Resorts are luring couples who are trying to have a baby by offering on-site sex doctors, romantic advice and exotic food and drink, calculated to put lovers in the mood. The Birds and the Bees package at the Five Gables Inn & Spa on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, for example, includes a two-night stay with a couple's massage, oysters (a purported aphrodisiac) and wine, a pair of heart-print boxer shorts and a CD by love crooner Barry White for about $810 a couple. At the Procreation Ski Vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyo., couples can snuggle by a toasty fire, …

After years of focusing on direct marketing, Gateway is launching a new mass-market campaign--"Ask, Listen and Deliver"--to appeal to consumers as they start their holiday purchasing. The No. 3 seller of PCs in the U.S.,] behind Dell and Hewlett Packard, returns to print with a four-page spread in PC magazine. It has also launched work on DRTV and begun TV brand advertising. At the heart of the new effort is a fact-finding mission. Gateway personnel have hit the road in six Chevrolet Suburbans painted with the company's cow-spots to find out what consumers want out of their PCs. …

Roxanne Quimby, who built Burt's Bees from a roadside stand into a multimillion-dollar natural cosmetics company, is starting a new ecologically minded company. Happy Green Bee sells children's clothing--colorful dresses, sleepers, socks, hats and leggings that Quimby designs--made from organic cotton. "Organic cotton is not as popular as organic food," says Quimby, who sold 80% of Burt's Bees for $177 million to a Manhattan investment firm in 2003. "But its visibility is growing." In the past few years, hundreds of retailers have started offering some type of organic clothing, and companies such as Nike and Patagonia …

America's marketers and retailers are turning in earnest toward the holiday season-and humor figures to be a big part of it. "The tone of the season will be upbeat, light-hearted and very positive," says Pete Woods, vice president for advertising at Lowe's, which is running a campaign centered on humorous interactions between employees and customers. In one commercial, a Lowe's worker figures out what the customer wants by deciphering her pantomimed gestures for garlands and ornament hooks. Meanwhile, a campaign for Virgin Mobile USA cellphones urges its target audience to have "a bleepin' awesome holiday season. And …

Under the direction of former Versace marketing chief Stephen Croncota, Haggar Clothing has abandoned its previous youth-themed ad strategy and is acknowledging that Haggar is a brand for average, middle-aged men who don't care about the latest fashion trends. Ads breaking this week on TV, print and online feature ordinary-looking men between the ages of 30 and 45 in lighthearted situations. One pretends to advise on "throwing your daughter's boyfriend out the window," cautioning that if doing so, a man should wear a pair of Haggar pants with a Flexible Waistband. The new marketing will focus on quality, …

The special ingredient in the success of 42 Below--an ultra-premium vodka from New Zealand that Bacardi is offering to buy for $91 million cash--is controversy. Such politically incorrect antics as a "Win a Russian Bride" contest have positioned it as a hipper-than-thou vodka in 25 countries--getting the requisite press. A video on the company's Web site struck a New York bar owner as anti-gay and sparked a boycott of 42 Below. An obscenity-laden response from James Dale, the brand's chief marketer in the U.S., garnered a blurb on Page Six of the New York Post. Then there was the …

The Prius, Toyota's gas-electric hybrid model, remains popular among environmentally conscious consumers, and is now widely available on dealer's lots--for the first time since the current version went on sale in the U.S. three years ago. Priuses now sit on dealer lots an average 17 days--up from as low as five or six days a couple of months ago, Toyota says. Still, the turnover rate is extremely quick, compared with the national average for a new car: 64 days. Toyota expects to import 122,590 Priuses this year, up from a previous forecast of 110,000. Sales fell 12% last …

Little Caesars is branding 9 million pizza boxes with print versions of popular Hasbro games--including Memory, Scrabble Jr., Trivial Pursuit for Kids and Perfection--along with a sweepstakes that offers participants a chance to win a trip for four to any Beaches Jamaica Resorts. The effort is part of a promotion to build buzz around the upcoming holiday season. Local Little Caesars locations will host drawings at participating locations. One winner from each restaurant will receive a family fun pack full of Hasbro games and a Little Caesars pizza party. Other prizes at Game.com/games/littlecaesars include $500 worth of Hasbro …

Hannaford Brothers, the New England grocery chain, has developed a system called Guiding Stars that rates the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores--from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were rated, 77% received no stars, including many of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you (like V-8 and most Healthy Choice Frozen Dinners). Predictably, most fruits and vegetables earned three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal. Hannaford says it is not trying to be preachy or to issue a yes-or-no checklist--just to …

If speculation on the Internet is correct, Wal-Mart will announce blockbuster deals on electronics this Sunday that would normally run the day after Thanksgiving. "It looks like they are making a seven-to-eight week push and not putting all their hopes for a profitable quarter on Black Friday alone," writes GottaDeal.com founder Brad Olson in an e-mail. This holiday seems to be all about price for Wal-Mart, since it began chopping prices on the season's hottest toys three weeks ago. Company officials have openly promised discounts on thousands of key gift, entertaining and holiday items. High gas prices and …