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Advertising: Account Executive Is Antiquated. Consider Yourself a Catalyst.

June 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The agency is GolinHarris, which has 700 employees in 34 offices and an estimated $150 million in annual worldwide revenue. The largest clients of GolinHarris, which is owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies, include Dow Chemical, Johnson Johnson, McDonald’s, Toyota Motor and Wal-Mart.

GolinHarris is to formally announce the reorganization on Wednesday. The changes include the disappearance of traditional generalist titles like account executive and account supervisor, which will be replaced by new, specialist titles like strategist and catalyst.

“Our growth, our profitability, have always been strong,” said Fred Cook, president and chief executive of GolinHarris, who is based in the agency’s Chicago headquarters, “and we’re in the top 10 of P.R. firms.”

“But one of Al’s favorite sayings,” he added, referring to Al Golin, the agency’s chairman, “is ‘Fix it before it breaks.’ ”

“We’re reorganizing around the areas that are important to our clients,” Mr. Cook said, “areas that are not perceived as strengths in public relations: strategy, creativity, technology, analytics.”

“I’m motivated partly by opportunity,” he added, “and partly by fear.”

Mr. Cook referred to the agency’s strategy as “prevolving,” as in “intentional evolution,” to address client needs as they change in response to the new behaviors among consumers. “We’ve been working on this for 10 months,” he said, “from a germ of an idea of where we want to be 10 years from now.”

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The reorganization is primarily meant to transition employees from working as generalists to being designated as one of four types of specialists.

The four specialties are strategists, who analyze a client’s business; creators, people like writers, designers and producers who generate ideas and tell brand stories; connectors, people who reach target audiences through traditional and social media as well as other channels; and catalysts, account leaders overseeing relationships with clients.

“Recently, we hired a researcher, and people said, ‘He doesn’t fit into a particular account. He’s never worked in consumer packaged goods,’ ” Mr. Cook recalled. “But he’s a brilliant strategist; our model has to have room for people like that.”

Among the titles being abolished are vice president, senior vice president and executive vice president, replaced by titles like executive director and director.

Also, associate account executives and account executives are to be known as associates. Account supervisors and account group supervisors are to be designated as “senior,” followed by job types.

The changes will be somewhat physical, too. Each GolinHarris office is to get a multimedia engagement room, called the Bridge, where employees can monitor traditional and social media in real time on behalf of clients.

The rooms, which have been installed in the London, New York and San Francisco offices, Mr. Cook said, mirror what marketers like PepsiCo are doing. Pepsi’s Gatorade brand has a “mission control center” inside its Chicago headquarters where employees monitor conversations about Gatorade in social media.

It is estimated that GolinHarris will spend about $10 million on technology and training initiatives related to the reorganization.

GolinHarris is certainly not the first agency to revamp in light of the revolution in consumer behavior, and it will surely not be the last.

Still, the shifts reflect the reality that, as Mr. Cook put it, “if you started an agency today, you wouldn’t set it up” in the traditional way.

Mr. Cook and other GolinHarris executives have been briefing clients on the reorganization.

“It seems like a positive move,” said Christopher Perille, vice president for corporate communications and public affairs at the Mead Johnson Nutrition Company in Glenview, Ill. “We feel very comfortable with it.”

GolinHarris has “always been very anticipatory of needs,” Mr. Perille said, “and true to their slogan of ‘Fix it before it breaks.’ ”

“Given all the changes in media, communication, the growth of social media, taking a fresh look at how you approach business, staff teams, to make sure you get the right people on the right assignment, makes some sense,” he added.

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An executive at another client company who had been briefed on GolinHarris’s plans echoed Mr. Perille.

“It’s different from the way a lot of people are organized,” said Greg Zimprich, director for brand public relations at General Mills in Golden Valley, Minn.

“We’re having the same kinds of discussions internally,” he added, centered on “how to bring about what we are calling the modern campaign,” with paid, earned, owned and shared media “all working together.”

Paid media are traditional efforts to reach consumers, like television commercials. Earned media refers to coverage gained through influences like public relations campaigns. Owned media are the assets marketers control, like corporate Web sites. And shared media are social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“Some good thinking has gone into” the GolinHarris reorganization, Mr. Zimprich said. “It should be a good approach.”

Mr. Cook acknowledged that a bumpy ride was possible as the agency tried to “stay ahead of the curve.”

“It’s a long process,” he said. “I can’t emphasize enough it’s a beginning of a journey.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ec424d3324e3525d3465a1e6d349d106

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Advertising: A Direct Approach to Disaster Relief From Procter & Gamble

June 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Days after the tornado, two of the company’s brands, Tide and Duracell, arrived with their own specially equipped trailers and crews, which set up in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Joplin.

One trailer housed the Tide Loads of Hope mobile laundry, first dispatched to post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005, which provided free wash-and-fold service. The other was the Duracell Power Relief Trailer, which provided free batteries and flashlights as well as charging stations for phones and laptops.

In an era when 87 percent of Americans believe that companies should place at least as much value on societal interests as on business interests, according to a study by Edelman, the public relations firm, the line between marketing and philanthropy has grown increasingly fuzzy.

The widely lauded Pepsi Refresh Project, for example, which awarded more than $20 million to about 1,000 projects in 2010, was introduced after the beverage maker announced that it would forgo buying commercial time during the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years and allocate funds to causes instead.

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Marketers run both the Tide and Duracell programs, but while the trailers are festooned with logos, there is no overt selling.

“I guess you could call it a marketing expense because it’s run by our marketing team,” said Mandy Treeby, the external relations manager for Tide who leads the Loads of Hope program. “But Tide has cleaned clothes for Americans every day for the last 65 years, and this is so core to our purpose as a brand.”

On May 26, the mobile laundry, which generally handles roughly 300 loads a day, extended its hours and accepted 764 loads, its busiest day ever.

Dispatches from Joplin on the Tide Facebook page, with almost 1.4 million followers, have drawn hundreds of glowing comments from users.

“This is exactly why I don’t mind paying a little more for a product like Tide,” Samantha Cantrill wrote in a typical comment on May 27. “I love that you guys turn around and give back to people.”

Kurt Iverson, a spokesman for Duracell, said helping consumers in the aftermath of a storm is a natural fit for the brand.

“Spring and summer season is a preparedness time when we try to remind consumers they need to have batteries ready because storms can take your power away from you,” Mr. Iverson said.

The Duracell trailer made its first disaster outing in May after the tornadoes that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala. In the 13 days that the trailer was in Tuscaloosa, it was visited by about 3,000 families and distributed about 3,200 flashlights and batteries. About half of the visitors charged laptops or used onboard computers, often to get online to update friends and family.

“It’s just a great opportunity to really have some personal relationships with consumers that have probably bought Duracell for years but probably didn’t expect them to show up on their doorstep when they needed them most,” Mr. Iverson said.

Tide spent $177.2 million on advertising in 2010 and Duracell spent $60.4 million, according the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

The Gigunda Group, a firm based in Manchester, N.H., that specializes in experiential marketing, a term for in-person activities and events, coordinates the logistics for both the Tide and Duracell efforts.

Ross Mosher, the director of production for Gigunda , has traversed the country with the Tide unit for more than four years and said that because both water and sewer lines are often damaged, about 60 percent of the time the team has to bring in fresh water and take out dirty water.

Sometimes, Tide forgoes its truck and leases local laundries, providing free wash-and-fold services there.

“It may be that all they have is the clothes that they pulled out of the debris of their house, and when it’s a flood, sometimes the clothes are soaking wet and dirty,” Mr. Mosher said.

Laundry at Loads of Hope, which is staffed by about 10 Gigunda and Procter Gamble employees as well as workers hired locally, is washed, folded, wrapped in paper, placed in bags and tied with a ribbon.

“People come and lean over the table and give us a hug,” Mr. Mosher said. “One of the things that every brand strives for is to have an emotional connection to their brand, and Loads of Hope provides that every time.”

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Since 2006, Gigunda also has coordinated the mobile public restrooms that Charmin, another P. G. brand, has provided in Times Square during the holiday season, and Mr. Mosher said restrooms might soon be dispatched to disaster areas, too.

With pets distressed by disasters, too, Gigunda also is discussing with Procter the possibility of outfitting a pet-assistance mobile unit, which could be linked to the company’s Iams and Eukanuba brands, according to Mr. Mosher.

“You have to be incredibly careful around natural disasters because you don’t want to be seen as an ambulance chaser, and you cannot merchandise on the back of a disaster,” said Carol Cone, managing director for brand and corporate citizenship at Edelman.

But Tide has steered clear of pitfalls, Ms. Cone said.

“What they came up with is to give superhuman powers to their brand to help out during disasters,” Ms. Cone said. “In a disaster people have lost everything, but what Tide realized is that just bringing in a laundromat gives people a modicum of normalcy, a moment of humanity.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=782c61f1525bfbd067dcd232d4cb049f

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Union Struggle at Target

May 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But the arrows are about to come flying at Target’s famous bull’s-eye logo. The nation’s largest union for retail workers has embarked on its first broad campaign to unionize Target workers.

The union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, is trying to organize 5,000 workers at 27 Target stores in the New York City area. A majority of workers at the Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y., have already signed cards supporting unionization, and a government-supervised election there on June 17 will be the first time in more than two decades that Target workers will vote on whether to join a union.

“A lot of people are going to be shocked that Target workers would consider unionizing because of its very good image and because it’s known as such a fantastic philanthropic organization,” said Burt Flickinger, a retailing consultant who has worked on projects for both the union and Target suppliers.

The union decided to focus on Target after employees in Valley Stream, on Long Island, asked for help in unionizing. Echoing longstanding complaints by some Wal-Mart workers, the store’s employees complained that many of them earned too little to support a family or afford health insurance, forcing some to rely on food stamps and Medicaid for their children.

“What we want from Target is simply this: we need a living wage where we can get by,” said Sonia Williams, a logistics employee in Valley Stream who said she earns $11.71 an hour, plus a $1-an-hour night differential.

Target says its wages are competitive and its employees do not need a union.

Interviews with 10 of the store’s employees suggest that an important issue behind the unionization drive is frustration about being assigned too few hours of work, sometimes just one or two days a week.

Retailers are increasingly assigning such short workweeks as they seek to build an extensive roster of workers to fill their ever-changing scheduling needs. But some Target workers say that means they are offered too few hours to qualify for the company’s health plan.

Ms. Williams, who receives $200 a month in food stamps to help her and her 18-year-old son, complained that she was often assigned just three days of work each week, down from full time when she started nearly nine years ago.

So far, the union’s organizing efforts have not turned belligerent as it hopes to convince Target employees that it wants to work with the company, not hurt it. In contrast, the union has never been shy about attacking Wal-Mart — hurling invective, organizing protests and lobbying officials to block the retailer’s plans to expand in New York, Chicago and other cities unless it agrees to improve wages and benefits.

Union officials assert that Target’s wages and benefits are only slightly better than Wal-Mart’s.

Jim Rowader, Target’s vice president for employee and labor relations, said the company provided “great benefits, flexible scheduling and great career opportunities for workers in all stages of life.”

He said Target emphasized building trust between managers and employees. “When you talk about bringing a union into that mix, certainly based on the culture we have and the one we’re trying to build, we don’t think a union or any third party will improve on anything,” he said.

None of Target’s 1,755 stores in the United States are unionized, nor are any of Wal-Mart’s 4,420 American stores. The union has tried over the last decade to unionize Wal-Marts in Minnesota and Las Vegas and a Target in Minnesota, but fierce antiunion campaigns by the retailers deflated the efforts before they even came to a vote.

Mr. Flickinger said unions had been loath to undertake large-scale organizing drives against retailers, like the new one against Target in New York, because of obstacles like high employee turnover, the fear of some workers that they would be fired for supporting a union and the aggressive opposition by many companies toward unionization.

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You’re the Boss: Should Green Companies Work With Giant Companies?

May 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

TerraCycle products at Wal-Mart:Christopher CraneTerraCycle products at Wal-Mart:
Staying Alive

When I started TerraCycle, we quickly came to a defining crossroads: Did we want to sell our made-from-waste products to independent retailers or to big-box retailers? Basically, we were told that if we sold to the big-box chains we would be black-balled by the independents.

At the time, going independent seemed the more tempting path, and that was also what our advisers suggested. We would have a broader range of small distributors who care about green issues and who would help us build our brand. A broad range of clients would also offer security against the risk of being dropped by a big-box client. Perhaps an even more important factor attempting to avoid potential damage to the brand. If you go big box, you may face backlash from consumers who will accuse you of making a deal with “the man.” Still, we decided to go big box from the beginning for a simple reason: scale.

Big-box retailers are significantly more desirable to most shoppers because of the prices they offer and the range of products they carry. Small, independent retailers, have to charge more and carry fewer products, but they try to make up for it in many other ways, often by offering nicer ambiance, great customer service and hard-to-find products. And that’s why it makes sense that independent retailers want the brands they carry to be available only in other independent retailers. As an example, there was a big to-do last year when Seventh Generation started selling its products to Wal-Mart.

From my perspective, I believe that green companies should work with mega corporations because even a small change in a mega system can have a very large impact. When we introduced our drink-pouch brigade, we partnered with Honest Tea and collected 22,000 pouches in the first year. Then Kraft’s Capri Sun joined (Honest Tea is still a sponsor) and helped scale the program, and just a few years later, we’re collecting that many pouches every five minutes. Kraft has spent millions of dollars every year not only sponsoring the program (well beyond Honest Tea’s capabilities) but also advertising and promoting it (something we couldn’t afford to do on our own).

Most important, big companies have massive volume potentials. If they are global conglomerates, they can take your business global incredibly fast. Our global partners, including Pepsico and Kraft, have made it possible for us to introduce subsidiaries in more than 14 countries in just two years.

For me, the challenge isn’t whether to partner with mega companies; it’s how to find a way to partner with smaller companies, too. In this regard, TerraCycle has been partially successful. Our business model has two principal streams: getting garbage in and moving garbage out.

On the getting-garbage-in side, our main partners are all mega corporations that are able to absorb the costs of shipping and a two-cent donation per unit of waste collected (which results in program costs that are six to seven figures a year). Small brands would have a hard time meeting that burden. But because we’d like to work with them, too, we have created pricing options that, for example, let small brands sponsor a brigade and cover the recycling costs directly related to research and development but not the shipping. While these programs effectively ask the consumer to subsidize the program, they have proven to be successful and allow smaller brands to play. So far so good.

On the getting-garbage-out side (making products from waste), we are stumped so far — other than making different products for big-box stores and independents. Other brands have done this for years, creating one product for the big boxes and then changing the size a little or adding the words “premium” or “select” and introducing it with independents. I don’t yet see a more interesting pathway. Any suggestions?

Of course, there are some downsides to our approach, namely that we have turned off some of our consumers. Some people feel that our programs promote the consumption of the brands that sponsor their waste collection. Some people don’t buy TerraCycle products because they believe that the work we do with big retailers helps them grow and strengthen their business — which these people believe is a bad thing. On the other hand, if we tried to please all consumers, we would be a much smaller company and we would collect and transform a fraction of the waste we do today.

Do you have any suggestions on how we could better handle this dilemma?

Tom Szaky is the chief executive of TerraCycle, which is based in Trenton, N.J.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f724c97118cbc8061509ea715968c858

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In Consumer Behavior, Signs of Gas Price Pinch

May 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment

At $4 a gallon, gas is too expensive to justify the 50-mile round-trip commute.

“The option was either to sell my truck and get something smaller, or to try to get closer to work,” said Ms. Greene. She chose to move. The new house is just eight miles from the office.

Economists say steady job growth over the last three months, as well as this year’s federal payroll tax cut, have offset the downward pull of rising energy costs on the economy as a whole. But like a lot of economic news these days, what looks good on paper does not feel good for Americans still digging their way out of the recent recession.

At a True Value hardware store in Wilmington, Del., customers stressed by the cost of filling their tanks are buying more replacement parts for wheelbarrows and lawn mowers instead of buying new equipment.

In the San Francisco Bay area, the daily number of cars driving across the Golden Gate Bridge has dropped while passengers on the buses and ferries have risen.

“If all your customers are paying $50 for a tank of gas that they used to pay $25 for, somebody is not getting that $25,” said William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business.

According to a recent survey, one in four small businesses cited weak sales as their No. 1 problem.

Although gas prices have eased slightly in recent weeks, they are, on average, up about 30 percent over a year earlier. High oil prices have also driven up prices of food, airfares and even taxi rides in some regions, diverting consumers from other purchases.

The nation’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, which reported earnings on Tuesday, said high gas prices had restrained its shoppers, and its business. Sales at stores open at least a year fell by 1.1 percent in the first quarter, as visits to stores in the United States declined.

“Our customers are consolidating trips due to higher gas prices,” said Bill Simon, who oversees the United States business. It was the eighth consecutive decline in same-store sales at Wal-Mart.

Lowe’s, the home improvement chain, which reported a 5.7 percent slide in quarterly profits on Monday, said its traffic was down 3.4 percent in the quarter as customers made fewer trips.

“Rising gas and energy prices are cited by homeowners as the top factor affecting future spending plans, followed by the state of the overall economy and inflation in general,” said Lowe’s chief executive, Robert A. Niblock, explaining earnings that missed analysts’ expectations in a conference call with investors.

MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, which researches consumer spending, reported on Tuesday that the gallons of gas pumped nationwide in the last month fell by 1 percent from the period a year ago.

Conserving miles has become a new business priority at Topical BioMedics, where Ms. Greene works in Rhinebeck, N.Y. Her boss, Lou Paradise, recently invested in cloud computing so employees could access documents and programs and work from home more. He hands out gas cards as bonuses and birthday gifts, and holds seminars on how to make a car more energy-efficient. And when employees have to drive somewhere on business, he urges them to use the company cars — a Volkswagen TDI, a clean-diesel car and a Ford Transit Connect van, which is relatively fuel-efficient.

Other companies are also trying to help workers cope with high gas prices. Robert Trow, who runs a small distribution company in Mashpee, Mass., recently gave his employees a raise — on top of the one he gave in December — to help them deal with pump prices.

At the hair products business Paul Mitchell, which is based in the Los Angeles area, the company gives employees 20 cents a mile when they carpool, and covers bus fare in full. More employees are taking the company up on the offers now. Even the chief financial officer, Rick Battaglini, has begun carpooling to work.

Over all, the economy, though still slowly mending, has largely been able to shrug off the effects of high gas prices. Since the beginning of the year, employers have added more than 750,000 jobs, which puts more money into the economy in the form of additional paychecks.

And while the rise in gas prices since the beginning of the year roughly translates into a loss of $75 billion to $100 billion in spending power if sustained for the entire year, the payroll tax cuts adds back about $112 billion, according to an analysis by Credit Suisse.

“It looks like those two things have fought each other to a standstill,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c413d5cc826a20991797b74fc5080eeb

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Fair Game: Moving the Goal Posts on Pay

May 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

All of which makes a recent decision about executive pay at this giant retailer downright puzzling. In a proxy statement filed a few weeks ago, Wal-Mart’s compensation committee said it had replaced a crucial metric for assessing executives’ performance: same-store sales, referring to stores that have been open for at least a year. Instead of that measure, Wal-Mart is using total sales companywide, or at its major units, Wal-Mart Stores and Sam’s Club.

Why? The change was “intended to align our performance share goals more closely with our evolving business strategy, which emphasizes productive growth, leverage and returns,” Wal-Mart said.

The timing was certainly curious. The switch came amid a sustained decline in Wal-Mart’s same-store sales, which have been falling for nearly two years. The company’s total sales, however, rose 3.4 percent in the latest fiscal year.

Shifting the goal posts meant more money for Mr. Duke in the latest fiscal year than he would have received under the old arrangement. His compensation totaled $18.7 million, more than $16 million of which was performance-based.

Same-store sales are an important metric for investors. A quintessential apples-to-apples comparison, they measure the productivity at established stores and eliminate sales spikes that might occur when new stores open.

Aware that investors obsess over these figures, Mr. Duke told analysts recently that turning around Wal-Mart’s same-store sales was his top priority. Last February, when the company announced results that included the seventh consecutive quarterly drop for the figure, its share price fell 3 percent.

So why remove this crucial performance gauge for pay purposes? Wal-Mart did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Certainly, past statements about why the board chose to include this measure suggest that it’s important. For example, Wal-Mart said in its 2008 proxy that its board had used “comparable-store sales as a performance metric because it believes it is a key driver of shareholder returns, and because investors look to comparable-store sales as an important measure of performance in the retail industry.”

Two years later, the company said its compensation committee included same-store sales as one of its benchmarks “because it believed that good performance relative to these metrics is important for our overall financial performance and, therefore, is likely to have a positive effect on shareholder returns.”

The committee added that “the combination of these performance metrics was likely to incentivize our executives to achieve performance that is in the best interests of our company and our shareholders.”

And yet, a year later, Wal-Mart jettisoned same-store sales from the mix. Explaining the decision, the proxy said the compensation committee concluded that “the combination of these performance metrics was likely to incentivize our executives to achieve performance that is in line with the best interests of our company and our shareholders.”

Talk about trying to have it both ways.

KEEP in mind that when Wal-Mart included same-store sales in its pay calculations, that measure had a sizable effect on Mr. Duke’s compensation. Indeed, same-store sales accounted for 30 percent of the weighted factors determining his performance pay in fiscal 2010 (which consisted of most of 2009 and the first month of 2010).  

Removing same-store sales from its pay-for-performance measures “is a failure to admit failure,” says Burt Flickinger III, managing director at the Strategic Resource Group, a retailing consulting firm. “This is the first time since the company was founded that, during a recession, same-store sales were consistently negative in contrast to key competitors like Costco, Target, TJX and BJ’s.”

Mr. Flickinger says he expects Wal-Mart’s same-store sales to keep declining in the coming months.

The switch at Wal-Mart last year followed a shift in 2009 that allowed the company to set performance targets annually. In previous years, the board had set performance targets for three-year periods. The goals had to be met over that time before company executives could receive certain incentive pay awards.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fac2a3346b1f456d65b99f582e873e2a

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Advertising: SnackWell’s Nudges Up the Portion Pack

April 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In 1995, sales reached about $490 million, and the brand topped both the cookie and cracker categories — but then SnackWell’s got an object lesson in how the cookie crumbles. Competing brands, which had dabbled mostly in sugar-free products to attract dieters, introduced their own successful fat-reduced temptations, and SnackWell’s sales plummeted.

Revenue for SnackWell’s was $32.3 million in the 52 weeks that ended March 20, a drop of 8.6 percent from the previous year, according to SymphonyIRI Group, whose totals do not include Wal-Mart. Advertising for the brand, which totaled an estimated $60 million in 1998, ceased after 2005 as parent company Kraft aggressively marketed its 2004 introduction of another craze for dieters: the 100-calorie pack.

Now, in what Kraft marketers are calling a reintroduction of SnackWell’s, the brand has new products, and a new advertising campaign aimed at weight-conscious women.

The first print ad in the campaign features a closely cropped photograph of a pair of stiletto-heeled black leather boots with the new slogan for the brand, “Be bad. Snack well.” The ad, by McGarryBowen, New York, a unit of Dentsu, introduces Fudge Drizzled Caramel Popcorn, and a new approach for the brand: portion control.

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“Deliciously indulgent, perfectly portioned,” says the new ad, which is scheduled to begin appearing Friday in magazines, including People, Cosmopolitan and Glamour. “At 130 calories, they let you be bad, and still be good.”

SnackWell’s will continue to sell in two older varieties, Devil’s Food Cookie Cakes and Crème Sandwich Cookies, in standard packaging. But in a new twist on premeasured portions, the brand is nibbling past the common 100-calorie limit. Another popcorn snack with white chocolate is also packaged in 130-calorie portions and two other varieties, Fudge Crème Brownie Bites and Rich Vanilla Crème Brownie Bites, contain 150 calories in a portion.

“There is a group of women out there who struggle with temptation and want responsible alternatives that allow them to really enjoy sweets, but with an off switch because they have a difficult time stopping,” said Steve Siegal, a senior brand manager for SnackWell’s, who added that sometimes the cutoff should exceed 100 calories.

“When it comes to portion control, consumers really want satiating products, and at the end of the day they don’t want to feel deprived,” Mr. Siegal said. “They will have a few more calories if it satisfies their sweet craving.”

Women are far more interested in snacks and drinks sold in portion-controlled packages, with 19 percent of women saying they buy such products, compared with 8 percent of men, according Mintel, a market research firm. But prepackaged portions are often too small, in the opinion of 25 percent of men and 20 percent of women.

Brian Wansink, who wrote “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” said in a telephone interview that in his research, when experiment subjects were presented with 100-calorie packs, about 70 percent were satisfied with just one, while the remainder helped themselves to seconds or thirds.

In another experiment by Dr. Wansink, who directs the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, participants who had eaten at around noon were gathered for snacks of either chocolate or cheese and crackers between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. With no inkling that their intake was being monitored, “most people stopped between the 170- to 190-calorie mark,” said Dr. Wansink. Applying that to SnackWell’s 130- to 150-calorie portions, “that might present a happy medium” because it is midway between 100 calories and what seems to be a natural point of satiation, he said.

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But SnackWell’s two popcorn snacks that combine sweet and salty flavors could undermine “sensory-specific satiety,” the term for the feeling of having had enough of a certain flavor, he said.

“Sensory-specific satiety causes you to get bored if you just eat potato chips, but if you take a break from potato chips and then eat chocolate, you want more potato chips again,” said Dr. Wansink.

Sweet-and-salty snacks “are very tasty, but I could see this combination of flavors triggering a gigantic craving for more than just 130 calories of it,” he said.

Four varieties that had been sold under the Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs label — Petites Fudge, Petites Mint Fudge, Fudge Drizzled Chocolate Chip Cookies and Fudge Drizzled Double Chocolate Chip Cookies — will now instead be sold under the SnackWell’s label (still in 100-calorie portions.) All of the new SnackWell’s products have a suggested retail price of $3.19 for a box of five servings.

The brand declined to reveal what it will spend on the new campaign, except that it’s “a significant investment in the millions of dollars,” Mr. Siegal said.

As for why Kraft elected to introduce the products and approach under a brand it had not advertised in five years, rather than a new one, Mr. Siegel said that 85 percent of consumers still report being familiar with SnackWell’s.

“A lot of snacking companies would die to have 85 percent brand recognition for a brand that has stood for better-for-you indulgent snacking,” Mr. Siegal said. “It’s been a long time since the brand was out there in a big way, but this really is all about a new attitude and edge for the brand.”

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Justices Take Up Crucial Issue in Wal-Mart Bias Suit

March 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But several justices expressed qualms about how to administer a lawsuit involving as many as 1.5 million women seeking back pay that could amount to billions of dollars.

At issue in Tuesday’s arguments is not whether Wal-Mart, the country’s largest retailer and biggest private employer, discriminated against women who worked there. For now, the question before the justices in the case, Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, No. 10-277, is whether hundreds of thousands of female workers have enough in common to join together in a single lawsuit.

The plaintiffs’ theory is that a centralized companywide policy gave local managers too much discretion in pay and promotion decisions, leaving Wal-Mart vulnerable to gender stereotypes. The plaintiffs have presented sworn statements and statistics to support their claim.

Wal-Mart calls that evidence unrepresentative and unreliable. The company says its policies expressly bar discrimination and promote diversity and that the plaintiffs — who worked in 3,400 stores in 170 job classifications — do not have enough in common to warrant class-action treatment.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the theory about how the company discriminated — through a central policy conferring local discretion — was internally inconsistent. “The complaint faces in two directions,” he said.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Wal-Mart, echoed that point. “The common policy is one that affects everyone differently, by definition,” he said.

But Justice Stephen G. Breyer said Wal-Mart could be held accountable if it failed to take action in the face of reports of discrimination from its stores. “Should central management under the law have withdrawn some of the discretion to prevent discrimination?” Justice Breyer asked.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, saying that companies had a responsibility to make sure that women were treated fairly in local workplaces.

There has been no ruling in any court yet on the plaintiffs’ assertions that they were discriminated against. Several justices wondered just how back pay decisions would be made if the case were allowed to go forward and the plaintiffs prevailed.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Joseph M. Sellers, said the trial court could rely on statistics culled from databases, which he said were more reliable than the evidence that might be presented in individualized hearings.

Justice Antonin Scalia had a fundamental objection to the proposed hearings. “We must have a pretty bad judicial system,” he said, if judges must rely on statistics rather than individualized proof. “We should use that at jury trials, too,” he said of statistics, sarcastically.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked about some of the statistics at issue. “Is it true,” he asked Mr. Sellers, “that the Wal-Mart pay disparity across the company is less than in the nation?”

Mr. Sellers said that was not the appropriate comparison. “The comparison that’s relevant,” he said, “is men and women and Wal-Mart.”

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Supreme Court to Weigh Sociology Issue in Wal-Mart Discrimination Case

March 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in “social framework analysis.”

A central question in the case is whether he should have been allowed, in preliminary proceedings, to go beyond describing general research about gender stereotypes in the workplace to draw specific conclusions about what he called flaws in Wal-Mart’s personnel policies.

“Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make,” said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. “He hasn’t done the research.”

But a brief supporting the plaintiffs from the American Sociological Association said that Professor Bielby’s work explaining how Wal-Mart’s policies may have led to discrimination “is well within our discipline’s accepted methods.”

The sharp arguments are a testament to the central role that social framework analysis has come to play in scores of major employment discrimination cases. Describing what was at stake in such cases, a 2009 article in The Fordham Law Review defending Professor Bielby said the debate was “about the existence of unconscious or implicit bias, the continued seriousness of discrimination as a force in the modern workplace and the appropriate reach of legal remedies to challenge discrimination.”

The Supreme Court is not considering whether Wal-Mart, the country’s largest retailer and biggest private employer, in fact discriminated against women who worked there. For now, the question before the justices in the case, Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, No. 10-277, is only whether hundreds of thousands of female workers have enough in common to join together in a single suit.

To make that case, the plaintiffs submitted 120 sworn statements describing what they said was anecdotal evidence of discrimination. They also offered statistics showing what they said were suspicious gaps in pay and promotion between men and women.

Wal-Mart disputes the plaintiffs’ evidence as unrepresentative and unreliable. But even if all of it were established fact, anecdotes and statistics would not be enough. Supreme Court precedent also requires lawyers pursuing a class action to identify the common policy that they say led to unlawful discrimination.

For that, the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart case turned to Professor Bielby, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has testified in scores of similar cases.

Social framework analysis gives courts general information — a framework — drawn from social science. Testimony about the reliability of eyewitness identification can, for instance, serve a valuable role in cases in which prosecutors seek to rely on such evidence.

Professor Bielby, who declined a request for an interview, told the trial court that he had collected general “scientific evidence about gender bias, stereotypes and the structure and dynamics of gender inequality in organizations.” He said he also reviewed extensive litigation materials gathered by the lawyers in the case.

He concluded that two aspects of Wal-Mart’s corporate culture might be to blame for pay and other disparities. One was a centralized personnel policy. The other was allowing subjective decisions by managers in the field. Together, he said, those factors allowed stereotypes to infect personnel choices, making “decisions about compensation and promotion vulnerable to gender bias.”

The methodology he used, Professor Bielby explained, was social framework analysis. He cited the seminal work of the two law professors at the University of Virginia, Professors Walker and John Monahan, in the first of 123 footnotes in his 41-page sworn declaration in the case.

But Professors Walker and Monahan contend in their academic writing that Professor Bielby has misused social framework analysis. It is fine, they say, to give courts general information about social science research. But it is improper, they continue, to draw conclusions about the matter in dispute without conducting first-hand research.

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