Deciding where to spend your marketing dollars is often difficult, because there is rarely a straight line from the investment to a specific financial result. Much of marketing's impact, the argument goes, cannot be determined directly.

Customers become very discerning during a downturn and getting their attention becomes the challenge of every brand out there, says Vinesh Nair, Executive Director and Co-Founder of The Sphinx Group.

Branding guru Matt Bowen believes that, when it comes to customers, branding begins at home. The most overlooked customers, he says, are under your company's own roof. Bowen, the President and CEO of Aloft Group, explains why the first customer for any marketing program isn't your target audience; it's the people in your company.

CMOs in professional-service firms face daunting challenges: practitioners who may not understand or like the idea of marketing, and a continuous barrage of questions about the effectiveness and cost of marketing programmes. Now is the time for professional-service marketers to rethink their strategies.

In today’s Net-connected world, your business details are in the public domain. So can we say goodbye to traditional, written-in-stone business listings? We speak with Marc Lyne, co-founder of Brownbook.net – a free, global business directory that anyone can edit