Anheuser-Busch--which last year acquired U.S. import rights for Bass Ale--is planning a print and radio push to support an online petition drive by Diageo's Guinness brand to make St. Patrick's Day an official holiday. Bass Ale and Guiness are sometimes mixed to create a "black and tan" mixture. Despite the frequent mixing of the two brands by bartenders in the U.S., the relationship between them has seldom been acknowledged by marketers. Diageo has tended to push its Harp brand as the "tan," instead of Bass, while A-B has emphasized its obscure Bare Knuckle Stout in lieu of Guinness. …

In an adaptation from their forthcoming book "The Game-Changer," Procter & Gample CEO A.G. Lafley and management consultant Ram Charan describe the principles of innovation that restored both earnings and morale at the packaged-goods giant after Lafley took the top position in 2000. To turn the company around, Lafley says he focused on a few simple, powerful things. The first was to put the consumer at the center of everything it does. To achieve this, P&G tries to see the world--and opportunities for new products--through its customer's eyes. "At P&G the CEO is not the boss--the consumer is," says …

A marketing partnership between Nascar and Meredith's Family Circle will produce a syndicated reality TV show called "Nascar: Serving It Up" that features a contest among aspiring chefs at Nascar events. Forty half-hour TV episodes will begin airing in September 2008. Initial episodes will follow entrants cooking a family recipe, culminating in a cook-off. A distinguished panel of celebrities, including Family Circle food editor Julie Miltenberger, will judge the nationwide final cookoff. The new program is the latest in a string of Meredith ventures extending the company's iconic hearth and home magazine brands to other media, including …

As part of an extended 25th anniversary celebration of Michael Jackson'z "Thriller"--the all-time best-selling album--Sony BMG and the Epic Recordings/Legacy label have mounted a Web site that allows fans to paste themselves into the title song's famous video as lurching, dancing 3-D zombies. The clip can be saved to a computer, posted to a profile page or shared with friends. Visitors to www.michaeljackson.com/mythrillervideo/ can also join a community in which they can create profiles pages, send text messages to Jackson, download mobile phone ring tones and broadcast their location and messages in a Twitter-style application. The site is …

Ford is moving the U.S. unit back of Volvo from Irvine, Calif., to northern New Jersey, where it was long located prior to Ford's purchase. It will be housed in the same campus it occupied before. Volvo recently has shared digs with Jaguar, Land Rover and Aston Martin, but Aston Martin was sold last year and Land Rover and Jaguar are being acquired by Indian automaker TaTa. As part of the shift, Volvo CEO Anne Belec is moving back to Dearborn to work for Ford's global chief marketer Jim Farley. She is being replaced by her No. 2, …

Campbell Soup's line extension of its red-and-white-label soup that promises 25% less sodium notched $101 million in sales excluding vending machines, convenience stores and Wal-Mart last year and tops Information Resources Inc.'s list of the hottest new supermarket products of 2007. The healthy face-lift has been a long time coming for the century-old brand. Campbell's first introduced low-sodium soup in the 1960s, but the products--with just 150 mg of sodium per serving--were targeted to consumers who had suffered "a cardiac event." Campbell also tried to fill the bill with Healthy Request soups in the mid-1980s, but people complained about …

Hewlett-Packard has galvanized thousands of its retirees into an auxiliary army of senior marketers, goodwill ambassadors and volunteer sales people. None are paid; they do it, they say, because of their affection for the company. Across the country, companies are making use of retirees as part-time or temporary workers. But H-P's twist is particularly unusual in Silicon Valley, where long-term company loyalty is as rare as a pinstripe suit. In a move it says reflects a renewed emphasis on grassroots marketing in the Internet era, H-P is seeking to turn its retirees into an asset that other, younger tech …