What Are The Most Important Business Challenges?

Q:Few would dispute that many businesses today face unprecedented difficulty, change, and paradoxically: opportunity. For some time now we have been examining how we might be of best marketing help to smaller, growing businesses with the ambition to succeed.

A:I'd be grateful for feedback from business owners and marketing professionals in the following areas: * Which are the most challenging areas you face in doing business today? * Given information "overload" and the plethora of business advisors, what areas could be better covered? *How do you feel about sharing your experiences with your marketing peers, hopefully to shorten the learning curve? My purpose in asking these questions is not principally to solicit clients, but rather to facilitate our own thinking about the changes we should be making ourselves. And of course to stimulate a lively discussion to the benefit of everybody. I think that is right. Why do you think there is so much suspicion of marketing amongst small business leaders? Do they equate marketing with huge expense they cannot afford? It need not be like that. Good marketing, needless to say, could save them from very expensive and sometimes terminal mistakes.