Kohl's department stores will announce a deal today to offer Food Network kitchen products, tableware and linens starting next fall. The exclusive retail deal with E.W. Scripps' popular cable TV network follows a recent pact with designer Vera Wang. The retailer's year-old foray into exclusive merchandise has helped the value-oriented stores rebound from a 2004 sales slump. Exclusive merchandise--including the Ralph Lauren Chaps brand, Candies' shoes and apparel and four Estée Lauder makeup lines found only at Kohl's--now account for 8 percent of the soon-to-be 800-store chain's sales. Kohl's president Kevin Mansell says he hopes the 35 million monthly Food …

A consortium of major marketers is behind a 10-store test of infrared-sensor technology that measures the traffic in front of supermarket-aisle promotional displays. Consumer-products companies are using increasingly sophisticated displays to capture shoppers' attention right before they decide which product to buy. Figuring out the return on investment of these dollars isn't easy. Retailers have long counted the number of shoppers who enter and exit their stores, and they can use product bar-code data to track which items were purchased. But for consumer-products companies to analyze how well their in-store marketing campaigns worked, they need to know how many people …

In the 1960s, Sue Doyle, her daughter, Barbara Doyle O'Connell, and granddaughter, Susan Weatherhead, starred in TV and print ads carrying the tagline "Young-looking skin runs in an Ivory Soap family." Yesterday, Weatherhead and O'Connell helped pick another Ivory family as part of Procter & Gamble's campaign to launch Ivory Lavender, the brand's third-generation product. A suburban Chicago family--Mary Rose Bell and Sandra and Alexandra Mecklenburg--became the new, three-generation Ivory family who will appear on www.ivory.com this month and possibly star in future Ivory ads. P&G said it began a nationwide search in January for a new mother-daughter-granddaughter Ivory family …

San Diego-based Allerca is currently taking orders for $4,000 "allergy-free" pet cats. One hitch: Advance orders now stretch into 2008, with some customers offering to pay $6,000 to shorten the wait. Allerca founder Simon Brodie says he started by trying to genetically engineer a low-allergy cat, but during the early testing stages his team accidentally stumbled on animals that seemed to be naturally sniffle-free. The work has prompted strong skepticism from a rival company. "I don't think you can have a non-GM hypoallergenic cat," says David Avner, founder of Felix Pets in Denver, Colorado, which is attempting to use genetic …

With Sweden's victorious center-right opposition party talking about privatizing many state-owned companies, Vin & Sprit AB, owner of Absolut vodka, may be up for grabs. Absolut is the world's third-largest premium liquor by volume, after Smirnoff vodka and Bacardi rum. Pernod Ricard SA's chief executive, Pierre Pringuet, said the world's No. 2 liquor maker by volume could be a possible bidder. Absolut would help Pernod expand in the U.S., where it is currently the No. 4 competitor by volume--but it would have to give up the distribution rights to Stolichnaya vodka, which it is in negotiations to buy outright. Other …

Rather than throw good money after bad, Revlon is pulling the plug on its Vital Radiance line targeted at baby boomers. David Kennedy, who took over as president-CEO of the cosmetics marketer last week, said the company will take a negative hit of $110 million, figuring it was unlikely to receive space at Revlon's "best [retail] accounts." Instead of building Vital Radiance, the investment saved will be used to leverage the mainstay Revlon brand. Revlon spent $17 million in measured media behind Vital Radiance over the last three months, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence--but the brand failed to …

Chrysler Group will more than double what it spent in advertising during the first half of 2006 for the remainder of the year, according to Tom LaSorda, president-CEO of the automaker. Chrysler spent $527 million in U.S. measured media in the first half of this year, according to TNS Media Intelligence--meaning its second-half budget could be well over $1 billion. The outlay will go partly toward its new-model launches, including the Dodge Nitro SUV, Dodge Avenger, Dodge Ram 3500, Chrysler Aspen SUV and Chrysler Sebring sedan. The company is also planning some branding ads that will hit on the corporate …

Big-city hotels are converting guest and meeting rooms into luxurious spas staffed by fitness and yoga instructors and other trained personnel. "Everybody's putting one in," says Joe McInerney, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. "If you don't have one, you're not competitive." The spas often contain whirlpools, saunas, steam rooms and relaxation or treatment rooms to provide relief to stressed-out business travelers. Services include massages, facials, manicures, pedicures, and yoga and exercise instruction. Mobil Travel Guide ranks the spa at New York's high-end Mandarin Oriental as the nation's best for the kind of lodging frequented by business travelers: …

Hollywood is putting a twist on one of marketing's oldest clichés: Good marketing can't save a product with bad buzz. Last weekend's awful box office returns for "All the King's Men" ($3.8 million) was presaged by an announcement by Sony Pictures last year that its planned opening at Christmastime was being pushed into 2006. The unmistakable message: This movie is in trouble. Studios wield their marketing campaigns as they always have, priming audiences to expect the best. But with the media following every twist of a movie's progress, viewers head to theaters loaded with behind-the-scenes information. The studio sent another …

Fresh off of its successful launch of Activia, Dannon Co. is testing several "probiotic" yogurt products in the U.S. that that do everything from manage weight to fuel metabolism, thanks to live bacteria cultures. The goal is to push the average American's consumption of seven pounds of yogurt per year toward the 50 pounds consumed annually by the Finns. Dannon is testing Light & Fit Crave Control yogurt and immunity-boosting DanActive, but that's just the starting point, according to Andreas Ostermayr, Dannon svp-marketing. "The U.S. market is ready for innovations in yogurt beyond just basic taste," he says. To bring …