Often, it's not clear what it means for some practice to be "best." Best at what? And by what standard?

What works well for one of your competitors or another company doesn't necessarily mean it will work well for your organization. Following in the footsteps of other companies is called mimicry, and while it might be flattering, it is often very dangerous.

This is a very good question and answers on the web typically ends up being a lot of tactics, like advertising, brand management, sales, service, pricing, email marketing, etc. That's a good start, but far from complete.

And that's one of the problems with the web. If you go to search engines like Google and type in "marketing expert", you'll come up with over 27,000 web pages! When you've got that many people claiming to be experts in marketing, it's difficult to even know what marketing means.