On the road and have discovered some food memories are better left alone. Feeling nostalgic, decided to stop at Denny’s for breakfast — an old college haunt. A bunch of us used to walk there 24/7 in all kinds of insane Binghamton weather to enjoy a hot and tasty Grand Slam breakfast. Well, today I found that Denny’s has sucumbed to a terrible fate surely in the name of improving profit margins and efficiency. Besides that it took forever to get served and the food was cold, everything we ate was clearly over-processed and pre-prepared wherever possible — microwave bacon, frozen hashbrowns, eggs from a mix (you get the idea). It is a sad, sorry, and all too common tactic that chips away at the equity of a brand and ultimately provides the consumer with a substandard experience. I should have know better honestly. The eight year old refused to get out of the car declaring Denny’s was “vile” — out of the mouths of babes.

A new study commissioned by the Shopper Marketing Center of Excellence identified broad and growing acceptance of the practice of shopper marketing among both retailers and marketers, as well as a need for closer collaboration between them. The comprehensive online survey, fielded in March 2008 with Brandweek, Progressive Grocer and Convenience Store News, polled manufacturers and retailers as well as the agencies and marketing service organizations working with them.* The results provide a provocative glimpse into the current state of shopper marketing and vividly point out the gaps in achieving its promise. Desire for collaboration emerged as a key theme of the findings. In general, retailers and manufacturers say they want closer collaboration (aligned objectives, stronger shopper insights, joint planning, activation and measurement) to maximize its potential. But as Rob Holston, the practice leader in shopper marketing for Deloitte Consulting, put it: “collaboration is like a romance” and requires a lot of work from both parties to succeed. (more…)

Even if you are not on the Champs-Élysées to celebrate the final stage of the Tour de France this Sunday, you can celebrate the greatness of the race with a new French tradition – the hamburger! Beginning a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer — in St.-Germain cafes, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs — they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun. “It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even,” said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant here. “Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it.” As French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food, they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes like cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. These attempts to translate the burger, or maybe even improve it, strongly suggest that it is here to stay. I know. I know. Three burger blogs in as many weeks but it’s hard to ignore such a delicious trend. (more….) 

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden? That is where people like Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves. Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs. Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist.  (more…)

While affluent Hispanics only represent about 1 percent of the population now, many believe that such U.S.-born Hispanics, who are second- and third-generation, educated with high incomes and bicultural/bilingual, are the future. The fact that such a segment exists should be of no surprise to anyone who follows demographics. There are now 44 million U.S. Hispanics — now 15 percent of the American populace — with an estimated spending power of $1.2 trillion. What’s more, nearly 4 million of those Hispanics have annual incomes of $75,000 and above, per the U.S Census. ”Latinos buy more than beer and toilet paper,” said Tom Maney, svp, ad sales for Fox Sports en Espanol. Maney should know. This year, the cable network has seen Volvo, among other luxe brands, buy time to try to reach the net’s viewers, which include Latinos who boast an annual income of $60,000 or more.  (more…)

If there is any doubt that the rules of consumer engagement are changing, you need only look to sites like www.carrotmob.com. The purpose of this non-profit is to financially reward companies who make environmentally friendly choices. You might call Carrotmob “FlashMob 2.0″ since it combines the whimsy of those types of events with the Sierra Club’s seriousness of purpose, hitting the sweet spot between the Bay Area’s two dominant poses: pointless irony and earnest do-gooderism.  Whether it is a success or failure long-term remains to be seen. At a minimum, it is another interesting example of how social and consumer communities are expanding and using their influence in unexpected ways. (more…) 

BzzAgent, a network of regular-Joe brand advocates, is making a big bet that word-of-mouth marketing will outperform any other discipline when it comes to ringing registers and driving advocacy for brands. With its “WOM Impact Guarantee” program, which launched today and will run throughout the rest of 2008, BzzAgent is inviting any brand marketer and its agency partners to take part in a challenge in which BzzAgent and the agency partner will run competing campaigns. If BzzAgent does not top the competing agency by 20% across four metrics — brand awareness, consumer opinion, purchase intent and actual sales — the agency will refund the marketer the cost of its word-of-mouth campaign and measurement costs. Hard to cover your ears and not listen to this offer — especially if you interested in a technologically connected target. (more..)

Artists have been appropriating images from Madison Avenue for decades — Andy Warhol Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans or Richard Prince’s use of Marlboro cigarettes magazine advertisements. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself. But what happens when the tables are turned? In recent years a number of advertising campaigns (international and domestic) have seemed to draw their inspiration directly from high-profile works of contemporary art. And, the artists who believe their images and ideas have been appropriated are not happy about it. One glaring example: the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss turned down numerous licensing requests for their award-winning 30-minute short film, “Der Lauf der Dinge” (“The Way Things Go”). The 1997 film follows a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction in which everyday objects like string, balloons, buckets and tires are propelled by means of fire, pouring liquids and gravity. (This is fabulous and insanely reasonable to own more…) Yet in 2003, Honda ran a two-minute television commercial, “Cog,” in which various parts of a car form a dominolike chain reaction that culminates when an Accord rolls down a ramp as a voice-over intones, “Isn’t it great when things just work?” Mr. Lobel, a professor of contemporary art at Purchase College, said while he sympathizes with artists who believe their work has been copied, they also need to recognize their own reliance on existing images. “Culture is about ongoing borrowing,” he said. “It’s about taking images, ideas and motifs and opening them up to new uses.”  (more…)

Every trip home to NYC includes a clandestine late night trip to White Castle for a sack of guilty pleasure (with and without cheese svp). However, now it seems like “sliders” have an identity crisis. The three-bite burgers probably belong on an analyst’s couch, not on a plate. Are they greasy but lovable little staples of down-market fast food? Or are they trendy, high-end bar food fussed over by chefs and served with fancy ketchup on miniature brioche buns? Right now, at restaurants in New York and elsewhere, they are both. Take your pick. Adding to their self-image issues, sliders are as likely these days to be made with seafood, chicken or cheese as with beef. Even White Castle, which began feeding the masses their tiny burgers in 1921, now offers fish and chicken sliders. (more…)

It felt like it was only a matter of time before private label brands evolved to the next level of product/brand development and execution. Sounds like that time might be now.  In the judgment of the trade publication Refrigerated and Frozen Foods Retailer, Safeway’s O Organic line is “breaking the mold on what we all thought we knew about private label.” Rather than becoming the alternative to established brands, Safeway wanted O Organics to be the established brand. The company brought in executives from consumer-product giants like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé, gave the line a look that stands on its own (although the color choices may look familiar to anyone who knows the Whole Foods house brand) and hired the ad agency DDB in Chicago to create print and television advertising to help build the image of a full line of healthful, organic products in a wide range of categories. The company says the line is on track to hit sales of $400 million in 2008.  What really sets the line apart are distribution plans which include retailers and food service outside of their stores — including foreign markets. (more….)