Finding Your ‘Small Business Identity’ and Why 2023 Is the Year to Shout It Out
Jeanette Mulvey
Editor-in-Chief, U.S. Chamber of Commerce | Top Voice on Entrepreneurship & Small Business
Hello, everyone! I took some time off from my newsletter to recharge during the holidays, but now I’m back and ready to help you navigate 2023. Whether you’re still in the planning stages of launching a new startup or you’ve been in business for a long time, I’ll be here with you through the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur in our new post-pandemic world.
This week, I’m focused on the emergence of a trend toward embracing small business identity. It's a change I’ve seen over the last year in how business owners are thinking about themselves and the role their personal identities play marketing their businesses.?
Over the last decade, the development of cloud-based technology and inexpensive marketing via social media undoubtedly allowed small businesses to compete with the biggest players in their industries, but it also created the illusion that many of these companies were bigger than they actually were.?
In many cases, it became less obvious to the customer that they were buying from a small business often owned by one person with a few or no employees at all. As a result, cloud-based tech, e-commerce, and the outsourcing of services to third parties often depersonalized the interactions between business owners and their customers and undermined the emotional connection and loyalty between the two.
And while it is still very much the case that small businesses will continue to leverage any technology that allows them to be competitive, I am seeing business owners start to more publicly embrace their “small” or “local” status and their own personal identity in ways that I did not see a few years ago. No longer do small business owners hide behind their logos hoping they’ll blend into the digital crowd. Instead, their personal identities are front and center and a major selling point for many.
I attribute this partly to a pandemic-induced mindset in which many people - not just business owners - took stock of their lives in an effort to determine what was most important and meaningful to them. For many business owners and brand-new entrepreneurs, that meant being more true to themselves and focusing their energy on what mattered most to them. For others, it meant seizing the opportunity to connect with their community and build a network around their business that was deeply connected to who they are and what is important to them.
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We know from CO—’s own traffic data, for example, that entrepreneurs are more interested than ever in registering or becoming certified as a Black-, woman-, minority-, LGBTQ-, or veteran-Owned business. We’ve seen a huge demand in interest in how to qualify for these certifications, how to access resources specific to business owners in these groups, and how to find ways to publicly prompt the owner’s identity via directories and platforms dedicated to promoting them.
Social media marketing tactics, particularly the emergence of TikTok being used to promote businesses, are increasingly focused on pulling back the curtain to reveal the real person behind the scenes running the business. Entrepreneurs no longer see a separation between their businesses and personal identities and are, instead, leveraging their true selves to enhance their business stories and make deeper, more personal connections with customers.
Their timing couldn’t be more perfect. This trend toward personalizing small business aligns with a continually growing desire on the part of customers to support local businesses and a work-from-home culture that has allowed small and local businesses to serve workers who are no longer out of their homes five days a week.
If you’ve been thinking about how to put a more personal face on your business story, here are some articles to check out to get started.
Jeanette Mulvey is a small business journalist and expert. She currently serves as Editor in Chief of CO— by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce .
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