Mid-Sized Marketers Get Their Due

Imagine a spectrum. On one end you’ve got Apple, Coke or any of the Forbes 500. On the other end you’ve got your local mechanic, accountant or any of the small businesses you pass on the way home. One end employs marketers-o-plenty, and maybe even a Chief Marketing Officer. While small businesses have the marketer/owner - the barber or bartender. Al Ries and Jack Trout write for one group. Jay Levinson writes for the other. This is for the big space in the middle: the mid-sized marketer.

I’ve read Guerilla Marketing, Marketing Warfare, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. I’ve read how GM has worked to be/stay #1, how Miller and Budweiser duked it out in the 70s and the dot coms spent billions of dollars buying Superbowl ads and vinyl wrapped cars. But it takes some effort to find the nuggets in there for the mid-sized marketer. And that’s strange, because I think the number of mid-sized marketers outnumber mammoth marketers.

I for one, after living in Bellingham and paying attention to local business media for ten years, am occasionally surprised by another $10-15 million company within five miles of my house. They are all over the place. And they are surprisingly small, say 20-30 people.

If you walk down the aisles of your favorite Best Buy, Wal-Mart or Fry’s, once you get away from the TVs and cameras, you’ll stumble on tons of products from mid-sized companies all over the country and the world. Greeting cards, vitamins, glassware, candles, ladders, the list reaches into every consumer interest category.

Let’s look at some traits I’m assigning to companies of this sort:

• National, if not International.
• Not too concerned with local media, since their market is not concentrated in the local population.
• Want to play with the big boys by building a web presence.
• Might outsource some marketing, public relations or advertising.
• Quite possibly a marketing department of one.

There’s a lot to be said about a marketing department of one. It’s not all good, but there is a lot to be said about it. Your work is high profile, but there’s also some confusion about what you do in the company. You get a lot of credit and a lot of blame. You get to be both creative and analytical.

I’m going to spend some time here in the next few weeks and share some things I’ve learned as a mid-sized marketer. The freedom I’ve garnered, the successes I’ve managed and the flops I can call my own. And this is because I don't think there are enough props shown to the humble mid-sized marketers of the world.

So here it is. Here’s the well-deserved shout out to the mid-sized marketer. There are more of us than you think.