6) A key attribute for any successful marketing campaign is repetition – your company may not have marketing resources of an Intel (their "Intel Inside" campaign far exceeded their marketing goals) but you do need to repeat your message and reinforce branding and market awareness by touching your market segment via multiple reinforcing marketing processes; i.e. search engine ranking, print, opt-in e-mail, radio/TV, sponsorship buttons, newsletter inserts, etc.

7) Make it easy to do business with your company by offering pricing and terms of service that fit your client's needs – Digit-Net technologies (www.digi-net.com) sells software and or ASP services to its customers by offering them terms of services that can be flexed to fit their needs, not other way around.

8) Switching costs are high in this challenging market – companies and individuals don't want to change their habits, as this can cost them more money. So, figure out how you can adapt your products and services to fit their needs to minimize their switching costs. Then, communicate this effectively via all of your marketing processes.

I can't stop thinking about how valuable some countries are for their manufacturers. A high-tech brand coming from Japan makes sense for most of us. I'm convinced promotional task for a high-tech brand in, say, USA, would be a substantially easier one if product hailed from Japan than it would be if its label read "Made in Iceland". Why? Because country establishes brand's initial reputation.

Conversely, brands themselves can create countries' reputations. Let's consider Finland. If I asked you to respond to notion of Finland ten years ago you'd probably have said things like "cold", "midnight sun", and so on. Today you're likely to think of high-tech mobile phone technology when you think of Finland. And this huge mind shift is purely thanks to Nokia (which, by way, was a chainsaw manufacturer just twenty years ago).

So, you can claim that brands create countries' reputations and that countries create brands' reputations. This is a very interesting piece of theory to keep in mind for when you next find opportunity to create a new brand from scratch. The theory should not only make you consider what values your brand should stand for, but also where it should be manufactured and where it should be perceived as being manufactured. Having wrong country label on your package won't destroy your brand, but I'm convinced that having right "Made in" label will save you a substantial amount of marketing money.