| Home | Business | Brand | Marketing | Innovation | Design |
New York Times, November 3, 2009 — Best Buy sells a lot of DVDs, but it is taking another step to get ready for the day when that business shifts online.
The giant electronics retailer on Tuesday is announcing a partnership with Sonic Solutions‘ Roxio CinemaNow service to deliver first-run DVDs streamed online directly to consumers.
Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2009 — Facing mounting pressure to boost sliding sales and recalibrate his company, P&G CEO Robert McDonald is stepping up the hunt for acquisition and divestiture candidates, people close to the company said.
New York Times, October 29, 2009 — Sanjay Jha’s honeymoon as co-chief executive at Motorola lasted just a few minutes into his first meeting with employees in 2008.
Why should we trust you?” one employee blurted. The frustration was understandable. Motorola, which pioneered cellphones and built such consumer favorites as the StarTac and the Razr, had not had a hit phone in years, and a succession of leaders could not find one.
Mr. Jha, 46, an engineer who worked his way up at Qualcomm from a chip designer to the No. 3 executive, answered the challenge, saying employees should not take him on faith but watch what he did.
Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2009 — McGraw-Hill Cos. agreed to sell BusinessWeek to Bloomberg L.P., marking the growing media ambitions of its new owner and a retreat for McGraw-Hill after 80 years of owning of the business magazine.
New York Times, October 11, 2009 — EVERYWHERE you look these days, businesses are selling subscriptions. Cable television, Internet and cellphone services are sold that way. So are business software, office printing and car rentals like Zipcars.
Harvard Business Review, October 1, 2009 — In May 2009, General Electric announced that over the next six years it would spend $3 billion to create at least 100 health-care innovations that would substantially lower costs, increase access, and improve quality. Two products it highlighted at the time—a $1,000 handheld electrocardiogram device and a portable, PC-based ultrasound machine that sells for as little as $15,000—are revolutionary, and not just because of their small size and low price. They’re also extraordinary because they originally were developed for markets in emerging economies (the ECG device for rural India and the ultrasound machine for rural China) and are now being sold in the United States, where they’re pioneering new uses for such machines.
We call the process used... continue reading
Advertising Age, October 1, 2009 — To charge or not to charge. That's the question many marketers and media companies building mobile apps are asking themselves. Kraft, which has arguably been one of the more successful marketers in the iPhone App Store, charges 99 cents for its iFood Assistant.
Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2009 — The recipe for Vegemite, a salty brown yeast spread famous in Australia, remained unchanged for more than 80 years. Then Irene Rosenfeld became chief executive of Kraft Foods Inc.
This summer, a milder version of Vegemite appeared on store shelves across Australia. Ms. Rosenfeld had almost nothing to do with the reformulated taste, its new packaging or its rollout — which says a lot about how she has tried to transform Kraft since taking over as the food giant's CEO in 2006.
Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2009 — Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Mark Hurd, in what would be one of his biggest moves yet to overhaul H-P's inner workings, is finalizing a plan to combine H-P's printer and personal-computer businesses into one unit under current PC chief Todd Bradley, said people familiar with the situation.
New York Times, September 20, 2009 — THE hum of 102 rooftop air conditioners and a chorus of beeping electric carts provide the acoustic backdrop in Amazon.com’s 605,000-square-foot distribution facility on this city’s west side. But the center’s employees can almost always hear Terry Jones.
On a recent summer afternoon, Mr. Jones, an “inbound support associate” making $12 an hour, steered a hand-pushed cart through the packed aisles and shouted his location to everyone in earshot: “Cart coming through. Yup! Watch yourself, please!” Mr. Jones explained that he was just making his time at Amazon “joyful and fun” while complying with the company’s rigorous safety rules.
But his cries might double as a warning to the retail world: Amazon, the Web’s largest retailer,... continue reading
† Access to articles with this symbol may require a subscription.