Tech favours small business

The world is changing. The end of the cheap credit era coupled with fast communications and affordable technology are tilting the playing field towards nimble entrepreneurs and away from big business.

Microsoft’s latest advertising campaign shows how the corporate world doesn’t understand these changes.

Microsoft’s “you find it, you keep it” campaign sends computer buyers out to find their perfect system – if they go under a budget they keep the change. In the ads, the shoppers find Macs too expensive and settle on a wide screen Windows laptop from a computer superstore.

Over the years, marketers have found most attack ads fail. We want to hear positive stories telling us why we should buy a product. When the message is a lame “don’t buy from the competition”, we often end up not buying at all.

This was true with the Apple “I’m a Mac” ads. While funny, and often true, they only convinced Mac fans of their innate, natural born superiority to lesser beings using inferior systems. All the ads did was confirm Apple’s place in a group that wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

Similarly, Microsoft’s current “buy cheap and nasty” message only reflects what most technology consumers do already ­- buy solely on price and regret it later. Microsoft’s ads reinforce this behaviour at the very time the computer industry needs everything it can to keep margins up.

The bizarre thing is these ads further lock the major PC vendors into a death spiral of low margin sales of cheaply made systems. So rather than hurting Apple, the real losers from Microsoft’s campaign are Microsoft’s own retail partners, specifically Dell, HP and Acer.

I guess Microsoft doesn’t care as long as those poorly specced machines are sold with a copy of Windows, which is interesting as the current version of Windows doesn’t rate a mention in these ads.

Attack ads like Microsoft’s and Apple’s are a failed strategy. They didn’t work in the old days, but forever growing markets meant executives and their advertising agency mates could look at increased sales, pat each other on the back and award themselves a long lunch despite having added no value.

Those days are over, and this is the opportunity for entrepreneurs. Like the brontosaurus, big business doesn’t understand that the world has changed while smart, nimble new businesses that use technology well are overtaking the dinosaurs.

So have a look at the tools you can use, whether it’s social media, software-as-a-service or even a cheap, nasty, underspecced laptop. Do it right, and your business has the power take on the world. Good luck.

Paul Wallbank has spent 15 years helping businesses with their technology issues. Over that time he also grew PC Rescue into a national IT company and set up the IT Queries website. Today Paul assists business facing the challenges of today’s market and believes entrepreneurs and new thinking is what will fix the global economy.

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