In April, it will be two years since the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill that dumped nearly five million barrels of the black stuff into the Gulf of Mexico. The folks at BP would like everybody to move along now.

To help ease that transition, the company — the second largest gasoline marketer in the US — plans to invest $500 million over the next two years for an American marketing push, according to Convenience Store News.

According to the report, the plan is centered around “a distinctive fuel offer, improved customer experience, and a more compelling loyalty rewards program” with the hope that the company can become the “No. 1 fuels marketer east of the Rockies” again.

“In 2012 and beyond, BP’s commitment to its branded marketers will be second to none in our industry,” said Doug Sparkman, president of BP’s East of Rockies Fuels Value Chain, at this week’s 2012 BP Amoco Marketers Association (BPAMA) Convention and Business Expo, an annual gathering of BP marketers taking place in Florida.Continue reading...

Eastman Kodak Company’s filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as it reorganizes its business raises “the specter that the 132-year-old trailblazer could become the most storied casualty of a digital age that has whipped up a maelstrom of economic, social and technological change,” as the Associated Press (via Time.com) puts it.

“Kodak played a role in pretty much everyone’s life in the 20th century because it was the company we entrusted our most treasured possession to – our memories,” said Robert Burley, a photography professor at Toronto's Ryerson University, to the AP.

And now those memories have been co-opted by the likes of Facebook’s Timeline (which just added 60 new apps) and other online memory-keepers in an age where the business of photography has moved to digital. 

Although Kodak’s press release says, “The Company has made pioneering investments in digital and materials deposition technologies in recent years, generating approximately 75% of its revenue from digital businesses in 2011,” it was not enough to keep the venerable brand solvent.Continue reading...

Jobs, jobs, jobs — they remain a topic utmost on Americans' minds as the slowly dropping unemployment rate largely belies the reality of a U.S. labor market that is only slowly picking up momentum. Brand executives know this, and more of them have taken to wielding job creation as a branding device, like Subway.

But corporate strategy sometimes dictates a different turn even when eliminating jobs is the last thing a brand wants to do. Among the big brands announcing layoffs in recent days: Novartis, which is restructuring its U.S. business and cutting 1,960 positions; Goldman Sachs, which laid off 2,400 employees last year with more to come; Citigroup, which is shedding about 5,000 jobs globally; Kraft, which announced that it will cut 1,600 North American jobs as it prepares to split into two companies. All eyes are on Kodak, too, as the company prepares to restructure.

Kraft — which made headlines with one high-profile hire in the past year: golden-voiced homeless-to-Hollywood phenom Ted Williams, at top — is now shedding ballast in order to survive a difficult future, where its strategy is to split into a global snack company and a North American grocery operation later this year.Continue reading...

Embattled PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi is beginning to dig deeper to find ways to satisfy circling investors and analysts, including some who'd like to see the company split up into traditional and growth-business segments the way that Kraft has been.

The New York Post hears the word on the Street is that Nooyi is considering laying off about 4,000 workers and ending the company's 401(k) matching program in order to boost earnings. Bloomberg, doing some more digging, also hears that layoffs are indeed under consideration, although "less" than the 4,000 figure reported by the Post.Continue reading...

PepsiCo executives are still committed to promoting "better for you" versions of their product lines, following a decade of business strategy that has seen the company drive hard into health-conscious product development. Maybe it's just the holiday spirit, but now PepsiCo is ready to pay closer attention to its traditional "indulgent" products and brands, including long-time favorites under the Pepsi and Frito-Lay banners.

"We cannot forget about what I call the indulgent core businesses," Albert Carey, chief executive of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, said at an industry conference this week, according to the Financial Times. "If you're going to do the healthy, you have to do the core, because we still have a very strong business in the core." Examples, he said, include Frito-Lay "bar food" snacks such as taco-flavored Doritos and hot-wing-flavored Ruffles.

Depending on how hard astern PepsiCo wheels, this could mark a significant turnabout.Continue reading...

As the yen continues to hold on to its strength, iconic Japanese brands like Toyota and Sony are having to make increasingly difficult decisions about retaining domestic production in Japan. At this point, it looks like the world's biggest automaker and its most enduring consumer-electronics brand are coming to somewhat different conclusions.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda has surprised many close observers over the last few days by conceding that his company may have to end up skewing future production much more toward other countries and away from Japan because of the persistent imbalance of the yen against the weaker dollar and other currencies.

In fact, he told the Wall Street Journal that Toyota may actually end up exporting Corolla subcompact sedans that it is beginning to build at its just-opened plant in Mississippi, in addition to supplying the North American market from there.Continue reading...

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz lately has diversified his personal brand into becoming a cheerleader for U.S. job creation. Now he's engineering another stretch, as he takes his company further afield from coffee into new beverage arenas.

That's what Starbucks intends to do after its just-announced purchase of Evolution Fresh for $30 million. The coffee icon plans to use the deal to push well beyond its roots in java into both quick-serve delivery of juice-based products as well as a beefed-up presence in CPG -- and beyond.

"This is the first of many things we're going to do around health and wellness," Schultz said. "We're not only acquiring a juice company, but we're using this acquisition to build a broad-based, multi-million-dollar health and wellness business over time."Continue reading...

This afternoon, if you happened to be wandering in NYC's Soho neighborhood (where the temporary Apple store is located, in fact), you would have caught the opening of the Beats By Dre store.

What's interesting about this opening is that it appears that the only advertising or marketing that was used for this store was by way of pure social media. The special guest at the opening night party? Let's just say we'd be surprised if it didn't turn out to be Dr. Dre himself.Continue reading...