Feel great in 2020 by buying from your neighbours

Having an opportunity to live and work in the same county is certainly useful when it comes to the commute. More importantly though, it allows you to feel part of the community, to be a component in the machine. Whilst we have worked all over the UK and further afield with our video production services, a lot of our projects are located in the North West and particularly in Lancashire.

We love being based here, there’s everything we could need to do business, however we know how easy it easy to sometimes overlook what is on your doorstep. Being in the industry we’re in we buy a good deal of our technical kit from the large nationwide suppliers like Amazon, Scan Computers and ProAv and especially over the festive period it’s very easy for us to simply click ‘buy now’ and have something delivered to your door the next day. But should we when we look at what we have so close by?

Everything we do at Bigtank is geared to help businesses create emotional connections and we thought about whether buying in this way is conducive to that. By buying from a large corporation are we really adhering to what we think business is based on? There is unlikely to be no emotional connection made from a transaction with a large corporation where we don’t know with whom we’re dealing with and there’s almost no human interactions.

Now that doesn’t mean to say we’re against buying from big companies, we always will as they can often provide a product or service that some local firms cannot but having joined the Lancashire Business View’s campaign to bring back a billion our eyes have been opened at the effectiveness of spending just as little as 5% of your annual spend in Lancashire.

So when it came to stock up on office supplies for our return in 2020 rather than buying the batch we saw online, we put an order in with our local office kit supplier My Total Office Solutions based just 5 minutes away and it turns out had just what we needed and at the same price. As ever it was delivered the very next day by the same person who took our order, with a thank you and all with the excellent service we’ve come to know and love from them. Another instance is that of our data storage. This is something we might normally go to one of the larger online suppliers for and get some hard drives from them however we recently discovered that one of our Lancs based connections has set up their own business, Media Drives Online, so we decided to buy from them instead, again we got exactly the same product but with a personable service and all at the same cost.

In both instances we got the product we needed but also the pride of knowing that we had helped a small business and injected money into the local economy. Although not major, those transactions generated those emotional connections which we see as integral to doing business. So, when you buy online this year, before you click that ‘buy it now’ button, just stop and think who you know near you who could help you and do your bit for each other in 2020.

Get video insights from Bigtank at: https://www.bigtank.co.uk/vlog where you'll find loads of great advice on how to Tell Your Story, Engage Your Market and Grow Your Business.