The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
If you want to serve local business owners, allying your company with their deepest needs matters. Recently, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance[1] provided a valuable opportunity to hear directly from localism advocates and elected officials[2] about small business owners’ goals and obstacles. If your brand is marketing software or other services to this largest sector of American commerce, I highly recommend setting aside an hour this week to watch the whole recording (embedded at the end of this post).
Today, I’ll briefly recap the information from this event that stood out to me as most illuminating, in hopes that you will be able to evaluate these messages to help you find common cause with clients and customers.
The present state of local economics in the U.S.
ILSR’s co-director, Stacy Mitchell[3], began the webinar by remarking that, just a decade ago, it was not common to hear much political talk surrounding small businesses versus monopolies, but that this is changing. Advocacy groups are gaining strength and political factions like the 100-member progressive caucus are increasingly getting out the message about the present state of U.S. local economics, which Mitchell summed up this way:
“Today, we know that economic concentration and the losses that we’ve seen both for working people and for small businesses have had devastating effects on communities; that the decline of small businesses and the growing concentration across our communities is really driving racial and economic inequality, ultimately undermining our democracy. And we know that the primary driver of this is corporate power, whether it’s the power these corporations wield in the market or the political power