Gatorade Changes Up Its Game

New iterations of Gatorade Thirst Quencher, the flagship Gatorade brand, will sport a large letter G next to the brand's iconic bolt. "For Gatorade, G represents the heart, hustle and soul of athleticism and will become a badge of pride for anyone who sweats," according to a company press release.

BrandWeek

Clay St. Project lets P&G think outside the pyramid

A big Clay Street success story was P&G's Herbal Essences brand. After it was acquired from Clairol in 2001, sales plummeted and the brand was floundering so badly that retailers were threatening to no longer stock it. A Clay Street project was convened to find a way to resuscitate the brand and improve sales. The team agreed to target a hypothetical consumer who was in her late teens to early 20s and active, fun-loving and drawn to the brand's appeal to those interested in natural ingredients.

Cincinnati Enquirer

Sales Down? Time To Dial Down The SKUs

There's a widespread consumer frustration out there, with many shoppers feeling there are too many choices, presented in a way that's needlessly complicated.

So in apparel, they want stores to be curators. You don't go to a museum to see every landscape ever painted--you want to see things from the 18th-century pastoral school. They want that kind of editing. They want retailers to stock brands that show they understand a certain lifestyle, especially now, coming off five years of hard-core brand identification. Take Juicy Couture. Fans know it's come a long way beyond that pink sweatsuit with "Juicy" on the bottom. They think, 'this brand knows I dress up sometimes, and that sometimes I want new sunglasses.'

MediaPost

FedEx Whites-Out the Kinko's Name

Some longtime customers are lamenting the imminent demise of the Kinko's sign, which FedEx will start removing from stores next year. Andy Sernovitz, an author and marketing consultant in Chicago, says he got more frustrated reader responses to a blog item he wrote about the name change than to any other. "It's not just a place you shop," he explains. "A Kinko's moment culminated in something big. It's the night before the term paper, and you've got to get to the frat party. It's your wedding invitation, your résumé, a big presentation."

Business Week

Students At Parsons and The University of Cincinnati Are Innovating And Generating Economic Growth.

It’s easy to get pessimistic in this holiday season as major institutions in our lives, especially the financial institutions, break our trust. But we shouldn’t despair. I recently visited two senior design/innovation classes in Cincinnati and New York where the students were so wonderfully brilliant that my own personal gloom was lifted and replaced by hope.

NussbaumOnDesign

Feelin' Muji

Anonymity is an odd thing for a brand to strive for, but not if you are a "no brand" brand. The goal of Yasui's team is to define Muji by design: to create and refine products toward ultimate simplicity and functionality. Muji is characterized by neutral tones and a bare-bones chic infused into everything from food to beds to bicycles--even a house. Muji ("no mark" in Japanese) screams minimalism to anyone who has entered one of its 433 locations in 16 countries.

Time Magazine

Red Sox unveil new club logos and uniforms

The Red Sox will wear a new gray primary road uniform. These “retro roadies” will feature the word “BOSTON” in blue lettering across the chest and will include a “Hanging Sox” patch on the left sleeve. The new alternate road uniform will be a combination of gray pants and blue jersey with “BOSTON” in red lettering across the chest. Both the home and road alternate uniforms will now feature new alternate “Hanging Sox” logo hats. No changes have been made to the primary home uniform.

boston.com

1/2 Dozen Trends

1) NICHETRIBUTES
2) LUXYOURY
3) FEEDBACK 3.0
4) ECONCIERGE
5) MAPMANIA
6) HAPPY ENDING

trendwatching.com

P&G Tries Again with Pantene

The campaign is the latest attempt to jump-start the brand, which has repeatedly been singled out as a laggard in P&G's North American beauty business. Most recently, Pantene was blamed for making P&G miss the usual 5% annual beauty growth mark. In an earnings call with analysts this April, CEO A.G. Lafley attributed much of that decline to last spring's failed restaging of the brand. Called Parthenon, that campaign, also via Grey, New York, called for organizing the brand's many SKUs into 18 easily identifiable "benefit-themed" collections, including ones for healthy, colored and treated hair. Aimed at minimizing the confusion, the strategy ultimately failed.

BrandWeek

Architect David Rockwell: Broadway to Brand

David Rockwell, the award-winning architect and Broadway set designer who made his name creating minimalist interiors for sushi restaurant chain Nobu, has moved into an unlikely corporate role: brand consultant. Big companies such as JetBlue (JBLU), Coca-Cola (KO), Starwood Hotels (HOT), and Gap (GPS) are hiring his 240-person architecture firm, which consults on everything from store decor to software engineering, to help them come up with ways to broaden their customer appeal in retail and other high-profile environments.

Business Week

When a diaper isn't just a diaper

The purpose of Pampers, conceptualized through cross-department meetings and P&G's vaunted consumer research, is to be a partner with mothers in the physical, social and emotional development of their children.

High-falutin' stuff for a diaper.

Cincinnati Enquirer

Just did it

The Nike Sportswear store in Soho introduces its new Bespoke program today, allowing customers to choose up to 80 individual aspects of the Air Force 1. (In case you're wondering, it takes the old NikeID concept to the next level.) Sounds daunting,I know, but it was fascinating when I tested the process over the weekend.

men.style.com

A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation

Now, this odd couple thinks they have something to gain from one another -- so they've started swapping employees. So far, about two-dozen staffers from the two companies have spent weeks dipping into each other's staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. The initiative has drawn little notice. Previously, neither company had granted this kind of access to outsiders.

Wall Street Journal

Book Club: Outliers: The Story of Success

Life is unfair, as even the bible acknowledges ("Unto every one that hath shall be given … "). We can't all hit a baseball like DiMaggio or sing like the Beatles. But how much do we understand about those who can? Not enough, says Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success."

Newsweek

Rebuilding the Brand

The sun-drenched waterfront hotel in Miami is glitzy, with swaying palms out front and a glittering fountain in the lobby. But the mood inside Wednesday was dark, as the Republican governors Association gathered to try to rebuild a brand badly tarnished at the polls.

Newsweek

The Brand Bubble

Through extensive research using brand and financial data on thousands of brands, I and my colleagues at Young & Rubicam have found that the multiples that markets place on brand valuations far overstate actual consumer sentiment. This means that the value creation most brands are bringing to their companies, and ultimately to their shareholders, is greatly exaggerated. Put simply, most businesses and the financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them.

changethis

Buying Binge Slams to Halt

Suddenly, our consumer society is doing a lot less consuming. The numbers are pretty incredible. Sales of new vehicles have dropped 32 percent in the third quarter. Consumer spending appears likely to fall next year for the first time since 1980 and perhaps by the largest amount since 1942.

New York Times

Sweet Surprise

Goodbye Seduction, Hello Coupons

As the economy rapidly deteriorates from flourishing to floundering, marketers are scrambling to remake their advertising so products seem affordable and sensible rather than indulgent and fabulous. For many big marketers, including automakers, retailers, consumer product companies and even financial services, a major shift in consumer psychology spells an end to the aspirational advertising that has dominated their campaigns for the last decade.

New York Times

Disney, by Design

But now the company also sells $3,900 designer wedding gowns — no characters in sight — and women’s cashmere sweaters “inspired by Tinker Bell.” Interior design offerings include $2,800 leather club chairs and $6,000 chandeliers patterned after the Art Deco décor in Mr. Disney’s former office. One of the company’s new products: couture soap.

Welcome to Disney, the “lifestyle brand.”

New York Times

What Marketers Can Learn From Obama's Campaign

"Better" never works in marketing. The only thing that works in marketing is "different." When you're different, you can pre-empt the concept in consumers' minds so your competitors can never take it away from you.

Ad Age

Thinking by Design

While marketers have appreciated the value of distinctive design for some time now—at least since Apple and Target started making it a key differentiator about a decade ago—design thinking is something else. The premise is that if you tap a designer, or a designer's problem-solving approach, to tackle standard business problems, you will get game-changing results.

That's why Procter & Gamble credits DT for the company's successful turnaround of its Herbal Essences shampoo line. It's also why Bank of America points to DT as the catalyst for its "Keep the Change" program, which automatically entered "rounded up" figures on checks and payments into savings accounts. Ninety-nine percent of customers who opted for Keep the Change stayed with the program, according to BofA.

BrandWeek

The Pitfalls of Nascar Blindness

So it's been fairly amusing (to me, anyway) to listen to many of my adland friends react in horror and utter amazement to the news that John McCain is not all that far behind in the polls. Or maybe even closing in. (It all depends on whose polls you listen to.) Because after all, no one they know is actually voting for McCain -- so who, they're curious to find out, are all these people in the GOP column?

This reaction is a common symptom of something that greatly afflicts people in the advertising community: Nascar blindness. This disease is the strongly held belief that if no one in your little bubble of upscale, artsy Bobo friends is into something, then clearly no one else is, either.

Ad Week

The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to 'Simplifiers'

Tomorrow's consumer will buy more ephemeral, less cluttering stuff: fleeting, but expensive, experiences, not heavy goods for the home.

Harvard Business Review

McDonald's New Packaging Focuses On Content

"We're expressing the quality of the brand in a different way," said Pierre Woreczek, chief brand and strategy officer for McDonald's Europe. "We're moving from lifestyle packaging to one that expresses our passion for food quality while keeping our brand tonality."

Marketing Daily

What Went Into the Updated Pepsi Logo

Pepsi would not discuss what it's paying for the revamp, but experts estimate the cost for a top firm to work five months at north of $1 million. But that's just the beginning. The real cost, said an expert, is in removing the old logo everywhere it appears and putting new material up. For Coke or Pepsi, when you add up all the trucks, vending machines, stadium signage, point-of-sale materials and more around the world, it could easily tally several hundred million dollars, the expert said.

Ad Age

Lou Dorfsman, Design Chief at CBS, Dies at 90

Mr. Dorfsman’s work became a model for corporate communications, in the marketing discipline now called branding. In 1946, when he joined CBS as art director for its successful radio networks, the company was already a leader in both advertising and the relatively new field of corporate identity. Frank Stanton, then CBS’s president, understood the business value of sophisticated design and had earlier hired William Golden as the overall art director; in 1951 Golden designed the emblematic CBS eye, among the most identifiable logos in the world.

New York Times

Pepsi, New Bottles

Brand New

Book Club: Buyology

"Buyology: Truth and Lies About What We Buy," published by Doubleday, lays out the findings of a three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study by Mr. Lindstrom, who is chairman-CEO of Lindstrom Co. He and a team of researchers in Oxford, England, used the most up-to-date neurotechnologies -- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) -- on 2,000 people from five countries in an effort to better understand consumer behavior. The goal was to gauge the efficacy of product health warnings, product placement and subliminal messaging, among other things.

Ad Age

50 Stunning Examples of a great redesign

wefunction.com

PepsiCo Launches Massive Overhaul

PepsiCo today said it will pour some $1.2 billion over three years into a push that will include sweeping changes to its brands, including what Chairman-CEO Indra Nooyi characterized as a revamp of "every aspect of the brand proposition for our key [carbonated soft drink] brands. How they look, how they're packaged, how they will be merchandised on the shelves, and how they connect with consumers."

Ad Age

Fate

Stand by Your Brand: How Cohesive Design Turned Obama Into America’s Leading Man

But the “O” logo is only one element of the two-part Obama campaign. Utilizing the san serif Gotham font, his typeface creates a look that is both formal and friendly, the perfect hallmark of an ideal Presidential candidate. Paired together with its “O” partner, and the Obama brand created a dynamic duo. The symbol occupies the recognizable “hero” role, while the font literally reinforces the brand name. No piece of marketing collateral ever escapes a healthy dosing of logo treatment in a political campaign, but Team Obama has transitioned his sleek modernist look into an iconic symbol so seamlessly it borders on graceful.

dvisible magazine
h/t Steve L.

Transmoflection

Vancouver 2010 Graphic Identity

Subconscious Warm-Up

The upshot of the original study, and numerous replications, was that the subjects subliminally exposed to Apple branding came up with more uses, and their uses were deemed more creative, than those exposed to the I.B.M. logo or to no logo at all. In other words, exposure to the Apple logo appeared to make people more creative.

New York Times Magazine

When you stand for something

It's frustrating to watch marketers, politicians and individuals fall into the obvious trap of trying to stand for something at the same time they try to please everyone or do everything.

Seth's Blog

Salesmen & Sociologists

Here’s what’s happening. First of all, we have substantially exaggerated the power of brands. Most consumers in most categories have little or no brand loyalty. They don’t care which bank they go to (they go to the one that’s across the street.) They don’t care which airline they fly (they fly the one that has the best deal at the best time.) They don’t care what auto insurance they buy as long as it’s cheap or what tomato sauce they buy as long as it tastes good.

Ad Contrarian

Choc in a Box

New Work: Museum of Arts and Design

New at Pentagram

White Castle Equity Video

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Best Global Brands

Then there are the other guys—companies that refuse to let tough times distract them from their long-term brand-building efforts. Sometimes they see a recession as the perfect moment to get a leg up on a weakened rival. Others strengthen their brands to ward off discount competitors. Still others feel they have a knockout new product that requires support. In BusinessWeek 's annual ranking of the 100 Best Global Brands, several are keeping their U.S. marketing budgets steady, as a percentage of revenue.

BusinessWeek

Getting Inside the Customer's Mind

To help it get there, Macy's recently became the latest sales-challenged U.S. retailer to hire a British research shop called dunnhumby. Co-founded in 1989 by marketing geeks Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby, dunnhumby doesn't help retailers find new shoppers. Rather, by crunching data from credit-card transactions and customer loyalty programs, the outfit reveals hidden and lucrative facts about clients' current customers. It can identify who might jump at a particular sale, or who will ditch the store if a certain product goes away. "I really think it's some of the best intelligence available," says Deborah Weinswig, who follows the retail industry for Citigroup.

Business Week

A Pop-Up Agency Shows Off Emerging Talent

A decision was made that Jack & Bill would concentrate on clients in the fashion field because many of the younger Porter Novelli employees worked on accounts in areas like “fashion and style and art and culture,” said Erin Osher, a partner at Jack & Bill who is an account supervisor at Porter Novelli.

“It was really the chance of a lifetime to create an agency with the support and help of a big organization,” said Ms. Osher, who has worked at Porter Novelli for three years.

New York Times

4 Captivating Companies and What They Share

The SAGA companies do very different things and are of hugely different sizes: Google's market capitalization is about $158 billion; Starbucks is down to about $12 billion. Yet they share some remarkable traits. At the most basic level, each has transformed not only a specific commercial marketplace but also some important aspect of contemporary life -- computing and music for Apple, information and advertising for Google, coffee for Starbucks, books for Amazon. In doing so, each has had an appreciable impact on our daily routines, taken on a looming presence in popular culture, and often engendered an intensity of feeling more often associated with tastes in entertainment or political views. Together, they have created a new model of business innovation, culture and values.

Washington Post

The Plot Thickens

Branding in a New Dimension

First, brands cannot be created and managed in a top-down approach. Gone are the days when branding companies could create a brand identity accompanied by a dense, rarely read instruction manual on how to apply it across media. Brands are no longer static. Today they're fluid, flexible and nonlinear.

Ad Week

Book Club: Make.Love.Brand.

We chose Authenticity as the theme for the first volume in our book series Make.Love.Brand. because we believe that the terms of engagement for business are being redefined. We believe that authenticity is a requirement for any company intending to be relevant. And, we believe that without authenticity, there is no love.

Ziba

Target's Design Scout

Michele Caniato, a consultant on high-performance materials for companies such as Nokia (NOK) and Whirlpool (WHR), founded Culture & Commerce with entrepreneur George M. Beylerian in 2000. They applied the concept of Hollywood talent management to product design. "We're a matchmaker and guardian angel," says Caniato, adding that the firm has negotiated $65 million in designer contracts to date.

Business Week

P&G to sell Noxzema

Sources familiar with the deal told The Enquirer that Alberto-Culver Co. of Melrose Park, Ill., will acquire Noxzema, which P&G has owned since 1989. A sale price was not available. P&G spokesman Paul Fox declined to confirm the deal on Sunday, saying the company does not comment on rumors.

Cincinnati Enquirer

Sweet Revenge

It’s a cliché that the fight for survival brings out the best in business rivals, but a clear rivalry is also useful to consumers — it’s something to latch on to, an opportunity to take sides.

New York Times Magazine

Target to Open Designer-Focused Stores in NY

Target is calling these temporary stores bodegas to convey an egalitarian and very New York shopping experience, said Ms. Tesija. They will be located in vacant storefronts in Midtown, Union Square, SoHo and the East Village, and will open Sept. 12, which is the end of Fashion Week.

“The idea was really generated based on the Target take on Fashion Week,” she added. “This would be a way we could bring affordable design to the masses.”

New York Times

What the Heck?

'Where to' might not be as important as 'how loud'

The alternative is to do your best to pick a direction (hopefully an unusual one, hopefully one you have resources to complete, hopefully one you can do authentically and hopefully one you enjoy) and then do it. Loudly. With patience and passion. (Loud doesn't mean boorish. Loud means proud and joyful and with confidence.)

No flitting, no waiting for proof. Just consistent, overwhelming performance in pursuit of a vision you believe in. That's far more important than which direction you chose in the first place. And yes, I think it's a marketing decision, because the market embraces 'how.'

Seth's Blog

Coke's New Design Direction

When Butler reviewed the state of design at Coca-Cola on his arrival, evaluating everything from the branding created for the then-recent 2004 Olympics in Athens to the process that the company's 300-plus bottling partners went through to get approval for new bottle designs to the customer experience of buying a Coke from a vending machine, he found a lot that needed fixing.

Business Week

Michel Gondry Levi's Commercial

Marketers get to us in more ways

"There are probably more pretty good products being sold in America now than at any time in history. This is a tribute to progress, but it both complicates our decision making as consumers," he writes, and makes it difficult for one product to stand out.

USA Today

Mixing It Up

It all sounds less like an ad than like a skit — the old Dan Aykroyd “Bass-O-Matic” bit on “Saturday Night Live” crossed with the recurring “Will It Float?” segment on “Late Show With David Letterman.” Then again, Dickson will, with deadpan delivery, touch on a product attribute here and there. And reducing 50 marbles to dust does suggest that the device sure is powerful, in a 1970s infomercial sort of way.

New York Times

Retailing icon Mickey Drexler doubles down

These brands tap into nostalgia, but Drexler does not want J. Crew's stores to be fantasyscapes that transport the shopper back to the country estates of Evelyn Waugh or the Africa of Isak Dinesen's memoirs. He dislikes the way a lot European designers' boutiques are intimidating. "Maybe its my Bronx upbringing, but I don't like elitist approaches. We don't take ourselves too seriously at J. Crew," he says. "Going into a store is kind of like meeting a person. I want J. Crew to come across as open, warm, and friendly."

Fortune Magazine

How to Win by Studying Culture: An Interview with Grant McCracken

If I could add an MBA course, I would call it "Anthropology and Ethnography In Business," and it would lay bare the culture that shapes how consumers think and feel and how culture determines what they want. It would teach students how to do "ethnography" which is the method anthropologists use to study culture, and in our case to extract the parts of the culture that matter so that these can be built into product development, innovation, promotion, advertising, direct marketing, digital marketing, new media, and the rest of the marketing package.

Harvard Business Review

Stop & Shop unveils new logo

Gone are the red and green traffic lights that served as the company's symbol since it opened in 1914 In their place: a yellow bowl with three colorful halves that can be interpreted as bowls of fruit, bread or ingredients, the company's spokesperson said.

Boston Globe

Put a Little Zappos in Your Day!

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Those Shelved Brands Start to Look Tempting

Marketers of consumer products go through a similar process during economic downturns, taking stock of brands they already own to see if any can be revived or renewed. It can cost significantly less to bring back a brand — or restore the luster to a faded one — than to develop a new product, because spending huge sums to generate awareness is not necessary.

New York Times

Nike Liu Xiang Ad

This is the type of thing that makes Nike a leader in sports marketing. When the other sponsors privately cringe at the thought of one of their top guys going down, the folks at the Swoosh actually think, "How do we spend on this and turn it into a great human moment that appeals to people?"

CNBC.com

Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands

Mr. Tulley’s transformation highlights a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands.

“A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,” says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. “You can’t simulate everything.”

New York Times

Designing the Future of Business

A 2007 survey by Kelton Research for Autodesk (ADSK) found that when seven in 10 Americans recalled the last time they saw a product they just had to have, it was because of design. The survey found that among younger people (18 to 29 years old), the influence of design was even more pronounced. In Britain, a recent survey by the Design Council found that 16% of British businesses say design tops their list of key success factors. Among "rapidly growing" businesses, no fewer than 47% rank it first.

Business Week

More Bounce for Bounce

It is significantly difficult to get excited about dryer sheets — those scented thingies you put in the dryer to make your clothes smell better and cling less to your underwear — but this redesign is relatively exciting. Bounce, a product from the infinite P&G empire, recently launched a complete redesign of their full line of dryer sheets, which come in a variety of scents and styles. A large variety.

Brand New

Even P&G finds market difficult

"Lots of companies say that they're recession-proof. But when the recession comes, everybody gets touched, and P&G is not immune to that," said Richard Smith, an analyst who covers P&G for the Motley Fool.

Cincinnati.com

Mars Takes M&M’s Out of Their Shell

“Some of the first creative I saw was very serious and indulgent, and treated the product like this very rich new M&M thing,” Ms. Credle said.

But she believed that M&M’s candy was supposed to be fun. She revised the ads so that they parodied typical premium chocolate ads, and brought in a character — a sexy green M&M — that had been used in much of the traditional M&M’s advertising.



New York Times

Ex-Sara Lee, Nike executive hired by Brandimage-Desgrippes & Laga

Brandimage-Desgrippes & Laga, a global brand design consultancy firm based in Walnut Hills, has turned to a former president of Sara Lee Retail Foods to lead North America strategy for the company.

Cincinnati.com

America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least)

America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

The Pitfalls of Megabranding

But then again, the whole idea of a megabrand is to strip the brand name of any actual meaning and turn it into a Paris Hilton. Famous for being famous.

Will it work? Maybe. Marketing is never one-sided. Winners are usually those companies whose strategies are better than the strategies of their competitors.

Ad Age

Font of Youth: How is Obama Like Target?

Like Aeron chairs or Eames furniture, Helvetica and its ilk have enjoyed a revival in the 21st century, and—like so much in campaigns—the use of the font sends multiple messages. First, given how small-c conservative most campaign design is (something like this could have been a campaign design for any candidate in the last four decades), the font and the all-around look communicates modernity—it reinforces the "change" branding. If you think of a Presidential candidate as a brand—and their campaigns do—it's young... but not too young. It also communicates a level of familiarity and safety, because you've seen if pretty much everywhere in commercial culture. (John McCain's website, befitting a conservative and old-school candidate, has a more traditional design and mix of serif and sans-serif fonts.)

Tuned In

How Stengel Found Purpose, Post-P&G

Stengel's interest in the institute stems from his kinship with Spence, whom he first met through a mutual friend about three years ago. Since then, Spence has spoken several times at P&G -- as part of the company's advanced general-manager training program -- and Stengel has visited GSD&M, which at one point he eyed as a potential agency partner for the packaged-goods giant.

More recently, as Stengel, 53, planned the next chapter of his career after 25 years at P&G, Spence, 59, invited him to become an advisor to the think tank -- a role Stengel will assume after publishing a book about marketing early next year.

Ad Week

Summer Silliness Brings a Pizza Field and a Giant Oreo

Alternative is a good way to describe the Right Guard campaign staged in London last month. While Right Guard referred to the subway stunt as “pitvertising,” bloggers called it icky and posted cheeky speculations about what might happen if the technique were applied to other products.

New York Times

Business Model Innovation: Best Buy, P&G and Apple Get it. Starbucks Doesn't Get It.

An economic crisis can be a crucible that forges new innovations in business operations or they can lead companies to make dumb mistakes that destroy them as they rush blindly to survive. We’re beginning to see corporations move into one camp or the other as the economic downturn gets worse and worse.

Nussbaum on Design

Artists Revealed

Beck's Canvas

Courage

Nelson Peltz, activist marketer

Brand reinvention is usually not part of a raider's attack plan, unless you're Nelson Peltz. Peltz, 66, spends hours wandering supermarkets, malls, and fast-food restaurants with his ten children (ages 5 to 45) to get investing ideas, which he later chews over with partners Peter May and son-in-law Ed Garden, who together run Trian, a hedge fund founded in 2005. According to people familiar with the fund, Trian now has more than $5 billion under management, including investments in companies such as Heinz, Wendy's, and Tiffany.

Fortune Magazine

James Biber Remakes Starbucks for ‘Architect’

The July issue of Architect magazine asked five architects, including James Biber, to redesign Starbucks in light of the company’s recent downturn. (Shares have fallen by 42% in the last year, and the company has announced its plan to shutter 600 stores.) Biber, who is featured on the cover caffeinating in New York’s City Bakery, proposed an environment that caters to a range of experiences—from fast to slow, from social to private—within a setting redesigned to be simple, efficient and universal. The approach even includes a new name for the chain: *$.

blog.pentagram
architectmagazine.com

Book Club

johnnybunko.com

The Best Global Design of 2008

The second big trend in 2008 was the return to minimalism and elegance. Apple's (AAPL) gold-winning MacBook Air laptop and iPhone best represented this trend. So did the silver-winning Whirlpool (WHR) Duet front-loading washing machine. Other winners were not beautiful but simply sensible. The Flip video camera by New York's Smart Design and Pure Digital Technologies is a pocket-size, easy-to-use videocam that employs no cables or complex software.

Business Week

WOO WOO

Stengel on Leadership, New Media and the Purpose Institute

Our pilots [on single-point agency leadership] are going exceptionally well. We are learning a lot from them. But there's no doubt the future for P&G and our agencies will be on high-performing, highly inspired integrated teams. That's where I think you get breakthroughs and embrace a lot of the opportunities we maybe were not embracing years ago when our teams were not as integrated.

Ad Age

The Process

P&G Global Marketing Chief Stengel to Step Down

The company announced today that Mr. Stengel, 53, who captains its $5.2 billion marketing budget, will step down Oct. 1. He will be working on special projects effective Aug. 1.

Succeeding him will be Marc Pritchard, 48, former head of P&G's cosmetics business who most recently had overseen a stepped-up global restructuring effort concentrated largely on how the company's regional market development organizations and global business units divide their duties.

Ad Age

Starbucks' Lessons for Premium Brands

Schultz sought, admirably, to bring good coffee and the Italian coffeehouse experience to the American mass market. Wall Street bought into the vision of Starbucks as the "third place" after home and work. New store openings and new product launches fueled the stock price. But sooner or later chasing quarterly earnings growth targets undermined the Starbucks brand in three ways.

Harvard Business Review

BBDO acquires Barefoot

"We have been interested in Barefoot for several years," said Andrew Robertson, President and CEO, BBDO Worldwide. "We're both about 'The Work,' and we have been impressed with how they've evolved into a digitally-driven integrated agency. Recently, we've had a chance to work together and get to know each other's organizations. We felt like this was a good time to forge a partnership."

Cincinnati Enquirer
Ad Age

The Death of Mass Luxury

It certainly looks that way. Executives at luxury retailers such as Saks (SKS), and high-end brands ranging from Coach (COH) to Karl Lagerfeld, are bemoaning the disappearance of free-spending shoppers. "You're seeing more pressure on that aspirational luxury consumer at our entry-price points," says Steve Sadove, chief executive officer at Saks.

Business Week

How to make everyone happy

If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people and create change that lasts, you're going to offend those that hate change in all its forms. Your choice.

Seth Godin's Blog

Weak economy may be Wal-Mart’s strong suit

A year ago, Wal-Mart seemed to be mired in a world of woes. The discounter’s sales growth was anemic and its share price was slumping. Its two big nemeses, WakeUpWalMart.com and Wal-Mart Watch, two union-backed campaigns critical of Wal-Mart’s labor practices, regularly lambasted the retailer for its wages, benefits and treatment of workers. An attempt to appeal to more affluent shoppers had backfired badly, leaving the company’s apparel and other departments struggling. The company had been forced to scale back growth plans.

MSNBC.com

Safeway Hires P&G Vet Dietz as CMO

Safeway yesterday said it appointed Diane M. Dietz as its new evp and CMO, filling the spot vacated by Brian Cornell, who left the grocer to become CEO of Michael's Stores.

Dietz will oversee Safeway's marketing, merchandising, manufacturing, and distribution functions, and reports directly to Steve Burd, the chairman, president and CEO.

Brand Week

The End of the Line for Line Extensions?

Within the past year, some of the most heavily extended personal-care brands in those giants' portfolios -- Unilever's Dove and P&G's Pantene and Olay -- have slowed substantially or even declined in the U.S.

Ad Age

On Motivation

Outofyourleaguegirl

P&G's Sustainability Initiatives -- Not So Sustainable

Yet several of P&G's competitors have begun rethinking their approaches to chemical use. Earlier this year, Clorox launched a line of natural plant-based home cleaners; Wal-Mart, eager to line its shelves with green products, couldn't wait to get them into its stores. S.C. Johnson created a Greenlist, a ranking of chemicals according to their safety, and wherever possible has stopped using chemicals from the most hazardous class. Method and Seventh Generation, two smaller companies that make cleaning products using naturally derived ingredients, have been growing by double digits while some of P&G's comparable brands are flat or declining.

Fast Company

How to Build Brand Friendship

That human dynamic is the root of brand loyalty as well. Our "relationships" with brands aren't nearly as deep or meaningful as human relationships, but they do share some of the same characteristics. The extent to which you can create a sense of belonging, friendship, and dependability between your brand and customers is the extent to which you have a powerful brand asset.

Business Week

Wolff Olins' Intuitive Branding

So it seemed like a good moment to see if Wolff Olins (part of the Omnicom media conglomerate) has found the secret of being taken seriously by top-flight clients and yet still managing to produce work that is successful, news-worthy and distinctive. On a cold day in January, I went to their spacious offices near King's Cross to find out.

Business Week

Less Hyphen, More Burst for Walmart

Brand New