More than 500 attendees from companies throughout attended the first National Marketing and Marketing Forum for SMEs, where experts said that investing in intangibles such as marketing and innovation are key to strategic business growth.

MARKETPYM’11 has closed its first edition as a National Marketing and Marketing Forum for SMEs with a great success of assistance: more than 500 professionals and businessmen from all over participated in the congress organized by the firm specializing in marketing and human resources Garrigós & Llopis.

The day had the institutional support of the Generalitat Valenciana, with the participation of the first vice president of the Consell and conseller of Industry, Commerce and Innovation, Vicente Rambla. And also with representatives of business organizations of the Valencian community, such as Rafael Fernando Giner, president of CIERVAL; or Mario Mariner, president of the Valencian Institute for the Study of Family Business.

For Emilio Llopis, Partner of Garrigós & Llopis and President of Marketpym: “The success of the first edition of MARKETPYM is a sign of the firm commitment of SMEs to marketing, innovation and creating value for customers. must abandon the topic that marketing is not the SME’s business, on the contrary, it is more aware than ever “.

With the help of experts such as Gonzalo Brujó, CEO of Interbrand, and Conrad Llorens, CEO of SUMMA, a reflection exercise was raised on how brand creation and innovation can also help small and medium-sized enterprises to boost their performance. business, especially in difficult economic environments like the current one.

Innovation and business focus, strategic keys

During the first conference block of MARKETPYM’11 an analysis was carried out on the importance of developing brands, drinking from the successes and failures of the big brands and adapting these experiences to the business world of small and medium enterprises. The commitment to a constant movement of SMEs, given the current market conditions (globalization, competition …), inevitably happens in the opinion of experts for investment in intangibles such as marketing and innovation.

According to Gonzalo Brujó, CEO of Interbrand, “what this crisis is teaching us is that we have to learn to manage intangibles like long-term marketing. The business strategy has to be in line with the brand strategy, betting on business focus, differentiation, consistency in the communication of company values and innovation “.

The success stories of companies such as Zinkia and Tous served as an example to determine which strategies work for SMEs that are at a time of important internationalization and how creativity is essential to gain a good position in a globalized market. Their respective managers recommended to the attending businessmen to always apply common sense in their business, never trust in the achieved position, reinvent themselves permanently and not lose sight of what the true focus of the business is.

The brand, an essential element of business

The change of the rules of the game in the market and the permanent need to provide new solutions are the challenges that companies must face today if they want to develop a successful business model. During the second session of MARKETPYM’11, both the value of the brand as an essential element of the business and the new opportunities offered by online branding were analyzed.

Among the conclusions reached, for experts it is clear that it is easier to build a brand in an SME because the implementation costs are lower; it is easier to align small teams with the value proposition of the company; and the leadership capacity and commitment of the entrepreneur are very important. The success stories that served to show how to put this into practice were presented by IVI, with its transformation and brand evolution; Global Premium Brands, through its new brand “Gin Mare”; and Fermax, with its exercise of adaptation of the brand to the international culture of all those countries where it is present.

During the day, it became clear how the Internet and Social Networks have opened a whole world of experiences that businessmen can take advantage of, given the ease of establishing relationships with their target audience that allows online branding. However, experts and businessmen agreed that it is an environment in which there is no need to be, but it is essential to have something relevant to tell and a strong and developed brand that accompanies each initiative.