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Are you a B2B company, putting (or considering putting) significant effort and significant resources into developing a coherent brand for your product? Researching the marketplace and analyzing competing brands? Establishing strategy sessions to review and select the best brand identity? If you are, you're probably wasting a lot of time and a lot of money. For the majority of B2B companies, branding is very likely of little or no value.

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Continual improvement of products and services is an effective approach to maintaining existing customers and winning new ones, especially if your goal is to create strong word-of-mouth. Strong word-of-mouth tends to create customer evangelists, those passionate advocates who tell others about your products and services. To truly understand what your current evangelists think about you, say about you, and do about you, you must dig deeper than the typical satisfaction survey.

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The economic downturn of the past two years has put marketers on the defensive. As budgets have been reduced and reduced again, marketers have stepped up efforts to find the Holy Grail of marketing--the formula, the software, even the general rule of thumb that enables marketers to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. The trouble comes when marketing strategy becomes driven solely by the need and ability to measure marketing effectiveness.

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Once you have a product or service, you have to set a price for it. This may be the most misunderstood exercise in all of marketing. Lucky for you, Dana is prepared to clue you in. Ready?

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Sometimes, less is more. That's especially true in this business climate. If you want to grab a customer’s attention and lock in their loyalty, the key is to save them time, money and effort. And that won't necessarily happen with simply more advertising.

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We thought it would be good to balance out some recent talk on the web about what is marketing. Here's our view.

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This economic "rinse cycle" offers an opportunity to shore up your organization's fundamental strengths. Happily, for anyone responsible for a budget, pursuing the fundamentals doesn’t require cash as much as it requires wit and persistence. In part one of this two-part series, Christopher Kenton underscores five low- or no-cost initiatives you can pursue to bolster your marketing organization.

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Scan the search results page of any portal, and it’s easy to see why Internet search is such a tricky maze for some direct marketers to follow. With “Sponsored Links,” “Direct Web Matches” and “Featured Sites” beckoning consumers, knowing which of these hot strategies is most effective at capturing attention often leaves marketers cold. It may be easier in the short run to stick with simple banner ads, but direct markets risk missing out on important sales leads.

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Do you have a lot of customers, but you haven't done a good job of assembling an email list? Here's five techniques for growing your email list as a marketing tool.

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How do you clue your users in to your site's particular benefits? If you offer something that is unique to your organization (and chances are that you do--that's why you're in business), then how do you make the users aware of these benefits? As with life, the secret is in timing.

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The days of having an intranet just because, well, it's a good idea are over. As a manager, you need to deliver hard data that justifies investment in your intranet. You need to show that a dollar spent on your intranet will deliver more value that a dollar spent elsewhere. Otherwise, your budget will shrink.

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Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover. But you sure can tell a great deal about prospective vendors by the quality of their PowerPoint presentations. Here's what to look for, and what it will tell you.

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Technology is full of differing approaches. But Microsoft v. Linux goes beyond a simple disagreement. It’s a Hatfields-and-McCoys feud, a drama of honor and justice, a fight for the way things ought to be.

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Have you mistakenly trained your branding to fall over and play dead? Do you know how to use psychology to create branding that lights up with the voltage of a thousand neon bulbs? And can you play Scrooge with your budget, yet get huge branding mileage? And if so, how?

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There is a classic saying in management: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So what's it take to measure the value of your content? You need to understand knowledge and information. You need to articulate the objectives you have for your content. You need to compare how your content performs against other forms of communication. And mostly, you need to see content as an asset.

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What's new and cool in the email space? Animation? Flash? Video and voiceovers? Some other hip and sexy technique to grab eyeballs? Put the glitz aside. Would you believe...there's nothing more effective than really knowing your audience? In email marketing, it's more effective than anything else -- even the next shiny thing.

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Look critically at IT's current operating cycles and its approach to business. Paul has, and he's identified five specific reasons why high tech firms will continue to be stuck in a downward spiral. To survive, high tech has to adapt to the current business climate.

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Companies spend millions of dollars each year developing mission and vision statements, identifying their brand, and then communicating their brand promise through various media. Well, employees are the primary “media” in the majority of brand contacts. But in most companies, employees don’t understand the brand promise well enough to communicate it, let alone live it and articulate it clearly.

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elling is a more complicated process than many companies understand, requiring communication with many different "species" of buyers. The good news is that you *can* master communication with every genotype that your company encounters. The bad news is that like insect species, there are a lot of different genotypes and most of them are a little creepy.

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ate last month, Scott Adams kicked off the first National Weasel Day in San Francisco as a shameless plug for his new book, "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel." In a play on Groundhog Day, the new holiday's lore holds that if the weasel entered its cubicle, the economy would rebound in 2003. Alan Greenspan, you can rest easy next year; the weasel provided as sound an economic indicator as any that have come out lately.