A few days ago I was talking with the marketing director of a local business. She had run onto resistance from the business owner to moving forward with some new marketing ideas. The owner had tried various marketing approaches in the past that had failed and his fear of failing again had him stuck doing the same things and hoping for better results. Now I would concede that this decision might make some sense had he been getting acceptable results from his current approach, but revenues were far below break even and had been for some time. Maybe the economy will improve and pull his business levels up with it. I hope for his sake that it does and soon. But if it were me, I would not want to risk my business on the hope of an economic turnaround.

I realize that it is hard to risk doing something new when your buisness is losing money, but is that really worse than ongoing losses into the indefinite future? My recommendation - regularly try new marketing approaches but keep investments low until you get the formula right. When you have a winner (you're getting back many times the dollars you're spending on your new approach) pour on the investment and scale up your results. Where to get the funds? Cut back on your least effective marketing investment and shif the dollars to the new approach. If you fail completely to find a profitable formula, your situation will only be little worse than it would be had you done nothing -- and there is a good chance that you'll end up much, much better off.