Starbucks is certainly feeling bullish these days. Just a few years after scaling back its US retail footprint in a rocky economy, the coffee giant is now eyeing "accelerated global growth" with plans to open thousands of new locations. It's even offering a luxe "superpremium" gift card that'll cost $450 to put in a Christmas stocking.

In a presentation at the company's biennial investor conference today, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz glowed with the news that he plans to boost the number of Starbucks cafes in the Americas by more than 20 percent — opening more than 3,000 new shops over the next five years, including 1,500 in the United States, still its biggest market.Continue reading...

When the financial crisis hit in the United States, it also was a big blow to one particular Dutch brewery that pretty much only made one beer. Heineken’s sales went down for a couple of years and its U.S President, Don Blaustein, left in August of 2009 “saying he had a different view over how to expand Heineken in the U.S. during the recession,” as Bloomberg recalls.

We’ll never know if Blaustein’s ideas would have worked given more time, but the new guy, Dolf van den Brink (one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40 execs to watch this year), seems to be figuring it out just fine. “We weren’t in a good position in 2008, 2009,” he told the site. “For 45 years, we were a single-brand operation. We were set in our ways.”

His job, of course, has been to shake up those ways.Continue reading...

One sign Ford believes it's really going to turn around Lincoln this time is that it is trying to make a big splash for its new vehicle-design language and brand repositioning on America's coasts.

At the press preview at the Los Angeles Auto Show this week, Lincoln is displaying the all-new MKZ midsize sedan that will be sold beginning next year, and a hybrid version of the car, as part of a brand exhibit that also features a handful of classic Lincolns from over the decades.

The Lincoln brand has declined to more or less a rounding error in sales in California recently even though the brand's headquarters was located in Southern California for a few years.Continue reading...

The powerhouse Coca-Cola brand will be feted at France's prestigious Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2013.

The multinational beverage giant will be recognized with Creative Marketer of the Year Award, formally known as the Advertiser of the Year Award, for innovative marketing across multiple platforms and creativity in brand communications. That the award is no longer called "advertiser" but "creative marketer" tells how far the the industry has come in almost 60 years of Cannes Lions awards — as has Coca-Cola.

“Creativity has been and always will be at the heart of our brands. It fuels our business — with consumers, customers, fans, agencies and partners all over the world,” said Joe Tripodi, EVP and Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer, Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola won its first Cannes Lion award in 1967, and has since garnered more than 100 Lions including a Design Grand Prix in 2008 for the US entry "Coca-Cola Identity" and most recently, the 2012 Outdoor Grand Prix win for China for its Coke Hands outdoor activation (above) by Ogilvy Shanghai.Continue reading...

Chrysler can celebrate its comeback from the dead in just three years in large part due to the contributions of two executives. Let's call them Mr. Outside, Olivier Francois, and Mr. Inside, Klaus Busse.

Francois is the Chrysler CMO whose inspired vision and creative command conjured up the "Imported From Detroit" campaign that caught fire at the 2011 Super Bowl and other magic that just got Chrysler Group named Ad Age Marketer of the Year for 2012, and Francois named a 2012 Brand Genius by Adweek.Continue reading...

Steve Jobs's vision for a 2.8 million square foot, energy-efficient, spaceship-shaped new corporate HQ for Apple that is plunked down on a lush 176-acre campus in Cupertino, California, lives on — although it’s going to take a little longer to build than originally planned.

When Jobs pitched the design to the Cupertino City Council in the summer of 2011, the hope was to have the 14,200 employees that might work there doing their thing at the new facility sometime in 2015. Now it is looking like it could take another year, according to Bloomberg.

The company submitted its new plans to the city last week but must wait for Cupertino to complete an environmental impact report before moving forward on groundbreaking. That report could take till next June.

“They could conceivably break ground in 2013, but only if everything goes smoothly,” said David Brandt, Cupertino’s city manager, Bloomberg reports. And, of course, with any construction, particularly one of this size, nothing ever goes completely smoothly.

The new plans don’t have any big changes from the original vision. A footbridge over a stream has been removed and a freestanding 1,000-seat auditorium has been moved further from a road. The city will post the plans online so everybody can get a gander after Thanksgiving. That way they’ll have time to add more servers so the flow of traffic won’t crash their system. That’s something Apple’s local taxes can surely help pay for.

BMW on Saturday wrapped its BMW i global Born Electric Tour's New York City pit stop, which featured a digital window that turned the reflection of cars passing by into its own electric vehicles, the all-electric BMW i3 and plug-in hybrid BMW i8 concept vehicles. Find out more below, along with interviews from the automaker's execs who turned up to the Big Apple.Continue reading...

It won't come as news to the millions of Americans who go to humanity-choked Apple stores and try to find a blue-shirted staff member who might be unoccupied, but Apple's outlets are the most productive retail real estate in the United States, according to new research.

Now if its former retail guru Ron Johnson could finally just figure out how to apply some of the Apple shine to JCPenney, where he is the increasingly beleaguered CEO after having left Apple as head of its retail stores a little over a year ago.

Apple's store productivity has soared in recent years as consumers have flocked to buy iPhones and iPads, reports the Financial Times. As a result, Apple recorded sales per square foot of retail space of $6,050 in the year ended in June, putting it ahead of all other contenders, including No. 2 Tiffany & Co. and No. 3 Lululemon Athletica, according to data from Retail Sales. But even Tiffany finished a distant runner-up, with sales of $3,017 per foot.Continue reading...