The Power of Community in Marketing
from Forbes
Marketing is particularly vulnerable to management mood swings brought on by a poor economy. A few years ago, no self-respecting CMO would be caught dead without a Web 2.0 strategy. Today, marketers are advised to ride out the recession by cutting back to 15-second ads, repurposing old creative and refocusing their attention on segments that are wealthy, hedonistic or both. There is a better way to rethink marketing in a downturn. It's not about shrinking your way to growth; fundamentally, we all know that doesn't work. More

How to Grow a Business
from Inc.
Scaling up your business may look easy on paper, but it can be tricky. Luckily, over the years, plenty of successful entrepreneurs, including iVillage founder Candice Carpenter, have told Inc. all about what they went through. Here are some nuggets of wisdom, plucked from 30 years worth of their stories. More

Stimulus, Schmimulus - What About the SBA?
from Entrepreneur
Over the years, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has gained a reputation for being inadequate to its purported task of small business advocacy. But change, perhaps, is in the air. More

Despite 2.1 Percent Decline, Hope for Retail Sales
from Globe Street
Sometimes numbers can be deceiving - though March 2009 comparable-store store sales declined by 2.1 percent from the same month of 2008, retailers’ moods seem to have lightened, and some shoppers may be emerging from hibernation as the weather turns warmer. More

In This Economy, Everything is (Re)Negotiable
from Entrepreneur
Although there are no hard numbers, Alisa Harrison, a spokesperson for the International Franchise Association, says renegotiating leases is a top strategy for many members looking to cut costs and preserve cash flow. "At our convention, making it through the recession was topic No. 1," she says, "and renegotiating leases is a big part of that." More

Why PR is the Prescription
from BusinessWeek
Times are tough. It can be difficult to keep your focus on driving the top line when the bottom line is bleeding red. Still, you know you can't put your marketing program entirely on hold. You need to do something to attract new customers (and give existing customers more reasons to stay). It may be sacrilege for an ad guy to say so, but I recommend a healthy dose of PR. Yep, PR. More

How to Market in a Downturn
from The Harvard Business Review
In every recession marketers find themselves in poorly charted waters because no two downturns are exactly alike. However, in studying the marketing successes and failures of dozens of companies as they’ve navigated recessions from the 1970s onward, it is possible to identify patterns in consumers’ behavior and firms’ strategies that either propel or undermine performance. More

New Research Initiative to Measure Qualitative Effectiveness of In Store Marketing
from Retail Customer Experience
POPAI, the Global Association for Marketing at Retail, is launching retail-level research across multiple trade channels - including supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchandisers and convenience stores - to determine what displays, marketing at retail materials and shelf layouts work best and, most importantly, why and how they turn shoppers into buyers. More