Inter IKEA, the parent of IKEA, announced last summer that it was partnering with a hotelier to create a new hotel brand that oddly wouldn’t feature any of the Swedish furniture maker’s products. It’s now been confirmed at the Berlin International Hotel Investment Forum that Marriott is the partner and Moxy will be the name of the new affordable hotel chain, which plans to open 150 locations across Europe in the next decade.

“Moxy Hotels is the essence of the next generation traveler, not only Gen X and Y but people with a younger sensibility, for whom contemporary style is paramount,” said Arne Sorenson, president and CEO of Marriott International in a press release. “Every aspect of the hotel was thoughtfully researched and crafted to reflect and deliver on the changing lifestyles and expectations of this fast-growing customer segment.” 

According to TravelBite, this will be Marriott’s first budget brand in Europe. Fifty of those locations should be up and running in the next five years and Inter IKEA will be ponying up $500 million to help out, the Wall Street Journal reports. While the hotels won’t use IKEA furniture, the company has found a way to keep construction costs down in a different way: “Many of the hotels will use rooms prefabricated offsite and then assembled like IKEA furniture, a modular type of construction that is new for Marriott.”Continue reading...

What's the best way for a well-known retailer to introduce its brand to a new country? Come bearing gifts. That, apparently, is Target's strategy. In advance of its spring 2013 launch in Canada, the retail chain is laying the groundwork with PR-positive initiatives, including a push to support Canadian charities, sustainable stores, and a focus on Canadian fashion designers.

Target has pledged to give $1 million to six local Canadian charities in food, active play, education, and the arts. Visitors to Target's Canadian Facebook page through December 9 can select any of the six charities and Target will make a $100 donation and add the donor's photo to its "Gallery of Giving." Facebook visitors can also specify the province where they would like the money to go. The "Give with Target" campaign just launched on November 20 and has already raised over $250,000.

Will using corporate citizenship as a calling card convince Canadians to forgo Walmart and homegrown faves such as The Bay, Sears (which just refreshed its branding ahead of Target's arrival) and Canadian Tire?Continue reading...

How popular is the Pepsi brand in China? Exhibit A, above is an actual photo your scribe recently took in a grocery store on Shuicheng Road, Shanghai. Having recently moved here, it's fascinating to see how the cola wars are playing out on Chinese soil. 

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are competing, hard, for the 1.3 billion mouths of China for a sales boost. The latest volley: PepsiCo just opened a new "green" production facility with "the capacity to produce approximately 15,000 tons of Lay's potato chips annually." Located in the central city of Wuhan, the facility is a platform to reach into populous central and western China. But raw capacity isn't all of PepsiCo's strategy to make China an even bigger market for the Lay's brand.

Pepsi's new Wuhan plant — its sixth such facility in China — comes with all the "green" bells and whistles. Adhering to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria, the factory aims to use a third less water and a fifth less power than earlier facilities. Though China is a major polluter, Pepsi's factory is in line with a move in the country toward sustainability, for both health and financial reasons. The snack food growth focus follows closely the brand's deal with China bottler Tingyi aimed at expanding PepsiCo's reach in the nation's beverage market, expected to be the world's largest by 2015.Continue reading...

Citi released a video today promoting that in May, Citibank became the first bank in the world to achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for 200 projects from the U.S. Green Building Council. The brand rose two places on Interbrand's just-released Best Global Green Brands ranking with the comment:

Citi Group improves on this year’s ranking by 2 spots, now sitting at #44. While the banking institution continues to navigate turbulent waters due to global economic conditions, Citi managed to increase the public’s perception of its environmental efforts, thus closing its perception/performance gap significantly since last year’s assessment. More recently, Citi joined forces with Google to finance a large wind energy center in California and embarked on a joint venture with SunPower to finance residential solar lease projects. The financial institution still remains in the latter portion of the ranking, partially due to its large-scale investments in coal industries, which contribute heavily to climate change effects.

PepsiCo, the company that brought Fritos to Russia, just received LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) for its Frito-Lay Manufacturing facility in Azov, Russia, the first in the company's European network.

PepsiCo now counts 27 LEED certified facilities worldwide, while its Frito Lay Manufacturing facility in Azov is one of the first LEED-certified projects in Russia, "now considered to be the country’s model for a high performance building."Continue reading...

Call it a serene, green, social machine.

Following a $383-million upgrade, Virgin America is promoting its revamped terminal 2 at San Francisco International Airport for its eco-friendly features, abundant skylights, artwork, a "recompose" area past security checkpoints, “hydration stations” for refilling reusable water bottles, kids’ play area, and multiple recycling stations.

As fliers enter the 640,000-square-foot terminal, which just opened on April 14th, they're invited to check out the revamped terminal by checking in via Facebook and Foursquare.Continue reading...