As counterintuitive as it might sound, avoid discounting. Our columnist offers advice on positioning your company to survive and thrive. Unpredictable. Slow. Bleak. Grim. Gloomy. All words that have been used to describe the economic outlook for the balance of 2008—and depending upon who you talk to, the scenario for 2009 and beyond. Standard & Poor's believes the economic difficulties we've been experiencing due to the mortgage mess and skyrocketing oil prices will be at their worst early next year (BusinessWeek.com, 6/13/08). And while the housing market is sure to recover, oil prices may never come back down. That means more tough times for the economy, both in the U.S. and globally.

Your relationship with your customers takes place over time, and web 2.0 trends and technologies are lengthening and deepening your relationship with your customers. How they interact with any single campaign is just one data point and not the complete picture. To understand the true impact of your marketing campaigns, you need to know how consumers interact with those campaigns over time.

Web-based design tool lets the beverage giant customize marketing for hundreds of brands globally while slashing the time it takes to reach consumers. Walk into any grocery or convenience store and you're likely to see big sales signs tied to events—say, an Olympic-themed sign promoting a series of limited edition Coca-Cola (KO) cans that were available during the Beijing Summer Games. In the past 12 months, Coca-Cola Enterprises, the biggest bottler and distributor of Coke products in the U.S., has created 700,000 of these customized point-of-sale materials alone and expects to pump out 50% more in the next year.

Online advertising has become an increasingly important part of the small business marketer's toolkit. With the receding economy imposing budget cuts for large and small businesses alike—especially any program aimed at pie-in-the-sky mass brand extension without an immediate return—there is an even greater need to focus your dollars on the most targeted and engaged audience.

A financial crisis, two wars, a presidential election - when there is so much for readers to think about, how do magazines aimed at thoughtful readers attract their attention? In a new U.S. marketing push, one such magazine, The Economist, is spoofing the game Twister, distributing pizza boxes that improbably bear its name and sponsoring a performance of political satire. Another such magazine, The Atlantic, plans to advertise on the muffin displays in New York City convenience stores, on restaurant menu boards and on the shampoo shelves of drugstores. 

Already facing a grim economic forecast, U.S. newspapers are digesting another piece of bad news: The growth in online advertising they saw as their salvation has slowed to a crawl.In the past few years, newspaper companies have been rapidly expanding their Web presence - adding blogs, slide shows and podcasts - in the belief that if they built it, advertisers would come. But after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent from a year earlier, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the only year-on-year decline since the association began measuring online revenue in 2003.