…especially automotive redesigns, is the message you send to customers and the world when you undertake one. Are you, essentially, saying your previous design was no good? Everyone loves new and improved!, but what are you admitting about the product upon which you’re improving?
Ford, contrary to industry trend and general common sense, apparently thinks so. At a meeting [...]

Retailer Target found itself in a PR mess of its own making last week, one it could easily have minimized - perhaps even avoided altogether.
The dustup began when Shaping Youth, a blog that covers the world of marketing to children, contacted Target in regards to a rather suggestive billboard it had placed in Times Square. The good-intentioned [...]

Forgive the flippant title to this post, but that’s what we thought as we read of a recent study [head's up - link is a PDF download] showing that companies which retain just 5 percent more of their customers than they currently do will earn anywhere from 35 percent to 95 percent more profit.
Odds are [...]

Twice in the past six months or so, we’ve attracted the attention (and, some may say, the ire) of one of the most widely read ad blogs around, adrants. The first time was this past summer, when we made public our redesigned Web site. The jaded misanthropes at Adrants were underwhelmed by our new site, to put [...]

Ford Motor Company just made a move that is causing a stir. The car maker is no longer allowing an enthusiast group, the Black Mustang Club, to use photos of their own mustangs for their club calendar. Ford claims that they “own” the photos.
The dream of any brand is to have people nuts enough to [...]

Circuit City’s plan to fire some 3,400 “high-paid” employees and replace them with lower-paid ones is yet another example of a troubling trend of reducing people to numbers. Sadly, CC is not alone. There are scores of corporations that have taken the same approach. CC takes the brunt because it’s out in front of everyone [...]

Interesting story in this week’s PRWeek. (Note, I think the Web site’s subscription-based.) It looks at a new storyline that will play a prominent role in the fifth and final season of HBO’s sparsely watched but critically acclaimed “The Wire.”The storyline in question will revolve around the Baltimore Sun, a barely fictionalized version of the [...]

In Detroit, a couple hours’ north of us, the annual auto-erotic lovefest known as the North American International Auto Show is in full swing. In addition to your regular mix of auto badges from Europe, Japan, South Korea and, yes, the United States, this year’s cast of characters also includes car makers from a country eager to [...]