STRONGBRANDS    Professor Tim Calkins, Kellogg School of Management

Sara Lee announced today that it is changing its name to Hillshire Brands after it spins off its coffee division. This is a smart move but I wonder if the executives at Hillshire missed an opportunity. There was little chance the company would keep the Sara Lee brand. Sara Lee is closely associated with frozen desserts, […]

According to CEO Tim Cook, Apple will soon be launching some amazing new products. Yesterday at the D: All Things Digital conference Cook said, “The juices are flowing. We have some incredible things coming out.” Cook is clearly raising expectations for the new products. You don’t use the words amazing and incredible lightly. Is this a […]

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Pfizer is giving up on Lipitor, dramatically cutting back on marketing support. This isn’t surprising. Lipitor, Pfizer’s multi-billion dollar cholesterol lowering medication, lost patent protection at the end of 2011. A number of generic medications will soon enter the market, so Lipitor won’t be able to maintain […]

Best Buy is certainly struggling.  The company’s stock was above $50 per share back in 2007.  Today it is trading at about $20. The company is closing stores and analysts are skeptical about the future. The company has a number of issues to address but I suspect the most important issue is what I call the […]

What do you say in your annual letter when you’re running a company that has delivered disappointing returns for investors and is getting clobbered by competitors? If you are Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, you talk about all the positives. According to her just published annual letter, things are going quite well at Pepsi. She […]

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I bought a new car: a 2012 Honda CRV. The entire experience was remarkable, and it highlights the core marketing challenge we all face. Earlier this month we visited our local Honda dealer, Fletcher-Jones. We use Fletcher-Jones for service. We did a test drive on a new CRV and liked […]

Last week I wrote a post about my stay at the Minneapolis Hilton and how the front desk team didn’t respond when I informed them that my visit was rather disappointing.  I used it as an example of a missed opportunity in service recovery. Several hours after I put up my post, however, I heard from […]

Service recovery is incredibly important, especially in a world with blogs, Facebook and Twitter.  An unhappy customer can do a lot of damage. Sometimes there isn’t much you can do; the person is unsatisfied for one reason or another but you don’t find this out and so can’t address it.  It is hard to deal […]

Groupon is gearing up for an IPO. My advice to the team planning the offering is quite simple: move quickly. Andrew Ross Sorkin has as an interesting article on Groupon in today’s New York Times. He notes that Groupon has a number of rather significant issues, including a fairly low cash balance and a working […]

Netflix today announced that it was splitting the company into two business units operating under two different brand names. The internet video streaming business will retain the Netflix name. The traditional DVD business will now be called Qwikster. You can read the email CEO Reed Hastings sent to current Netflix customers at the end of this post. This […]

Today the Chicago Tribune announced that it would be introducing a premium edition of its home delivery newspaper. According to Crain’s, the Tribune will apparently now be available in two versions: the standard home delivery paper and a premium home delivery version with expanded content and features. The new version will be more expensive. You […]