Can BT be best friend to small business?
BT is making one of its periodic forays into the SME market. Small businesses usually languish near the foot of the leviathan’s strategic agenda until, magically, a quiet day on the large corporate front, or a basic desire to do something different, forces its way through. “Okay”, they say, “we’ll get Gordon Ramsay to front a high-profile advertising campaign and we’ll build a trendy website.”
Big technology companies spend small fortunes chasing their largest blue chip accounts. Once in a while they wake up to the needs and opportunities that exist in the wider world of business.
Revenue streams may conform to hackneyed 80:20 rules, perhaps even 90:10 rules, whereby a relatively small handful of large companies produce the lion’s share of income and profit. ICT providers mine this motherlode for all it is worth and every now and then their digging exposes the rich surrounding seam wherein lie the SMEs.
Thereupon a Damascene conversion takes place. Despite the fact that they themselves rank among the largest corporations on the planet, they draw small businesses to their bosom in a warm but worrying embrace.
Which is just what BT did last week. The UK telco embarked on a new marketing campaign targeting small businesses (not its first, doubtless not its last) and launched the first in what may be a string of SME-centric websites, dubbed ‘BT Tradespace’.
