For the start-up company, the big corporate or product launch event often seems like a good idea. It’s a bad idea. But it makes everyone feel good, at least during the prep stage. There’s lots to do. It’s the corporate equivalent of  ‘Somebody go get some clean towels and boil lots of water.’ In other words, it’s a distraction from the real work of launching a company… the long process of launching a company and keeping its presence fresh.

A corporate launch isn’t achieved with a big bang; it’s done with rolling thunder. Thunder is hard to sustain but worthwhile. An event is easy, but essentially worthless. Fewer and fewer members of the shrinking media bother with staged events. The events they do attend are hosted by brand name enterprise companies or feature one of the industry’s five or so living icons. At the small company major launch event there will be more people from the featured company in attendance than there will be media types. It’s short-lived. It is soon forgotton. And by definition, an event is regional, even if you fly the whole show into New York or some other major city. And consider this: Big events are expensive. For the new company trying to topple an established player, an event-driven strategy is an attempt to win the battle of mind share using a tactic that favors the other guy’s army. Big companies can outspend small companies 100 to 1 for this stuff.

But here’s something any company of any size can do that levels the playing field or actually favors the new company: you can talk to your community of customers and prospects directly, often, with authenticity, everywhere at a cost cheifly measured by think-time rather than the cost of hors d’oeuvres. This is something very big companies have a very hard time doing in part because sometimes they don’t have anything to say… sometimes they are fearful of the implications of an unvarnished dialogue… sometimes they’ve been doing the same old thing the same old way for so long they’ve lost their passion for what they do. Lights camera action? Nonsense. Blogs, webinars, podcasts… Advantage start-up.

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