According to marketing guru Philip Kotler, author of Ten Deadly Marketing Sins: Signs and Solutions, your company needs to re-prioritize its marketing objectives if it commits a marketing "sin":

1. Your company is not sufficiently market focused and customer driven.
2. Your company does not fully understand its target customers.
3. Your company needs to better define and monitor its competitors.
4. Your company has not properly managed its relationships with stakeholders.
5. Your company is not good at finding new opportunities.
6. Your company has a deficient marketing planning process.
7. Your company needs to tighten product and service policies.
8. Your company's brand-building and communication skills are weak.
9. Your company is not well organized to carry on effective and efficient marketing.
10. Your company has not made maximum use of technology.

Addressing the first "deadly sin" -- an insufficient market focus -- Kotler writes that many companies incorrectly identify their market as "everyone" or make as vague a statement as "women between ages 20 and 50." Instead, a company should customize its customer by identifying different market segments and preparing offerings for each chosen segment. In addition, the company should identify the more important segments, assign managers to them, and award those managers accordingly.

Another major error by companies is to assume only the marketing and sales departments serve the customer. Kotler says every employee -- perhaps through a companywide training program -- should understand his or her connection to the customer.

"To change an ingrained culture to put customers at the center of the company universe would take strong and determined new leadership," writes Kotler. In addition to sponsoring a companywide training program, he suggests the company:

• Develop a clear hierarchy of customer groups and values to company personnel;
• Show employees in each department how their behavior can positively or negatively affect the attraction or retention of customers;
• Regularly measure and feature findings on customer satisfaction, and include bonuses if customer satisfaction rises or reaches a certain point;
• Make sure that all the distributors and dealers also are customer obsessed.

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PHILIP KOTLER is the S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and the author of 30 books, including Marketing Insights from A to Z and Lateral Marketing.