Pepsi Sweats Over Gatorade†

CEO Nooyi Concedes Sports Drink's Growth Days Are Over; Redesign Backfires

Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2009 — PepsiCo Inc. is fumbling in its efforts to turn around sales of Gatorade, which weighed on second-quarter profits.

Sales of Gatorade, which PepsiCo snared in its $13.8 billion acquisition of Quaker Oats Co. in 2001, have slid this year despite a flashy new marketing campaign that simplified the product's label to "G."

Motel 6 Has Designs on Your Business

The budget lodging chain hired a designer of cruise ships and airline cabins to spruce up its look and lure in newly cash-conscious travelers

BusinessWeek, July 20, 2009 — Motel 6 hardly has a reputation for good design. At its best, the 47 year-old chain has been heralded for simple, no-frills efficiency. At its worst, it has been the punch line of jokes about dangerous roadside love-ins.

Using Design to Drive Innovation

Designers must deliver the orchestration of the total experience with a brand, product, or service or face irrelevancy

BusinessWeek, June 29, 2009 — In a previous era, all the talk was of strategy, strategy, strategy. More recently, it's been innovation, innovation, innovation. As design thinking seems poised to sweep away some of today's celebrated innovation practices, we must be wondering what new provocation is on the horizon. Relax, I'm not planning to conjure one up.

How to Kick Off an Innovation Project

To build consumer loyalty, Office Max launched a study of what women look for when they buy office supplies

BusinessWeek, June 24, 2009 — "Life is beautiful. Work can be, too." So ends a fantastical commercial for the office supplies company, OfficeMax (OMX), which aired in cinemas earlier this year.

More than just a new marketing campaign, the ad reflects a new direction for a company that had previously based its competitive strategy on price and location

Insight -Out Design

Hub, June 22, 2009 — The Tropicana “orange and straw” debacle is well on its way to becoming a classic example of redesign gone wrong. The lesson is simple but profound: Good designers always remember that they are designing for real people, not for their firms, themselves, or even their clients. This means that design and consumer research are inextricably linked.

Warmer, Fuzzier: The Refreshed Logo

New York Times, May 31, 2009 — The world economy is in mid-swan dive. Wallets are in lockdown. So how does a company get people to feel just a little bit better about buying more stuff? (And perhaps burnish a brand that has taken some public relations lumps?)

Behold the new breed of corporate logo — non-threatening, reassuring, playful, even child-like. Not emblems of distant behemoths, but faces of friends.

Inside MAYA Design's Innovation Boot Camps

Fast Company, May 28, 2009 — The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.

Blowing Up Pepsi

PepsiCo Americas CEO Massimo d'Amore has been rebranding Pepsi's core products top to bottom. Creative destruction—or just destruction?

BusinessWeek, April 16, 2009 — In 14 years at PepsiCo (PEP), Massimo F. d'Amore has muscled through his share of tough jobs. In New York in 2000 he marshaled PepsiCo's successful takeover battle for Gatorade's parent company, Quaker Oats. In 2002 he boosted PepsiCo's sales and profits in Latin America even as the Argentine economy disintegrated. In the following years the Latin America operations grew faster than Coca-Cola's (KO).

Now, d'Amore (pronounced da-more-ay) is tackling his biggest challenge yet: shoring up PepsiCo's North American beverage business.

WaMu's Branches Lose the Smiles†

Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2009 — Before it collapsed last September, Washington Mutual Inc. spent roughly $1 billion on a branch-building binge that replaced bank-teller windows with free-standing counters and cash-dispensing machines.

New owner J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is now dismantling it all, right down to the signs that promise "free checking, free smiles," and basically dragging the former WaMu branches back to the past.

Tiny Hotel Rooms Offer Big Savings

Cost-conscious travelers embrace European-style micro-hotels in pricey markets like New York

Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2009 — Borrowing from a ship’s berth or a train’s sleeper car, developers are moving beyond budget accommodations and gambling that in tough times travelers looking for a little pampering at lower prices will embrace micro-hotels.

The concept of a hotel room the size of a suburban bathroom has spread across Europe in recent years. And as the U.S. economy deteriorates, interest in the idea has grown, especially in high-priced markets such as New York City, where there are fewer options for budget travelers.