Advertising/Media

Walmart said a year ago that it would make it easier for its customers to identify which foods on its shelves are healthier than others. This spring it will make good on that pledge by adding “Great For You” icons to hundreds of packages of foods in its stores.

Walmart already has millions of loyal customers simply because it has good prices at a good value. Now the question is: Can an icon that identifies healthier foods be an unconventional way to encourage, even build, customer loyalty for the retailer? more

Marketers buying time during the Super Bowl broadcast face challenges in determining the return on investment of their spots. They’ll face even more challenges if their websites aren’t designed to handle resulting surges in traffic… and Yottaa.com, a website optimization firm, is betting they aren’t.

Yottaa has released its predictions for the five sites most likely to either crash entirely or slow down considerably during the big game. They are, in order of likelihood: more

There are various modalities and senses of urgencies that flow through the upper echelons of executives at major corporations. Most of these individuals realize there is a time to grab market share as well as a time to plan a strong counter defense to against any and all plausible business, nuclear scenarios. Sometimes they’ve got to get into the boardroom and realize that the strategical direction that they are taking their company is concretely and 100% absolutely even more vital than the sugar coated, feel-good marketing messages that they continue to beam out into the ethos for all of the letdown customers to hear. Thus, drawing an even bigger divide in customer’s thought space re: the brand and what it really is vs. what they’re getting told it is. more

Doug Garnett, CEO/founder of direct response television agency Atomic Direct , has come out with a new book “Building Brand with Direct Response Television” that tries to inform readers of the medium’s overall effectiveness and evolution from its former stereotypes of “yell and sell.”

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So much for home-field advantage. Among the top 10 companies an American Express/National Retail Federation Foundation survey recognized for excellence in customer service, fully half are pure-play online marketers. As in, no brick-and-mortar presence whatsoever. more

As can be seen from Erik Hauser’s post below, Walgreens is dealing with a problem that could have a serious financial impact on a large portion of its customer base: a cancelled contract with prescription benefits company Express Scripts that could wind up reducing the number of prescriptions filled annually by the nation’s top pharmacy chain by as much as 1% to 3%. That could cost the company up to $4 billion in annual revenue and a sizeable portion of its customer base, who are already being courted in ads by other pharmacies that remain in the Express Scripts system.

In drug retailing, when people move their prescriptions, they also move a lot of their other healthcare and beauty buying. And having moved away once, they tend to stay away. more