Today, thanks to the brave new world of Internet search and ratings, we can be sure we’re getting the best value for every one of our shopping dollars. The Compete Online Shopper Intelligence study showed that 94% of online shoppers did research before their purchases.

But the brave new world breaks down a little when it comes to local search, when you’re looking for local service providers.  Imagine this:
•    It’s Saturday evening. Company’s coming for dinner. The kitchen sink backs up. How do you pick a plumber?

You can use Yelp (or Google Local, or online Yellow Pages, or eLocalPlumbers, etc).  Local search and ratings are one hot topic in small business marketing discussions today. Good for small business marketing consultants…but maybe not so good for people with backed-up sinks. What if there are no ratings, or only one or two ratings, for the plumbers close to you? Or what if the ratings are ringers, placed by the plumbers’ friends?

Today SuperPages and Angie’s List, are taking very different approaches to the problem.

•    SuperPages offers a SuperGuarantee with teeth: If you’re dissatisfied with an advertising service provider’s work, they’ll pay you up to $500.  SuperPages and the SuperGuarantee are free to consumers. Marketing support includes a major “We Make it Easy to Spot the Good Guys” TV advertising campaign and a $5 million SuperSpendingSpree sweepstakes.

•    Angie’s List offers customer ratings – lots of them. Each month they aggregate up to 40,000 customer reviews of local service providers like plumbers on a market-by-market basis. There is no direct remedy for customer dissatisfaction with an Angie’s List service provider, but plumbers and other providers can be put in the “penalty box.” Angie’s List charges member/consumers for its services: $15 to sign up plus $6.95 a month.

Which one would you – a local search user – choose to pick a plumber on a Saturday evening with company coming?
•    Thinking as a marketer, you’ve got to go with SuperPages and its SuperGuarantee . It’s the familiar Yellow Page updated for the 21st century. It’s free. The guarantee differentiates by offering  a specific financial remedy for dissatisfaction. And the sweepstakes drives traffic and builds consumer understanding.
•    But thinking as a harried dinner party host, you’d probably pick Angie’s List. Smart marketing doesn’t fix kitchen sinks. Up to $500 back at some future date doesn’t mean much with company coming for dinner. In this case Angie’s List, the less visible marketer, offers more value. Assurance before is better than a financial remedy afterwards.

Heaven? Or the hot place? We’re anxiously waiting to fill in the blank for the big agency/small business local marketing initiative reported in the August 31 Advertising Age. It’s directly relevant to something our agency is doing right now.

Pop-up retail is a marketing practice that’s been around for several years. Now RCKR/Y&R in London has taken the concept one step further, with a storefront satellite agency to serve “Mom and Pop” businesses – sellers of pierogi dumplings and frozen banana treats, a tattoo parlor, a liquor store and more.

Robinson & Maites is already working on a similar marketing initiative for a Chicago-area guitar store and school. It takes advantage of our experience marketing to small business. (It also lets us indulge our personal musical interests – the R&M team includes a guitar player, a banjo player and a hammer dulcimer player.)

How much can Goliath help David?
So we congratulate RCKR/Y&R on their efforts to help their small business neighbors. But will big advertising agency capabilities be relevant to the needs of very local small businesses?

Now that we’re developing marketing for a small business (instead of marketing to small business) we’re discovering a different world. For years we’ve worked with Fortune 1000 clients to develop local marketing targeting small business. They’re usually an extension/reinforcement of a national brand program, template programs designed to work in all markets, to achieve both national brand objectives and generic small business objectives.

Different challenges vs. deep pockets
But now we’re working with one specific retailer, with very specific objectives, in one very tightly defined geographic market. The new challenges include:
•    Cost-efficient targeting and media selection. How do you identify and reach guitar players and prospects only, in one small geographic area?
•    Execution resources. The obvious challenge – small businesses just can’t afford to throw money at their marketing problems.
•    Minimal economies of scale. Just one business bears the cost of program development; it can’t be amortized across multiple similar businesses.
•    Local market knowledge. We have to identify opportunities are in seven or eight specific communities, not in “suburbs” in general.
•    Multiple audiences for same product.  Teen guitar players and adult guitar players respond to different kinds of message. But it doesn’t make sense to run multiple campaigns.
•    Need for results now. Image-building is secondary for small local businesses. Their marketing must generate ROI – traffic and sales – fast.

This is a work-in-progress report
For both RCKR/Y&R and for Robinson & Maites. We’re pretty sure we’ll reach “heaven” (or at least a pretty nice place) with our small business client. We’re not so sure about theirs.  Big ad agencies have always aimed their efforts at long term perception change, not quick behavior change. And they’ve always had deep pockets to help them do it. That’s why we wonder how well RCKR/Y&R’s efforts will succeed against these challenges.

Right now big food – American agribusiness – is threatened by the same kind of decades-long trend that lead to the Big 3 automakers’ current sorry state. Will the trend to sustainable agriculture and locally-grown foods make Hamburger Helper and Hostess Twinkies go the way of the Hummer?  Will the Snickers bar suffer the same fate as Saturn?

My family became part this trend. Before we ever heard the term “localvore,” we were buying most of our fruits and vegetables from the farmer’s market a few blocks from home. And we joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm south of Chicago; each week we receive an e-mail from the farmer and a big cardboard box full of assorted produce. No cultural or political statement was intended; we did it just because the product was good and the price was right. And we still eat our fair share of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

The trend is growing. U.S. Department of Agriculture data from 2007 reports that 12,549 farms in the United States market products through a community supported agriculture arrangement.  And between 1994 and 2008, the number of U.S. farmers markets increased from 1755 to 4685.

It’s a fragmented movement. Marketing is local, word of mouth and social media. But it all adds up: one family’s purchases can total several thousand dollars a year. Could this be a threat to agribusiness giants like Kraft Foods, Tyson, Nestle, Dole and others?

In the short term, probably not. But in the longer term…maybe:
•    My local supermarket, which used to sell sweet corn that was indistinguishable from feed corn for cattle, now sells really fresh corn at prices lower than the farmers market.
•    Eating Well magazine reports on how a poor rural town in Vermont has become foodie mecca, with a restaurant on Conde Nast Traveler’s 2009 hot list. In Vermont, the localvore trend extends into the mainstream, to the food service operations at local schools. This helps rebut the claim that eating local is a luxury that’s only meaningful and affordable for people with money.
•    And in New York City there’s now a local bottled water brand – Tap’dNY- that comes straight out of the city water system.

There are some signs that big food is responding to the trend. For example:
•    Kraft Salad Dressings ran a recipe contest that incorporated a “secret” locally-grown ingredient.
•    Canadian Pizza, a trade journal for pizzerias, suggested that readers create a featured “Hundred Mile Pizza” product using local ingredients.
•    Campbell’s “Help Grow Your Soup” campaign extends the company’s support for local farms, using ingredients grown within 100 miles of its production facilities.

But these responses are mainly me-too lip service:
•    They slap words like “natural” onto their labels, imitating GM’s attempt to market a compact luxury car by slapping a “Cadillac Cimarron” nameplate onto a Chevy Cavalier.
•    Instead of starting to align their mainstream brands with growing consumer preferences, they lock truly natural and/or locally-grown products into niche categories. (One reason why agribusiness is buying smaller organic food processors across the U.S. and around the world.)
•    Most important, big food companies do not seem to have any real business strategy for countering this competitive threat to their brands.  They behave as if customers can be satisfied with marketing tactics alone (like the examples in the previous paragraph), that it’s not necessary to make major changes in food production and distribution.

Over the next few decades, we see a gradual erosion of big food’s share of market.

Could this lead to a government bailout of big food, somewhere around 2029? Or will it be business as usual, as big food’s economies of scale prevail over the natural food and localvore trends?