What does it take to be an effective leader? Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author, professor and nationally recognized expert in change management, identified seven requisite skills for participants in the "Building a World-class Business: Redefining Business as Usual" conference last week. The event was organized by Seton Hill University's National Education Center for Women in Business. Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business administration at Harvard University and co-founder of Goodmeasure Inc., a business consulting company. According to her, those enduring skills are:

Tune in to the environment to sense opportunities. "Find a set of needs that need to be filled ... look for opportunities to fill in the gap where needs are not being met, and sometimes, not yet articulated."

Develop kaleidoscope thinking. Move beyond "thinking outside of the box," Kanter said, suggesting a kaleidoscope might be a more apt metaphor for fighting entrenched thinking patterns. She urged leaders to "look at all of your assets -- move them around and see if they create new opportunities."

Communicate your vision in a compelling way. "You have to show that you care about it," advised Kanter. "You don't have to get everyone together on the details; you just have to get them moving in the same direction."

Find supporters. According to Kanter, successful innovators bring together a coalition of people, be it sponsors, backers or friends, to build on their vision. Smaller companies also can form alliances with larger companies and build mutually beneficial relationships.

Transfer ownership to a working team. Successful leaders build teams that understand the company vision and can successfully manage their area of the enterprise to support that vision.

Master the inevitability of difficulties and manage them. "Everything can look like a failure in the middle," warned Kanter, and stamina and perseverance are needed to "master those middles."

Share credit and recognition. As a business meets milestones, has successes and continues on the path toward the fulfillment of the vision, it is important for leaders to acknowledge the contributions of the team. "Everyone counts on other people, and those other people need credit and recognition," said Kanter.

Marketing on a Shoestring

Suzanne Teele, chief executive officer of Aceda LLC, and Pam Selker Rak, president of CommuniTech, spoke to attendees at the conference "Marketing Techniques for Tight Budgets." Both emphasized the importance of not allowing a slow economy to reduce marketing efforts. "Marketing is a long-term business investment, not a bloated cost center," said Rak. "You can't afford not to market." Teele agreed. "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer," and marketing is the mechanism for accomplishing it. Marketing should never be optional, even in challenging economic times."

Effective marketing begins by correctly identifying your customer, product, price and sales process, said Teele. Your customer is "the person or business that can most readily benefit from your product and is willing to pay for it," said Teele. She warned against the "spaghetti approach" to marketing, in which you tell everyone about your product "in hopes that something will stick." Dollars spent chasing customers who don't need or don't value your product are wasted dollars.

According to Teele, the buyer must determine that your product will solve a problem for her, and it will solve the problem better than any other product available on the market. The buyer makes that determination by weighing several factors: what is unique about your product, what is your company's reputation for keeping the promises it makes during the marketing and sales process, and is the product easy to buy and use?

Rak then presented 10 tips for implementing an integrated marketing program on a tight budget. Among them:

Create a targeted customer database, keep it up to date and use it.

Reduce advertising spending and increase public relations activities. "It is always better to have someone else tell your story -- it is more powerful."

Your print vendor can offer some simple strategies for reducing the cost of printing your marketing collateral.

Target your reach. It is far more effective to hit a smaller number of people frequently than it is to target a larger number of people less frequently.

Use market research to evaluate if your marketing program is reaching the correct target and if it is doing it in an effective manner.

View your marketing vendors as partners. If you hire a marketing consultant, rely on the experts to help you develop and implement the program.

Branding

Effective positioning requires defining and building a mental relationship with the customer, according to Laura Gongos and Jody Lange of Burson-Marsteller, who last week addressed the Pittsburgh Technology Council's Marketing Network.

Gongos has been in the branding and communications field for more than 20 years, and is spearheading the regional branding effort (Image Gap) for the Pittsburgh region. Lange is a director with the advertising and marketing firm, and has worked for such diverse clients as Accenture, Duquesne Light, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield and Coca-Cola Co.

According to the pair, the key to successful branding is learning to create a simple, powerful message that communicates concisely what you are about. It creates in the mind of the customer a fixed positive image. Defining that image with the target audience requires providing it with a functional, tangible benefit, and building a relationship on that.

Every brand must answer: What does the brand do? What makes it different and relevant? What does it stand for? What facts and figures support it? The answers to those questions should fit into a single positioning statement.

"In the end, branding defines the entire relationship a company has with the consumer," Gongos said.