It can be difficult to make waves in the venerable greeting-card business. The appearance of humor some decades ago might have been the biggest innovation. Not far behind in impact has been Hallmark’s far more recent move to put music clips on computer chips in cards.

Now, American Greetings – which has always played Avis to Hallmark’s Hertz in this industry – is hoping to create a new buzz for its brand with its “hi-definition lenticular” card line.

The Cleveland-based company isn’t exactly claiming that its lenticular cards will seem as sharply defined as a high-definition TV screen, nor that they’re three-dimensional per se, a popular trend now in movies with Avatar’s success.Continue reading...

Sometimes it’s difficult for brands to know exactly how to react when they’re targeted by aggressive environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). You’d think that a major CPG brand like Nestle, which is a marketing powerhouse, might be better at guerrilla warfare with such groups – but Greenpeace just one-upped Nestlé.

Seems that the famously radical green group pulled one its patented stunts on Nestlé by posting a video on YouTube whose purpose was to draw attention to Greenpeace’s opposition to the company’s practices for obtaining palm oil that goes into Kit Kat and other Nestlé candy bars.

Greenpeace says that Nestlé disrupts rainforests in Indonesia in order to plant oil palms. Felling such “old-growth” forests is a common green-NGO complaint against pulp, paper and food companies.Continue reading...

Golf pundits are speculating that Tiger Woods’ plan to return to competitive golf at the Masters Tournament early next month will be a strategic master stroke for the career – and the brand – of the world’s greatest living golfer.

What could be better, they reason, than for the "Shamed One" to work back into an indomitable competitive groove by starting at the major tournament that he already has won four times, where he knows every blade of grass on the course?

But if you’re one of the famously staid club officials at Augusta National, the host for the ultimate platform in golf gentility, you may be forgiven if you see disaster ahead. The question is whether the media and fan firestorm that surely will accompany Tiger’s return will overwhelm Augusta – or vice versa. Continue reading...

Maybe it’s the pump fake that he threw at the abortion issue with his patently non-inflammatory yet life-affirming TV ad during the Super Bowl, which he filmed with hismother and which was sponsored by Focus on the Family. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s a self-declared virgin as a matter of principle, or that he has tended to take medical-missions trips during his spring breaks while college teammates hit the beaches.

But whatever it is, University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow has legions of haters out there. Lately, they’ve burned up blogs speculating about whether Tebow’s suspect throwing mechanics might drive him embarrassingly low in the upcoming National Football League draft. Fanhouse.com columnist David Whitley has even come up with a name for it: “TDS,” for “Tebow Derangement Syndrome."Continue reading...

Mars already dominates the chocolate-confectionery business in the American market. Now, the Mt. Olive, NJ-based candy giant would like to dictate how US food and beverage companies label their packages.

The Food & Drug Administration is expected to propose guidelines soon that will require CPG companies to provide simple, meaningful nutritional information on the front of their packages – and not just the rear. Furthermore, they're expected to require all food and beverage brands to keep cockamamie, grandiose or confusing claims off of packaging.

At first in Europe and now in the US, Mars has been rolling out a simple nutritional scoring system on all of its products based on “Guideline Daily Amounts” (GDA) of calories and key nutrients.Continue reading...

The president may be ensnarled with Congress right now over the fate of his sweeping health-care reform proposals, defied by Iran over nuclear proliferation on the Persian peninsula, and chagrined by poll numbers that are the worst in his short presidency.

But Barack Obama has another big problem that may rank with the others in regard to its long-term impact: His brand – built upon a foundation of values such as change, bipartisanship, and hope – has begun to wane. That was evident in a string of state-level races, beginning last fall, in which Obama’s personal appearances and popularity failed to win the day for Democrats. And that sort of thing also has to concern him a bit about 2012 if not before.

Some former Obama insiders who already have been victimized by Obama’s troubles – or helped cause them – illustrate his problem.Continue reading...

There were a few good reasons why Chevrolet and General Motors’ other surviving brands admittedly came late to the social-media table. There was that bankruptcy thing last year, and the worst sales environment in decades. And when GM first began sniffing around online networks a few years ago, it began at the corporate level.

But now Chevrolet is leading GM into a determined new surge in social media, and the brand’s coming-out party is going to be its heavy participation in South by Southwest, one of the nation’s largest and most influential interactive conferences. Chevy will be asking SXSW attendees in Austin, Texas, to help it evaluate three emerging applications.Continue reading...

If one of the biggest obstacles for your brand was that people mistakenly associated your product with banned narcotic substances, wouldn’t you try to distance yourself in any way possible from that relationship?

Hemp milk is increasingly popular with Americans as a nutrition-packed, allergen-free, non-dairy alternative to milk, with total sales that industry executives put at more than $10 million a year, split mostly among the four biggest brands. And they consistently say their biggest challenge is to make consumers understand that the hemp seeds used in the beverages are in no way connected with “rope” or “dope.” The seeds don’t contain THC, the active ingredient in marijuana (it’s in the leaves – of course), and the plant’s stalk is used to make rope.Continue reading...

To put it bluntly, prune juice is a great laxative. Everyone knows it, and that reputation has always posed some branding challenges for Sunsweet Growers – one of the largest bottlers of prune juice. Now the California-based brand wants to capture the growing ranks of boomers who may be increasingly in need of the the product's digestive properties.

Nevertheless, Sunsweet has been working hard on ways to draw younger American consumers to its plum and prune products. A few years ago it launched PlumSmart, a juice made from the plums that become prunes when dried; it is lighter than prune juice and possesses much “lighter” regulative properties. It’s selling at about a $20-million annual clip, according to Sunsweet.Continue reading...

Ever since BMW scored a big hit with its online series of short films a few years ago, automakers have been trying to figure out how to reprise BMW’s success. Now, at the Geneva Auto Show this week, Volvo has unveiled an online-only campaign called “The Naughty Volvo” to promote its new S60 sedan coming to the US this year.

Volvo’s online episodes aren’t that kind of naughty. But for a brand whose DNA has always been about safety and staidness, even after a radical styling overhaul several years ago, these three web films are naughty indeed.Continue reading...

Toyota executives are trying to stop the brand bleeding as they deal with safety recalls and attempt to jump-start sales with a new incentive program and a fresh TV-advertising campaign aimed at shoring up consumers’ overall confidence in the company.

But at the same time, Toyota also has been launching an important new product, a completely made-over, 2011 version of the Sienna minivan. The long-derided minivan segment has been showing some signs of life lately, and Toyota still sees it as an important category for the long term, as its Generation X customers move through parenthood.

The trouble is that, as great as the new vehicle is and as clever as the TV spots are, Sienna has been in danger of getting lost in Toyota’s scrambling attempt to stabilize its brand overall.Continue reading...

Toyota is employing a marketing campaign to mitigate the horrific damage it has sustained over the past several weeks – including an estimated 18,000 “lost” sales in February, billions of dollars in repair costs, and an untold deterioration of its once-sterling reputation.

Even as Toyota executives testified on Capitol Hill this week, the brand was unveiling a whole new approach in its TV advertising and launching the company’s most ambitious incentive program ever.

“We’re back in the sales business,” Bob Carter, general manager of the Toyota division of Toyota Motor Sales USA, declared to reporters on a conference call yesterday.Continue reading...

Over the last decade, Aflac has done an incredible job of gaining recognition for its brand. The supplemental-insurance company now has 93 percent brand awareness compared with only 13 percent when it launched its white “Aflac!”-quacking duck into TV advertisements in early 2000.

But that’s where the company’s branding success stops: All most Americans know bout the brand is that Aflac is represented by the partly annoying, partly endearing wing-flapping Aflac Duck, who’s always seeking attention in its television advertisements.

“We have to take the duck, and we’re beginning to take the Aflac name, in consumers’ minds and explain what we do,” Paul Amos, chief operating officer of Columbus, Ga.-based Aflac, told brandchannel. “We’re going from brand awareness to brand definition."Continue reading...

Amid all the woes of the American newspaper business, it’s heartening to see a venerable newspaper and its associated brand on the rise. That is, unless you’re the New York Times.

That’s because one of the few newspaper brands with any palpable momentum these days is the Times' long-time, Gotham-based rival, The Wall Street Journal. Not only has its circulation actually been rising while the Times’ has been falling, but the Journal’s ownership by Rupert Murdoch has resulted in all sorts of successful brand-extending activities over the last couple of years.

There’s the Journal’s engaging, if relatively minor, foray into sports coverage, for instance. And its burgeoning co-branding efforts with corporate sibling Fox News.Continue reading...

Assuming that a couple of eleventh-hour bids fail to amount to much, General Motors is finally going to shut down the great Hummer experiment in brand rocket-riding.

GM took Hummer to unparalleled heights – but when the zeitgeist turned against the brand a couple of years ago, there was little that an enfeebled and distracted GM could do about it except watch the steaming hulk of its Hummer investment crash to the ground. Turns out that GM couldn’t even figure out how to sell Hummer to the right bidder.

In the latest and probably final chapter of this brand tragedy, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery earlier this week couldn’t get Chinese regulatory approval for its bid to take over the brand carcass of Hummer. There’s lots of talk about how the failure reflects China’s insanely arcane bureaucracy, and about how the Chinese government has been trying to throttle back on auto-industry investments by Chinese companies.

But maybe the Tengzhong folks just got smart enough to realize that there wasn’t much juice left in the old Hummer brand, even in places like the Middle East where it was wildly popular for a time.Continue reading...