As a marketing consultant I can't tell you how often people tell me they feel their marketing efforts are a waste of time. Small and medium sized business owners in particular feel that with a small marketing budget they are at a huge disadvantage in comparison to their larger rivals. No, you can put it in even stronger terms; they feel their ability to compete is hopeless.

But if you talk to the marketing director of a large company you will soon realize that a large budget brings with it larger expectations and traditional advertising methods just aren't delivering the kind of results the big budget advertiser requires either.

The truth is we are in the middle of a revolution. One day people will look back on our time like we look back on the agricultural revolution or the Industrial revolution and study how we coped with the changes.

 That's you they will be studying.

In any period of transition but especially in the beginning, there will always be those who deny it is happening and moan about the way the world is "going to the dogs". They are the stalwarts (A person who is loyal to their allegiance especially in times of revolt) and they will see it through. They are a legend in their own mind.

They boast how they are the last bastion fighting for the good old values. They persist in doing what they have always done because it "always worked before". They look at their statistics and instead of seeing the tsunami they see the lifeboat bobbing on the waves of change. Surviving but taking on water with all hands bailing like crazy. There is no island paradise or safe harbor in sight but they believe because they need to believe, that over the next horizon they will encounter good weather and a fair wind. It is a temporary storm. It will blow over because they always have.

These are the marketers that believe that one big television campaign can or will solve their problems. Why not it always worked before?

I could go on but I am sure you get the point. I'd like to say that these are the people that stick their head in the sand and hope for the best but my allegory doesn't allow for it besides; we know where they have stuck their head.

And then there are the others. At first they are a small group or even a spattering of individuals dotted here and there across the landscape. They're in small business and big business. They are entrepreneurs. They are staff. They are young, they are old but they all have one thing in common.

Marketing is not for the Faint Hearted

In Australia we call it guts. You might call it courage, backbone, chutzpah or something else but it is that inner confidence that says there must be a better way and I am going to find it. It's being prepared to do things differently even though its harder because,  instead of following a path well trod you will be carving out a track in unknown territiory.

Yes you will be held responsible for your actions and you will get a lot of stick (be laughed at) from the "do it the way we all do it" crowd. But when you find the trail to glory, the winning formula, it  will be you on the podium getting the accolades not the crowd.

In the 1970's and 1980's when a main frame computer cost millions of dollars, the decision which one to buy could make or break a financial controller. There were a number of brands to choose from but if a financial controller looked like he was going to recommend something other than IBM there was a legendary story that he would receive a call from an IBM director reminding him that "nobody ever got sacked buying an IBM". "Go with the crowd, make the safe decision and even if it is wrong at least you can point out that most financial controllers made the same decision".

The short answer is yes but I think you will want to read the long answer as well.

First, I need to set out the challenges we face.

One, there is no single strategy like running a campaign on TV that will solve your marketing dilemma anymore. TV worked when and because it was the only game in town. Today your prospects are drowning in choices and the market has never been so fragmented or diverse. This is a problem or an opportunity depending on your point of view.

To the new era marketer it means there is plenty of room to individualize your message and your method of delivery. Don't get me wrong there is still a mass market; it's just that they now want you to talk to them individually.

Two, your prospects are almost immune to your advertising and promotions. For example, research shows that on the Internet people actively avoid clicking on banner ads and almost any form of advertising.

I'm sure I don't have to remind you of your deteriorating response rate to your print ads in the local paper or even the nationals. And while most businesses can't afford to advertise on TV, those that can are pulling their hair out trying to make it work like it used to.

I recently attended a market research evening for the yellow pages, the book not the online version. With few exceptions the general feeling in the room was that yellow pages is long past it's hey day and in most cases people said they were either cancelling or reducing the size of their once prized yellow pages ad. For more on this see my blog entry.

The New Mass Marketing is:  Making it Easy for People to Find You 

Three, there has been a major change in the way people find out about you or your product. They now find you and what's more, they don't want you to find them until they find you and then you had better be prepared to feed them what they want.

What do I mean they find you? Well think about the last time you wanted to find a product or service, what did you do? If you are like the rest of us plebs, you Googled it. Or you went to Yahoo Answers, Delicio.us, YouTube or one of the other Web 2.0 interactive tools where you could not only find a solution or twenty to your problem, you could also ask others that have already used or tried or bought the solutions which one they liked best and why.

In fact if you do your marketing job well, it's likely that the person telling your prospect what to buy is not you but someone else recommending you. The mass in mass marketing now refers to the MASSIVE amount of places people can find information - and you need to cover as many of them as possible.

Example: recently that Itunes advert with the song 1234 really took my fancy. I had no idea who sang it or what the song was called. It was late at night so Underdog Music (my favourite record shop) was closed and I wanted to know more and hear the song again.

So I went to Yahoo answers asked if anyone knew the title and who sang it. Instantly I got an answer back telling me the singer was a Canadian called Feist and that I could see the whole song and dance routine on YouTube with a link to the video. I found practically the whole album there and realized that some of her other songs were even better so the next morning I rang Matt at Underdog and bought the album.

Notice the power of personal service still works otherwise I would have bought the album online as well. But the moral is the consumer now has a wide range of tools available that will help them find what they want, your job is to make sure that when they look, they find you, wherever that is.

I'm glad to end this article on a happy note because a sale was made and my point is that people will always want to buy things but who they buy them from will be determined by a combination of new technology and good old fashioned service not the massive TV or advertising campaign.

How you  use this new technology and which parts of it will suit you best will be the subject of many articles to come because despite what the pessimists will tell you, there has never been a better time to stand out from the crowd.

Just think, YouTube didn't exist a couple of years ago and it recently sold to Google for $1.65 Billion dollars. My Space was a similar story coming from nowhere and then selling to News Corp for $565 million,  who knows, today you could be the corner shop and tomorrow you sell your online department store to Wal Mart for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ric Vatner