The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing a case that pits the rights of brands against those of retailers and the power to control prices hangs in the balance. In an attempt to compete against larger brands, Leegin Creative Leather Products a decade ago began requiring retailers to adhere to a minimum price. Kay's Kloset, a boutique operated by PSKS Inc., balked at the policy and, in 2001, began selling the firm's leather goods at a 20% discount. Leegin pulled its product from the store, and a lawsuit ensued that was at first decided for Kay's. The Supreme …

Purdue Pharma will turn over 90% of the profits it initially made from falsely marketing the painkiller OxyContin. That's if a federal judge accepts a plea-bargain arrangement reached last month between prosecutors and its subsidiary, Purdue Frederick, and three current and former executives. The company and its officials agreed to pay $634.5 million in penalties and fines in pleading guilty to criminal charges that it had misled doctors and patients when it claimed from late 1995 to mid-2001 that the drug was less likely to be abused than traditional narcotics. OxyContin relieves serious pain for up to …

By scaling back wholesale distribution to big department stores in the U.S., such as Macy's, and buying back licenses to sell its clothing worldwide, Guess Inc. is aggressively expanding its highly profitable retail chain. It is opening dozens of new boutiques each year across the globe, from Milan to Mumbai, India. Sales in Europe last year totaled $252 million--about 10 times the size of the company's revenue in 2003, and operating margins doubled to a lofty 25% during that time. Europe, where Guess enjoys an upscale image among the suburban set, is especially profitable for apparel …

Hasbro hopes the July 4 release of the DreamWorks/Paramount movie "Transformers"--based on the company's "robots in disguise" toys introduced in the 1980s--will herald a new era for the company. In the past few years, Hasbro has remade itself from a toy maker to an entertainment company. In 2000, the Pawtucket, R.I.-based company was struggling. It lost $144 million after fads for Pokemon trading cards and the electronic pet Furby faltered. Part of the problem was an over-reliance on movie-related toys, like tie-ins to the "Star Wars" franchise, says Sean McGowan, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. Hasbro's …

Teens respond to brands that reflect their lifestyle, but they are also very conscious of overt hype, according to a new study conducted by Open Mind Research and OTX Research for Viacom's The N channel. Nearly half (46%) of teens surveyed say they tend to stick with a few of the brands they really like, but 52% feel "brands are created ... just to get more money." Of 47 brands tested, Apple's hugely successful iPod digital music player emerged as the brand that is "absolutely essential to teens." Other brands teens see as defining their generation include American …

Procter & Gamble is partially consolidating its marketing groups to put retail-marketing strategy under the same marketing directors who oversee brand teams instead of under the group that manages the sales force. General managers or marketing directors who find a brand responds better to trade marketing than consumer marketing will be able to shift more funds in-store. There are no reliable figures on how much the industry pours into various forms of trade marketing--from temporary price reductions to in-store ads--since most of it is not reported externally. But the total likely exceeds $2 billion annually for P&G alone. …

Blockbuster -- which has been renting both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles in 250 stores -- says it will only offer the Blu-ray format in 1,450 stores when it expands its HD offerings next month. It will continue to rent HD DVD titles in the original 250 locations and online, but the announcement is a major blow to the HD DVD format. Blockbuster found that consumers were choosing Blu-ray titles more than 70% of the time. The formats are incompatible, and neither will play on standard DVD players, although standard DVDs can be viewed with either a Blu-ray or …

By making his own movies, David Maisel, the newly minted chairman of Marvel Studios, hopes to transform his division of Marvel Entertainment into a true filmmaking brand. He wants to maintain control from script to release, keeping all the profits for the company and building a film library, while using someone else's capital. Until now, Hollywood's major studios have paid to license Marvel characters to create blockbuster franchises--including Sony Pictures three "Spider-Man" hits and 20th Century Fox's "X-Men" and "Fantastic Four" movies. Marvel makes relatively little money from these bonanzas because of unfavorable deals struck in the 1990s. …

The Boca Foods brand grew out of the 1993 creation of the "Sun Burger"--an organic, soy-based vegetarian alternative to hamburgers--created by a restaurateur named "Chef Max." "Organic soyfoods" is the fastest growing consumer food segment, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center. Boca grew through in-store sampling that convinced consumers that its burgers tasted great. Helping to fuel the brand's popularity were product reviews that praised Boca's burger-like taste and consistency, its appearance in the Clinton White House and the growing interest in healthy eating. In addition to introducing several varieties of burgers, the company brought other frozen …

The inventor of the Frisbee, Walter "Fred" Morrison, thought that Wham-O Inc. was "insane" when it changed the name of his flying disc 50 years ago yesterday. He'd originally dubbed it the Pluto Platter. Frisbee's name is a spinoff from the Frisbie Pie Co., a now-defunct Connecticut bakery. New England college students often tossed empty pie tins around for fun, a habit that led them to refer to the Pluto Platter as a "frisbie." Wham-O co-founders Rich Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin first obtained the marketing rights to Morrison's invention in January 1957. Less than six months …