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...

The rivalry between Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig took an ugly turn this week, with Weight Watchers filing a lawsuit against Jenny Craig over “deceptive claims.”

The lawsuit came about after Jenny Craig aired a commercial alledging that its weight loss program enabled customers to lose more than two times as much weight as Weight Watchers’ participants.

The commercial's claim, however, was not supported by scientific proof, despite the pseudo laboratory and scientific atmosphere in the commercial. Yet one has to wonder if Jenny Craig's assertion is really the only feat of deceipt incurred or dispensed by either of these brands.Continue reading...

Another day, another dig at Hummer, the white hot epicenter of scorn from New York to Beijing. But environmentalists might want to check themselves: they may not have Hummer to kick around for much longer. And then what?

Brands are, of course, a set of attributes agreed upon by brand owner and consumers. And no brand may have suffered worse from the latter part of that arrangement than Hummer, the unthinking environmentalist's go-to brand shorthand for bad autoing. The brand is so synonymous with a lack of concern about the environment that it is assumed Hummer owners, while claiming they are attracted by the “American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, love of the frontier, community and freedom" characteristics of the brand, really just revel in the image of sticking it in Mother Nature's ear. Radical activist group Earth Liberation Front even set one Hummer dealership on fire several years ago.

But then there are facts.Continue reading...