As customers have become more outspoken about what they buy and whom they buy it from, many companies have responded by putting aside a corner office for a chief customer experience officer, often called the CXO. The position has a range of titles, but in general reports to the CEO, cuts across the product and channel boundaries and includes a significant marketing component. The job can be quite different from one company to the next, sometimes overseeing every detail of a brand's messaging and interaction with consumers and other times serving as an emergency resource to handle service …

Irwin Jacobs, a Minneapolis-based financier who owns boat maker Genmar Holdings and is chairman of the professional bass-fishing tournament group FLW Outdoors, yesterday announced that the winner of an online fantasy-fishing competition would receive a $1 million payout. The Web site, FantasyFishing.com, was tested last year and attracted several hundred thousand participants. Wal-Mart Stores has been a title sponsor of the real-life FLW, which has grown from seven professional and amateur events to 240. Many of the events have their weigh-ins at Wal-Mart parking lots. The purses also have grown; this year the FLW awarded a top prize of …

Jim Farley believes his most important task as Ford's group vice president of marketing and communications will be to unlock the goodwill consumers already feel around the world for the 104-year-old auto company. "You just have to turn the key," he says. Farley, who recently defected to Ford from Toyota, where he was a top sales executive, says consumers want Ford to succeed. "People believe in this company," he says. "They want us to do better." Farley says he's still crafting his marketing plan for enticing consumers back to Ford, but says the new messaging will be "humble …

Returning to the Super Bowl after an eight-year hiatus, Coca-Cola is mulling another appearance, according to a person familiar with the situation. Using two clever ads from Wieden & Kennedy last February, Coca-Cola scored creatively in consumers' eyes--even though its ads had appeared during "American Idol" and in movie theaters before appearing on the Super Bowl. One Coke ad looked like a video game, featuring an animated do-gooder character passing out the company's popular soda to others he encountered. The other took an offbeat look at what happens inside a vending machine. PepsiCo has held sway at the …

The Precious Moments coffin--a macabre final resting place based on the teary-eyed figurine maker--was voted the most inappropriate extension of 2007 by 33.9% of 785 respondents to the Tipping Sprung Brand Extension Survey. It was followed by the Humane Society Dog Lovers Wine Club (28.4%) and Girls Gone Wild apparel (14.9%). The most questionable food extension went to Hooters energy drink (32.5%), Bumble Bee Prime Fillet Chicken Breasts (21.9%) and Trump Steaks (21.1%). Hooters has the dubious distinction of winning a worst brand extension category for the second time in the four years the survey has existed. Hooters …

General Motors has opened a new studio in a former management-training center where work is being done exclusively on its next generation of electric vehicles. The studio has clay and vinyl models of the Chevrolet Volt, which is to be powered by an electric motor run from lithium-ion batteries. The 45 designers and sculptors working on the Volt already have cut 30% percent from the wind drag of the original concept, says Ed Welburn, vice president of global design. The Volt, unveiled at the 2007 auto show in Detroit, will be designed to be plugged in to a home …

General Motors Hummer brand will unveil a small concept vehicle at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next month that was created by three designers recently hired from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Hummer won't say whether it has any plans to produce such a vehicle, but the rugged two-door SUV might give the brand a lower-priced model that could appeal to young buyers and compete with the Jeep Wrangler. Shorter than the midsize SUV that is now the boxy off-road brand's smallest vehicle, the HX adds features like removable body panels that would …

After a sweeping restructuring drive, Sony pinning its future hopes on new products with "wow factor," CEO Howard Stringer says. "The next cycle is actual innovation," says the former television journalist, who in 2005 became the first foreign chief executive of one of Japan's most famous companies. New games and services for the PlayStation 3 should help underpin a recent pick-up in sales, while a new organic light emitting diode television also has a bright future, according to Stringer. The next-generation flat television is just three millimeters (0.12 inches) thick, which was made possible because the organic display is …