Forget yoga — India now has a whole new way to keep its energy up. Yes, Starbucks has just opened its first store in the market.

While the drinks list at the world’s newest Starbucks will look pretty familiar to anybody who has ordered a grande skim latte elsewhere on the planet, the food features no beef or pork and a lot of old faves with local twists, such as a chicken tikka panini sandwich, a croissant with cardamom and the milk-based sweet mawa, according to the Wall Street Journal. In a sign of respect for its vegetarian customers, the non-veg food items will be sold at another counter and prepared in a completely different oven.

The world’s largest coffee chain is expanding into the world’s second-most populated country with the help of India's venerable Tata Group just as revenues in America are slowing, and the number of India’s consumers of coffee is nearly twice what it was a decade ago.Continue reading...

Coca-Cola continues its Coke Zero marketing tie-in for the upcoming James Bond movie release/brandstravaganza with a London promo that turned London commuters into 007, for 70 heart-pounding seconds, all for the chance to win Skyfall tickets:Continue reading...

Heineken isn’t just James Bond's new beer of choice, with a swanky limited edition collectors' edition in Europe whetting fans' thirst for the upcoming Skyfall movie. The brand also is consumed by enough Americans to make it the nation’s top upscale beer import. And the Dutch brewer wants to keep spreading the brand love.

With that in mind, Heineken has partnered with New York's up and coming Public School fashion label to create a limited-edition camouflage duffel bag in honor of the third annual “Heineken 100,” which honors “tastemakers,” according to a press release. The pair previously collaborated on a limited-edition T-shirt that you may have missed.

"We chose Public School as a partner because their clientele, like ours, are open-minded, confident, resourceful men who know quality, seek out new experiences and are ever-evolving in all aspects of their life," said (Bond-worthy named) Olga Osminkina, senior brand director of Heineken USA. "We hope this is one of many future collaborations with innovative and accomplished designers who align perfectly with the aspirations of the Heineken consumer."

The brewer is all about new looks these days as it also has redesigned its packaging for the first time since 1946 — meaning that James Bond isn't the only star on its bottle. The brand's new “Star Bottle” design (see below) that's coming to the U.S. is now rolling out to some vendors in New York and is scheduled to be on shelves in the rest of the country by March of next year.Continue reading...

It's been 20 years since Evelyn Lauder created The Estee Lauder Companies' Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign, which is now active in over 70 countries worldwide. It's a testimony to the work Lauder and her company have done to make October into a monthlong platform for Breast Cancer Awareness.

That journey began in 1992, when 44,000 women in the U.S. were dying of breast cancer each year and nobody was paying attention. Twenty years later, BCA has raised $35 million for research and education and paralyzing fear has been replaced by hope and inspiration.Continue reading...

Kellogg’s is crossing two bridges at once, bringing its successful Special K Cracker Chips across the pond to the UK, where they're called (in local parlance) Special K Cracker Crisps, and using social currency in the form of tweets to pay for the savory treats.

Special K’s London pop-up, The Tweet Shop (a play on the classic British "sweet shop") is seeking tweets with the Twitter hashtag #tweetshop in return for a box of its new Cracker Crisps. That's what Kellogg's UK is billing as its ‘healthy brand of crisps (potato chips) that don't use potatoes’ and come in three flavors: sea salt and balsamic vinegar, sweet chilli and sour cream and onion and usually sell for $1 a pack.Continue reading...

Uber, the San Francisco-based startup at the intersection of mobile, car transport and logistics, is disrupting the industry and causing wide-spread regulatory reverberations.

The app for U.S. urbanites to book a cab on iPhone or Android OS smartphones has emerged as an alternative to overcrowded public transit and an escalating dearth of regular taxis, but now finds itself in the crosshairs of local taxi and limousine commissions. The key issue, is Uber a limousine service or a cab service? Answer — a bit of both.

It's pitched as "Everyone's Private Driver. Request a swanky ride in a black car with just the tap of an app! We're changing the way people are getting around by offering a convenient, cashless, and stylish on demand car request service from your mobile phone." A clever marketing tie-in just saw the Uber app used by New Yorkers to hail vintage gangster cars in a "free on demand" (a double entendre for NYC cable VOD subscribers) promotion for the third season launch of Boardwalk Empire on HBO.

This week the app launched in Boston and last week in Dallas, making it available (in theory, if not in practice) in 15 cities in total: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego, Denver, Atlanta, and beyond the U.S., London, Paris and Toronto. But it hasn't all been smooth hailing — D.C.'s taxi commission has just proposed new rules to shut down Uber.

Uber's execs thought they had recently passed muster in Washington, following a six-month battle in the District of Columbia to legalize sedans used by its car-service partners.Continue reading...

Coca-Cola’s "Open Happiness" global marketing campaign kicked off in January 2009, when Cee Lo Green and Janelle Monae appeared in a music video that exclusively debuted on FOX's American Idol.

A year later, the "Open Happiness" theme took a tangible, and unforgettable form — a vending machine that appeared in the common room of St. John’s University in New York. It was rigged to dispense flowers, pizza and a six-foot sub resulting in a viral swish of happiness, generating more than 1 million views in the first week and still attracting comments 2 million views later.

The campus Coke machine stunt migrated to London, and morphed into a Hug Machine at the National University of Singapore in a gestural marketing stunt where a squeeze yielded a soda. Since then the Coca-Cola Happiness machine has popped up in local activations around the world, in markets including India, Buenos Aires, Indonesia, Tokyo, Istanbul for a special Valentine's Day stunt, and back to Singapore, this time promoting recycling in June.Continue reading...

“UNIQLO Lucky Cube with Maru” (you know — Maru, Japan's Garfield turned YouTube and web sensation) is one of the ways UNIQLO USA is celebrating the fall openings of new stores in San Francisco and New Jersey.

The brand’s first West Coast flagship store, 111 Powell Street in San Francisco's Union Square, opens on October 5th. “San Francisco has always been a place of creativity, diversity, and social innovation,” stated UNIQLO USA’s COO Yasunobu Kyogoku. “In this same spirit, UNIQLO takes pride in developing innovative technology to create high-quality casual basics that are not only functional, but also affordable.”

Fans in the Bay Area can win blimp rides, merchandise and other prizes by playing with the You Tube Japanese cat sensation and the game is available now through October 14th on UNIQLO’s website, and via Facebook and Twitter.Continue reading...