A Day and a Half to Register

Registration for Marketing Your Business closes at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. The session runs the following morning from 11:00 a.m. to noon Eastern time, and it carries no fee ("Marketing Your Business"). What follows is our case for the hour, or why we think you should participate.

Begin with the objection, because it is a fair one. Marketing is the most criticized function in business, and the sharpest criticism comes from inside the discipline. Chris Hackley, in Marketing: A Critical Introduction, assembles the charge sheet: intellectual shallowness, an attachment to outdated concepts, a focus on transactions rather than relationships, and a reluctance to examine its own assumptions (Hackley 4). The field's leading academic journal has aired the argument that marketing effectiveness is falling and that the discipline faces an ethical crisis of its own making (Hackley 4).

That indictment is aimed at a particular kind of marketing: the expensive, centrally planned kind practiced by large consumer goods companies. Hackley notes that the textbooks have been criticized for exactly this bias, since the overwhelming majority of business enterprises are small ones (Hackley 7). A firm in Marion, Gas City, or Fairmount is not running that apparatus. It needs to know who is buying, why they chose it over the alternative, and whether last month's effort produced anything.

That is the more modest project, and it is the one on Thursday's agenda. The published description covers the fundamentals of branding, identifying and understanding a target market, setting clear goals, testing what works, selecting tactics, and finding online tools ("Marketing Your Business"). Note what the list omits. There is no promise of control over consumer behavior, and no suggestion that a framework substitutes for knowing one's own customers.

The least glamorous item matters most. Testing what works is the honest answer to the charge that marketing does not deliver, because testing is how a firm finds out whether it does. The Small Business Development Center's national clearinghouse puts it plainly: a workable plan means research into an audience's behavior, a budget allocated across channels, and continuous monitoring to refine what is being done. Tracking a few measures, among them traffic, conversion, and the cost of acquiring a customer, converts marketing from an article of faith into a decision that can be revisited ("Digital Marketing Basics").

There is also a plain commercial reason not to let the deadline pass. Where customers find new products has shifted. Roughly a quarter of consumers now prefer to discover them on social media, with the share considerably higher among the youngest buyers ("Digital Marketing Basics"). A business whose approach was settled a decade ago has not stayed neutral on that question. It has answered it by default.

The hour is free because it is publicly supported. The Indiana Small Business Development Center is funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the United States Small Business Administration and offers no-cost advising, training, and referrals. The East Central Indiana office serves Grant County among eleven others, and its advisors remain available well after Thursday. Claudia Metzger is the point of contact at cmetzger@isbdc.org and 765-282-9950.

One hour will not make anyone a marketer, and we would distrust any description that claimed otherwise. What it can supply is a vocabulary, a short list of questions worth asking, and a working relationship with an advisor who will take the next call. For most small firms, that is where the useful part of marketing has always started.

Registration is open at https://isbdc.ecenterdirect.com/events/17482 until 11:59 p.m. on 19 August. We hope to see a good showing from Grant County.

Resources

"Digital Marketing Basics." SBDCNet, SBDC National Information Clearinghouse, 25 Mar. 2025, www.sbdcnet.org/small-business-information-center/digital-marketing-basics-for-small-business/.

Hackley, Chris. "Marketing Studies: The Critical Standpoint." Marketing: A Critical Introduction, SAGE Publications, 2009, pp. 1-20. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/indwes/detail.action?docID=689449.

"Home." Indiana Small Business Development Center, isbdc.org/.

"Marketing Your Business." Indiana Small Business Development Center, 20 Aug. 2026, isbdc.ecenterdirect.com/events/17482.