Markets Becoming Kingdoms

Once upon a time, the internet really was an open marketplace. Every new website, search engine and platform had to earn its audience - attracting users one click at a time with ideas, innovation, and genuine competition. It was fast-moving, exciting, and full of opportunity.

Today, that openness has narrowed. The internet has matured into a handful of digital kingdoms - each with their own gates, tolls and rules - where access to customers is increasingly dictated by algorithms, ad budgets, and the priorities of the platforms themselves.

Techno-feudalism is a term some economists use to describe how parts of the modern digital economy are shifting away from traditional open markets toward platform-controlled ecosystems.

In simple terms, it means that a small number of tech companies - the likes of Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and now OpenAI - act as the gatekeepers between businesses and their customers.

They decide what’s visible, what’s valuable, and, more often than not, who gets heard.

For many businesses, that means paying rent to the digital landlords to reach the people they once reached in different ways.

If you sell through a marketplace, list on a shopping feed, or advertise via search, you’re effectively renting a pitch inside someone else’s castle. You pay to get in front of your audience, and you pay again if they come back through the same gate.

That’s fine if you’re selling mass-market commodities. But if you care about quality, trust and long-term relationships, it’s hard and increasingly expensive to build loyalty on rented land alone.

Where We Stand

I’ve been working for 35 years, and the world of B2B has changed beyond recognition.
When I started, it was about printed catalogues, field sales, direct mail and exhibitions - everything seemed more tangible and personal.

Even in the 13 years since we started SafetyBuyer, the pace of change has been staggering.

I still remember chatting with my brother Ian about whether we should dare to bid over £1 per click on our best-selling COSHH cabinet. It felt like a big decision at the time.

Back then, we watched individual advertisers steadily increase their bids in search of a bigger share of traffic - almost leapfrogging over each other by the day. At the same time, many were doing the same with their prices, cutting margins to keep up with the competition.

We saw that behaviour early on and decided to focus our energy somewhere else - on service and differentiation, not on chasing clicks or racing to the bottom.

Fast forward to today, and the digital landscape looks very different. The old model of bidding for clicks has been replaced by Performance Max campaigns, where you no longer bid directly but instead set a target return on ad spend (ROAS) and let Google decide how to spend your budget.

Looked at another way, that shift was less about optimisation or customer empowerment and more about the landlord raising the rent - a commission or tax on your sales, decided by the platform itself.

We’ve kept growing - and our customers keep coming back - because we’ve never lost sight of the things that don’t change.

We work hard to:
• Earn direct trust with our customers - by following up personally after orders, checking delivery experiences, and making sure everything met expectations.
• Stay discoverable beyond the gatekeepers - not just through search, but through word of mouth, networking, and the conversations that happen when real people pick up the phone.
• Add human value that can’t be automated - offering practical advice on product selection, visiting sites when it helps, and sending samples or literature the old-fashioned way when it makes a difference.

When we win a customer, we don’t see it as a transaction. We see it as the start of a relationship to nurture - built on reliability, responsiveness, and those small, consistent touches that remind people there’s a team behind the website.

And to my fellow SME owners - working inside the castle grounds for too long can make you forget there’s a world beyond the walls. You start to believe this is the only way to reach people. But it’s worth stepping outside from time to time. The air’s fresher out there, and you might rediscover some of the more tangible ways of connecting that built our businesses in the first place.

Digital advertising once gave marketers crystal-clear data and ROI - numbers we’d never seen before. But as privacy controls and cookie blockers start to round the edges of those analytics, maybe it’s time to revisit the mix. To put a little more effort into the things that can’t be tracked in a dashboard but can still be felt by you and your customers.

That’s how we protect the connection between our team and the people we serve - and why we put so much effort into being remembered, trusted, and easy to reach.