Every successful brand has managed to communicate its company's core beliefs and attitudes what the company stands for to its target customers.

When it comes to the return on marketing investment, every penny counts and we should be able to account every penny.

Take a moment to daydream. You've read the New Science of Marketing cover to cover. You've come up with a set of plans to take your brand over the top and crush your competition. You mobilize the troops, sell them on your plans, and turn them loose.

It's time to face some hard facts about Customer Relationship Management. Plain and simple, CRM just isn't getting the job done.

Traditional positioning supports where products and services will play in the market. Many of today's marketing executives understand the importance of positioning, but too often development efforts are done passively, narrowly, and revisited too infrequently.

It's all the talk on websites, at conferences, in nervous boardrooms - CRM isn't driving top-line results. And everyone's getting worried, from the companies who have sunk millions into buying the software, to the software providers themselves, to the IT services companies who see CRM as their best chance for post-dot-bomb survival.

The objective of trade promotion is to sell more products to customers. The age old question is which customers?