In a time of economic hardship, many companies decide to decrease or even eliminate their advertising budget. It’s often the first thing to go, but is it the right choice?

Studies performed by companies such as McGraw-Hill Research and Meldrum & Fewsmith have shown that businesses which continue or increase their advertising efforts during a recession not only increase sales and profits during the recession period, but for years after as well. Those are the companies that come out on top, and it’s all about staying in the mind of your consumer.

Here’s a magazine ad featuring a photo of a serene-looking woman relaxing on a massage table, eyes closed, a terrycloth turban on her head and a few small, flat stones along her back. The setting is Zen-like, with a potted orchid plant on a minimalist table in the background. The ad is obviously for a luxury spa, or for a luxury resort’s luxury spa. Which one? Almost all of them, considering that this imagery is common throughout this industry’s advertising. Only the name of the spa changes.

Creating a fundraising event isn’t easy. From developing the event itself to signing sponsors, then generating that all-important buzz, the job involves a tremendous amount of strategy, cooperation and coordinated efforts. But when the organization is as worthy as the Central Florida Council Boy Scouts of America, everyone is inspired to do their best. Here’s how we launched Orlando’s Corporate Dodgeball Tournament, which benefits Central Florida Council youth programs, by using the Four “A” Metrics: Awareness, Affinity, Action and Analytics.

Good design adds value to consumer products as well as to the Web sites that sell them. How? By positioning the brand to have a higher perceived value among consumers, which increases demand while building a community of brand enthusiasts. In the case of e-commerce Web sites, good design is also essential in creating an easy, stress-free shopping or banking experience that consumers will want to repeat.

Do you think of direct mail as a postcard that’s flung into mailboxes with only a hope that the recipients will bother to read it before feeding it into the shredder? If so, it’s time for an introduction to variable data direct mail.

You may not have thought about it, but there are trends in branding just as there are trends in fashion, music and all other forms of communication (fashion is a form of both communication and branding, considering that what you choose to wear conveys a great deal of information about you).

Yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to present to an outstanding group of people at the Economic Cooperative’s Executive Seminar Series event. What an absolute pleasure. The audience seemed really engaged and the attendees asked some outstanding questions. One of those questions has stuck with me all day. “How does marketing a service differ from marketing a product?”

Throughout the years our methods of business communication have evolved from the Pony Express, USPS, FedEx, facsimile, email, instant messaging and now even texting. This evolution of technology and the increased popularity of mobile digital devices bring with it a serious design question of “what contact information belongs on a business card?”

Today Mike Brown and I attended the Orlando Business Journal’s Florida Economic Update event down at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport. The event’s title was “Recession, Recovery or Business as Usual?” The speakers were amazing, their topics were relevant and the event was phenomenal.