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Ten minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve we saw a rare meltdown on national television and one last 2016 celebrity death: Mariah Carey’s reputation. Millions saw Carey’s disastrous performance—some in person in Times Square and some live on television; the rest of us saw it later online. Unfortunately, Ms. Carey, one of the top-selling recording artists of all time, refuses to own up to her botched performance, and instead points fingers at everyone else, magnifying her mistake on stage. Rather than learning from past lip syncing scandals (e.g. Ashlee Simpson’s 2004 “Saturday Night Live” lip syncing debacle), Carey and her PR team are ensuring that this crisis to her brand—which should have lasted a day—will last an eternity.

New products and features are imperative for sustaining and growing a business, and marketing can drive the success (or failure) of a product launch. Your go-to-market strategy provides a strategic plan that clarifies how to reach your target customers and better compete in your market, bringing together your key business drivers: sales, marketing, distribution, pricing, branding, competitive analysis, and consumer insights. Go to market strategies can be applied to new product launches as well as existing products and services. Following are seven steps to formulating your strategy:

The start of a New Year incites new resolutions, and the advent of technology and innovation has marketers facing new challenges. As brands start planning for 2015, marketers will need to step up their games and keep ahead of brewing industry trends to gain a competitive edge. Below are four trends that transcend across both B2B and B2C marketing, and that should be considered as we head into the New Year.