning the “shopping season” construct is that so much price competition now takes place “out of season.” If shoppers are hunters, they do a lot of poaching! The internet has effectively obliterated whatever control large retailers exercised over information available to consumers. Between retailer and e-commerce sites, pure social networks and social shopping sites (soon to include Zavee), consumers now can easily locate, learn about and compare products and prices. As they are better able to make rational shopping decisions, consumers don’t necessarily restrict their purchasing to the fourth quarter. Indeed, given the ease and security of online purchasing conventional retailers feel price pressure year round.

So, what do Black Friday and the “holiday shopping season” mean for local businesses? First of all, high marketing spend to drive traffic for products with deeply promotional pricing is an approach with little relevance to most small businesses. This is not a big company strategy to emulate!

Second, to the extent that more consumers are out shopping at this time of year, consider tactics that play to your strengths, especially relating to service. If you are located in an area that sees increased traffic, why not offer walk-ins a cup of coffee, or a neck rub? If you can swing it, hire a babysitter to watch your customers’ kids – even while the parents shop next door. And if you have quality data on your customers, reach out to your best customers with an email, a card or even a phone call, just to let them know they matter and to invite them to drop by. Make sure they can reach you on social networks and always, always give them something positive to talk about.

What else should you do for Black Friday? Well, you could go shopping. There are supposed to be a lot of bargains around – some of them expressly for small business.

Update: Via MediaPost’s Marketing Daily blog: “Web-Savvy Shoppers Are Season’s Real Story”.

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Who Uses Review Sites? You Do (And So Do Moms)

by on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

LexisNexis has issued its 2009 Online Ratings Survey, an online survey of 561 legal professionals, small business owners and consumers that was conducted by Lightspeed Research in April 2009. The survey has been reported on extensively online, including at XML Journal and WebProNews. The full results are available here. The surprising results of the survey are that small business owners are active users of these sites – even more so than consumers.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • 87% of small business owners surveyed and 63% of consumers have provided feedback on review and ratings web sites.
  • More than half of small business owners and 43% of consumers believed that review and rating web sites mean businesses are held to higher standards.
  • Businesses tended to trust independent third party ratings, while a majority of consumers considered reviews from actual customers to be more trustworthy.
  • Businesses’ greatest area of concern was false and malicious reviews.

More recently, a “mom-centered” site called momconnection.com surveyed 583 mothers with children under 12 (out of their panel of 5,000 moms) about social media and its role in helping them make buying decisions. The study found that utilization of social media was very high: 81% of the respondents said they were members of Facebook (but only 23% had Twitter accounts) and 60% reported visiting a social networking site in the previous 24 hours.

Moms Already Social Shoppers

via momlogic.com

The study also found that personal recommendations were by far the most powerful drivers of purchasing behavior, a phenomenon we have noted before. In its research brief on this study, Mediapost found it “surprising” that only 24% of respondents reported using Facebook in making a purchasing decision, and that far fewer used MySpace or Twitter.

We don’t find this data surprising and we certainly don’t find it troubling. First, social shopping is relatively new, especially on social networks like Facebook and Twitter which only recently have become business-friendly. Just as overall utilization of social networks has increased dramatically over the past few years, we fully expect that utilization for exchanging information and experiences about brands and products will catch up. Especially because, as the research indicates, moms interact with brands at a very high level. Not only did 81% report visiting a marketer’s web site for product information, 36% reported becoming a fan of a marketer on Facebook (which is a little difficult to reconcile with the 24% figure cited above).

What does surprise us is how many major brands haven’t fully committed to social networks as a marketing medium. How can moms be expected to use Facebook to connect with marketers if marketers in the categories moms care about aren’t using Facebook to connect with them? So if a mom says she doesn’t use Facebook to help her decide which breakfast cereal to buy, it may indeed be that she just isn’t comfortable using social networks to crowdsource purchase decisions, but it could be that the brands she cares about haven’t given her a reason to try.

Another interesting finding from this study is how moms get and share information about products. Although personal recommendations are by a wide margin the preferred medium, 41% of respondents report consulting “mom-focused web sites” for information (presumably including the sponsor of the research) and 34% get information from shopping web sites. 54% have shared their opinions by rating or reviewing a product online and 37% have posted about a product in an online forum or blog. For a group that doesn’t obviously include large numbers of early adopters, we think this shows a reasonably high level of engagement with social shopping.

If moms are already using socially-oriented web sites – but not Facebook or Twitter – to help them make better purchasing decisions, it may be that they have figured out which sites offer relevant content and a valuable experience and aren’t limiting themselves to the big social networking brands. That suggests two things: first, that as marketers make better use of Facebook and Twitter they will find a ready audience of social shoppers. And second, that consumers are willing to use social shopping web sites that don’t have the brand strength of Facebook and Twitter, at least so long as they provide value to the consumer. As observers of social media marketing we are confident about the first observation. As developers of a new social shopping platform we are optimistic about the second.

Update: This post about the Maclaren stroller recall illustrates how active moms are on social networks, and how much influence they can have over marketers.

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A Few Words About Word of Mouth

by on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Since Zavee is a marketing platform for small and medium sized businesses, we think a lot about word of mouth (“WOM”) marketing. It’s a powerful and cost-effective tool, which makes it ideal for businesses that don’t have big marketing budgets. It’s also a natural fit for smaller businesses, whose owners inherently are closer to their customers than than in large enterprises. And with its focus on organically spreading a marketing message WOM encompasses (and perhaps even spawned) social media marketing – something else we think a lot about at Zavee. We aren’t the only ones thinking about WOM, of course. There is a WOM trade association, some major conferences, several blogs on the subject and more than a few books.

http://hearmehearmenot.wordpress.com/

http://hearmehearmenot.wordpress.com/

One of the things that caught our attention as we were developing Zavee was the inherent fragility of WOM, especially from the perspective of the smaller business. In our conversations with small business owners, we learned that they think of WOM as a cycle: a positive customer experience leads to a personal recommendation, which leads to a new customer, and so on. They aren’t quite as focused – yet – on influencer marketing, buzz marketing or other categories of WOM as larger companies might be. There’s no doubt, however, that personal recommendations are powerful drivers of new business. One global consumer study indicated that 90% of consumers trusted recommendations from people they knew. What makes WOM fragile, however, is how easily the connections that make up the WOM cycle can fail.


The very beginning of the cycle – the business providing the kind of experience that makes customers want to recommend it – gets a lot of attention, but in a way that’s the easy part. At least, it’s the part of the cycle over which the merchant has the most control.

The next step is much more problematic. The customer leaves with every intention of recommending the merchant. But like most emotional drives, it will remain top of mind for only so long. At some point the intention to recommend the business will dissipate, or be crowded out by other things, so it’s vital that the customer encounter a potential recipient of the recommendation before this point is reached. Some customers will reach out to specific acquaintances to make a recommendation while others will wait until they encounter an acquaintance serendipitiously or are solicited for a recommendation.

Then there is the issue of the person who receives the recommendation. Obviously, it must be someone with whom the customer is acquainted. But personal acquaintance isn’t enough. For the recommendation to have the desired impact the recipient of the recommendation must:

  • Have confidence in the customer generally as someone whose recommendations would be reliable – no one would act on the recommendations of someone they think is a flake
  • Have confidence in the customer specifically as someone who is knowledgeable and experienced in the relevant domain – if the customer knows about wine but not shoes her recommendation of a wine shop will be more powerful than her recommendation of a shoe store
  • Be able to understand the reason for the recommendation – this isn’t always an issue, and the intensity of the recommendation can count for a lot, but it certainly helps if the customer can effectively convey the merchant’s selling proposition
  • Be at the point of intention – the recommendation will be more powerful if the recipient of the recommendation is ready, willing and able to buy than if she has to remember the recommendation later on, when the emotional drive that she has “borrowed” from the customer has dissipated or been crowded out

As much as anything else, it’s timing that makes WOM fragile. If our hypothetical customer is solicited for a recommendation within the scope of her expertise by an acquaintance who is at the point of intention, the recommendation should be very powerful – unless the customer no longer remembers her experience so intensely or so favorably. If she reaches out to an acquaintance to recommend a merchant while her experience is still top of mind, that recommendation should be powerful, too – unless the acquaintance has just made a purchase from a different merchant or otherwise is not at the point of intention.

In a future post, we’ll discuss some things that merchants can do to make the WOM cycle stronger, and we’ll also describe how Zavee can help. In the meantime, let us know what you do to make WOM work for you.

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Tape This to Your Fridge (or Maybe Your Monitor)

by on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Maybe it’s a sign of our collectively diminishing attention spans, but magazines (and blogs) seem to run more and more articles that are basically lists. There’s even a term for it: the “listicle”. (Want to guess what the graphic equivalent is called? Right, it’s a “charticle”!) Listicles often reflect shallow thinking and lazy writing, but sometimes they provide tremendous value, collecting and condensing a great deal of knowledge into the kind of piece you want to print out and tape to your refrigerator door.

I’ve recently come across two listicles of the latter kind, both from sources every small business owner should be following. The first is from Mashable, which provides all sorts of valuable information about social media. This post by Ross Kimbarovsky, who co-founded an online community of graphic designers that now exceeds 43,000 members, offers 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips. In addition to its overall clarity and conciseness, this post adds value in two interesting ways. First, it goes beyond Twitter and Facebook to explain some less widely known tools, including mobile/local social network Foursquare and brand consistency tools such as Namechk. Second – and at least as important – the post suggests both a basic and an advanced strategy for each of the 10 tips. This approach provides a road map for small businesses that are just starting out in social media or are unsure how extensive a commitment they want to make. This post recognizes that different businesses will have different needs and appetites for social media, shows businesses how they can mix and match different tools and provides a framework for increasing the utilization of social media marketing over time.

Deep in Conversation

Deep in Conversation

The second post comes via the Conversation Agent blog: a compendium of 25 Must-Read B2B Marketing Posts. I haven’t read all 25 yet but so far every one has been thought-provoking and several have provided significant value to our business; I imagine you will feel the same way. Business-to-business marketing frequently gets overlooked in the rush to market to consumers, so it’s great that some of the best minds in the social media space are paying attention to the needs of the B2B marketer.

This is by no means an original observation, but it really is amazing how much useful material can be found just by spending a little time searching the Internet. It’s even more amazing how many talented people have done so much of the heavy lifting by finding, evaluating, collecting and editing valuable source material for marketers like us. We hope you find these posts as worthwhile as we have. Please let us know how they work for you.

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Recovery or Relapse?

by on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

In this Digital Rules column on Forbes.com, Rich Karlgaard argues that the small business sector usually leads the economy out of a recession, but that hasn’t happened this time. He goes on to warn that “a second leg of recession will occur if America’s small-business sector doesn’t expand.” As for the economy as a whole, experts seem divided over whether recent positive news, including stock market gains, are signs of a real recovery or reflect a false optimism that the recession is really ending.

NASDAQ in Times Square, New York City.

NASDAQ in Times Square, NYC

Here in South Florida, our small-business sector has been especially hard hit by the current recession. We wouldn’t have started Zavee in this market if we didn’t believe that small business would recover … eventually. And while we are aware that South Florida’s recovery is projected to lag the national recovery, we don’t have any better insight than anyone else into when and how quickly that recovery will take place. Karlgaard suggests that small business is sitting on the sidelines mainly because of “lack of expansion capital and fear[] of possible regulatory changes in health care, energy and union membership.” For what it’s worth, when we speak with local merchants we hear more about the lack of capital than we do about health care, cap-and-trade or card check, but that may just reflect a reluctance to “talk politics” with people they don’t know very well.

We end every post on Zavee Thinking by asking for your comments and we certainly want to hear from you on any and all topics we post about. However, we really hope you will let us know in the comments whether you think South Florida’s economy is headed toward recovery or relapse; what role you think small business will play; and what you think of Rich Karlgaard’s analysis.

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