Does the above headline seem like déjà vu all over again, and again, and again to you? Seems like I've been typing it for a year now, based on projections, but I'm dutifully including it for the record.

The Detroit Free Press reports that GM execs are shrugging off the news. "I don't think being No. 1 in global sales means much at all to the average consumer. I think it's an internal benchmark of our industry," says Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis.

Toyota itself wasn't exactly ecstatic about the news. It announced earlier in the week that global sales dipped 4% compared with a year earlier. "I think, unfortunately, that we may be the winner of whose sales declined the least last year," says Don Esmond, svp of Toyota's U.S. division. He also points out that "share doesn't pay the bills." Talk about managing expectations.

Bloomberg reports, meanwhile, that Toyota's incoming president, Akio Toyoda, will replace the company's four evps and "many" of the 19 senior managing directors when he succeeds Katsuaki Watanabe in June. He also will focus on customers and spending as much time as possible with the company's production and sales, according to the story. Read the whole story...

Savvy customers are taking advantage of marketers' desires to hold on to their current customers by negotiating lower rates on everything from phone bills to ... well, cable bills, Vishesh Kumar reports. Can other products and services be far behind?

Consumers are finding that negotiating with cable and phone companies may present a more direct route to saving on communications services costs than switching to cheaper prepaid cell phone plans or using Web-enabled mobile devices to connect to the Internet. And companies are often happy to make deals with customers, Kumar writes, particularly if they can poach them from rivals.

"The key is to hang on to every possible customer right now," admits Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "They are our lifeblood." Read the whole story...

Would you be more inclined to buy a container of Tropicana orange juice if the packaging trumpeted the fact that its carbon imprint brand was 3.75 -- meaning that the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice that's produced? It may not have quite the same ring that "lower your cholesterol" has on a box of Cheerios or "less fat" has on a package of Ritz, but PepsiCo is wrestling with how to use the data it has collected on exactly how much impact manufacturing its OJ has on the environment.

The biggest contributor to a carton of OJ's carbon footprint isn't the power required to run the machinery or the fuel used to transport the finished product, as you might have guessed, but rather the growing of the oranges themselves. Oranges require a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make, Andrew Martin reports.

There's a controversy brewing over exactly what the carbon footprint numbers mean, and how to use them. Some environmentalists say that any marketing claims would be "backed by fuzzy numbers and dubious assumptions," Martin writes. Nancy Hirshberg, vp for natural resources at Stonyfield Farm, feels that measuring a carbon footprint is a "fabulous tool" for pinpointing areas to reduce emissions but that the number is meaningless as a marketing tool. Read the whole story...

Procter & Gamble says it is taking its "My Black is Beautiful" campaign in a new direction and the anchor of the revised campaign will be a television program it's developing with BET Networks that will launch by early March, David Holthaus reports. The first episode will feature first lady Michelle Obama, according to Kisha Mitchell Williams, P&G multicultural brand manager.

The initial campaign, which launched in 2007 to support multiple P&G brands, included a Web site, a multi-city road show, a four-city exposition with discussion guides, advertorials and other materials to encourage African-American women to organize meetings and conversations on popular notions of beauty. The architect of that effort, Najoh Tita Reid, a P&G multicultural marketing director, has decided to leave the company.

Brands supported by the show and the overall campaign include Pantene Pro-V, Cover Girl Queen Collection, Olay Definity, Crest Pro-Health, Always and Tampax. Read the whole story...

I've never excerpted from a restaurant review, but Sylvia Rector's piece about Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which is based in the Washington, D.C., area, has more than 300 locations in 25 states, and is expanding to Michigan, caught my eye.

"Five Guys is one of the chains that has helped spawn the national trend toward fresh, higher-quality ingredients cooked to order and served in a fast-food setting," Rector writes. "The concept is being widely copied all over the country, but this chain has honed it to a science."

To play up the just-yanked-from-the-ground quality of its fare, for example, Five Guys puts its spuds where its mouth is. Fifty-pound bags of potatoes sit in the middle of the dining room awaiting a good scrubbing before accepting their fate in a "serious-looking, lever-operated french-fry cutter in back." They are then cooked in 100% peanut oil. This would be an entirely different approach than, say, McDonald's takes.

The chain's other staple is its burgers, which are served up with a choice of 17 toppings (free, except for bacon and cheese) but there's no leeway when it comes to cooking time. They're all well done. Read the whole story...

I prematurely moved the New Jersey Nets to New York yesterday in retelling NYSportsJournalism.com's account about the "A Day in the Life" program. The Nets will move to Brooklyn in 2011. Read the whole story...

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