The economy is sour, consumers aren't buying, and the competitive landscape is mutating. From marketers everywhere we hear a collective "where to even begin?"

"Start with a company-wide deep breath, since it's so hard to panic during a deep breath, and it's conducive to thinking and creativity, too," suggests Tim Berry, president of Eugene, OR-based Palo Alto Software.

He and a few other industry pundits—including Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott, Bryan Eisenberg, and Jonathan Salem Baskin—recently lent their advice for marketing smarter, and for less, in the down economy.

You'll find their comments and more here in our quick list of the steps that marketers can immediately start taking to hone their programs and cut back on expenses.

Step 1: Get back to basics

When the going gets tough, the tough get down to business and figure out exactly where they are, how they got there, what it was that originally led them to their heyday, and how they might evolve those strategies to function through the current economy.

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