A few notes of items in the news, or on my desk: The new Big G Kids Cereals ads from General Mills are talking nutrition. Smart stuff. Still cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And the leprechaun and Cocoa bird are in the SAME commercial. Postum Update: A reader contacted BrandlandUSA. TheirMORE HERE
Hungry for boiled peanuts? Why not try the Margaret Holmes brand, which is sold throughout the Southeast at stores like Publix. The story from the website says that in the early 1930s, Ed Holmes of Sandersville, Georgia, began canning white acre peas and squash in his kitchen, under the watchfulMORE HERE
Your name has been your name for as long as you’ve known you. At least that’s the case for most of us.between the ages of four and seven months, the neurons involved in name recognition kicked in, and you learned to recognize your own name. And so you learned theMORE HERE
HAMPTON, Virginia – What do Betty White and Lena Horne have in common? I will answer the question, but please let me tell you a story first. At the entrance to the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel between Hampton and Norfolk was a motel called Strawberry Banks. Though it was aMORE HERE
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on Goodyear, and what it plans to do with its Model Room. It will eventually move headquarters, and it doesn’t know what to do with it. Already, the World of Rubber has closed, and there are fewer visitors. Bruce Weindruch, of the HistoryMORE HERE
TOLEDO – In a box of fabric, we found a little label for a dress store called Lamson Brothers. Every town used to have a Lamson Brothers, a stylish local department store that not only sold national labels, but stitched a few of its own labels into wholesale garments toMORE HERE
The employment picture is a fright, no matter how nicely the people at Bureau of Labor Statistics spin it. In the last year, my adopted home state of Florida lost nearly one million jobs, and we won’t get them back for years, even if the recession fades. The question IMORE HERE
Westport, Conn – The New England Consulting Group has made Debra Schumacher managing associate. Schumacher has held positions of increasing responsibility at Quaker Oats and SC Johnson, managing brands like Gatorade, Edge, Ziploc, Windex and Glade. She was also a consultant to Daymon Worldwide, focused principally on store brands/private labels.MORE HERE
There appears to be no logic to what happens to brands when airlines merge. In the airline world, if the company is bigger, it keeps its name, and the smaller company name disappears. There can be a discussion, but the answer is always the same. The United-Continental merger appears toMORE HERE
NEW YORK – In 2004, urban theorist Jane Jacobs not only predicted the burst in the real estate bubble, but talked about how it could unwind. In her book Dark Age Ahead, the late Jacobs (best known for her treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities) took aMORE HERE