Small companies take marketing seriously

Britain's smallest organisations are the most likely to cite marketing as essential to business success, the most inclined to invest in marketing, and the quickest to recognise the importance of having a marketer in the boardroom. This was the conclusion of a marketing trends survey published this week by The Chartered Institute of Marketing and conducted by MORI.

Two-thirds of marketers questioned for the study said that marketing is a high priority within their organisation, while only 8 per cent said that it was a low priority. But while 49 per cent of firms with a turnover of over £100 million say that marketing is regarded as a high priority, this figure rises to a substantial 88 percent in organisations turning over less than £1 million.

This belief in the importance of marketing is backed up by real investment. Companies with a turnover of less than £1 million spend just over 10 per cent of their turnover on marketing, significantly more than the national average figure of 7.2 per cent. Only a third of marketers in small companies claim that it is difficult to secure funding for marketing activities, but by contrast two-thirds of those in the largest organisations find obtaining budget for marketing problematical.

The trend is also reflected in what is going on in Britain's board rooms. It is in the small organisations that marketers are most likely to be represented at board level. Over three-quarters of the smallest companies have a marketer on the board, but this figure falls to a depressing 37 per cent in companies with a turnover of between £51 million and £100 million, but rises slightly to 51 per cent in companies turning over more than £100 million.

"Small companies appear to recognise that marketing is central to success," says Christine Cryne, chief executive of The Chartered Institute of Marketing. "And as it is the smallest organisations that are the most up-beat about their prospects, they also seem confident that their investment in marketing will pay dividends.

"It's generally recognised that small and medium enterprises fuel the growth of the UK economy, accounting for 51.3 per cent of the UKs turnover and employing 58.5 per cent of the workforce*, so with the recognition that professional marketing is at the heart of the SME business, we can anticipate some positive commercial impact," she concludes.

And smaller companies were also most confident that they faced a bright future. While across the range companies are expecting their sales to increase by 6.5 percent for this financial year, and this figure rises to a more bullish 7.6 percent among organisations with a turnover of under GBP1 million.

* Source = DTI news release 25 August 2005