P&G plans to purchase Merck’s consumer health business. I think it says something about the way forward for its consumer brands. The Merck products sound like drugs, with names like Neurobion and Nasivin; the former is a B vitamin tablet that is based on a prescription injectable, and the latter uses a chemical Read more…
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Kentucky’s Governor Matt Bevin. Starbuck’s CEO Kevin Johnson. We’re awash in apologies lately, and they’re all worthless. Zuckerberg apologized before Congress last week for Facebook’s business practices, just as he has done publicly since 2003 (Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky prepared a list). Every mea culpa was a variation on the Read more…
“Extreme fossil fuels” are those that come from the most difficult and dangerous sources, and generate the worst pollution. Big banks upped their investments in such projects last year. You’d think they’d do the opposite, considering Europe’s nascent carbon-neutral economies, and Millennials’ avowed interest in saving the planet. Despite political, Read more…
Last weekend’s marches against gun violence elevated the conversation past the deflection and vitriol of the NRA. Ex-politician Rick Santorum revealed the emptiness of that “side” of the debate when he quipped that the protestors should learn CPR, implicitly saying that guns, and gun violence, were unchangeable facts of American life. So was Read more…
Recent crises at Uber and Facebook are reminders that we’re all test subjects for new tech, whether or not we know it. An Uber self-driving car going 40 mph ran over a pedestrian walking her bike on the side of the road in Tempe last Saturday night. In 2016, 270,000 Facebook users were duped into sharing Read more…
Toys “R” Us is closing its stores, and most analyses blame Amazon and online retailing generally. The explanations are misdirected and, at best, incomplete. Three trends combined in a complex, somewhat perfect storm to whack Toys “R” Us: First, people buy different toys nowadays, and buy them differently. Kids increasingly prefer playing digital Read more…
P&G’s announcement that it will cut more than $1 billion in ad spending with agencies, and do its marketing in-house, has the fingerprints of management consultants all over it. As reported in the Financial Times, the news was confusing: On one hand, P&G’s chief brand officer blamed agencies for putting too Read more…
In the UK, Coca-Cola has brought more than 100,000 school kids to visit its manufacturing and recycling plants, and it funds an annual business competition that has touched 390,000 secondary school children. Only not anymore. All of Coca-Cola’s programs have ended, or will shortly, in part due to mounting pressure Read more…
Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thompson are speaking out against Google and Facebook’s carte blanche business models. Murdoch says that tech giants should pay for the content they post on their platforms, and Thompson says that “bot-infested badlands” have “debased” the digital environment. I get the pushback on their argument: As two grumpy old white guys, they’re Read more…
Google thinks not, and will defend itself in a UK court next month, as two people have asked it to take down links to info about crimes for which they’d been convicted. Neither crime is required to be disclosed to potential employers, according to a UK law passed in 1974 that Read more…