Rosabeth Moss Kanter says that the death of Daniel Carasso, the former head and honorary chairman of Groupe Danone, last week offers an inspirational lesson: "If you create products that you believe in passionately as a force for good ... you, too, can live to 103 and build a global empire!" Danone yogurt, which was founded by Carasso's father, Isaac, was first marketed as a health food and sold by prescription through pharmacies. Daniel, having studied business and bacteriology, established the Danone brand in France in 1929 and guided it through depression, war and displacement with "the healthiest ingredients …

Barry Judge, the marketing chief at Best Buy, is using social networks to ask his customers to define the role of a new senior marketer who will be in charge of the company's use of word-of-mouth marketing using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other internet forums, Jonathan Birchall reports. "We're discovering that the issue of how to identify talent in this space may be a sore point for other companies as well," Judge says of his experiment in "crowd-sourcing." Birchall reports that Best Buy's Idea X site was showing over a dozen proposals yesterday. …

Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club, writes that a key factor in the new product successes of companies such as McDonald's, HP, Virgin America, and Wal-Mart is the fact that their CMOs go beyond branding and lead generation and have an active seat at the C-Level table. So, you may ask, how does one go about procuring that seat? Krainik credits Mark Bonchek, founder of Truman Company, with eliciting three key practices in discussions with leading CMOs over the past few months: 1. Think like a CFO; 2. Speak business, not marketing; 3. Be the voice of your …

Thanks to blockbuster movies with popular action heroes, sales of merchandise with a cinematic hook could reach an all-time high this year, Dawn C. Chmielewski reports. "People are thinking if everything goes well, 'Transformers' could rival 'Star Wars' as the single biggest-selling property," says John Taylor, a video game and toy analyst for Arcadia Investment. "With 'G.I. Joe' on top of that, you've got a shot at breaking $700 million." But with so many special effects-driven films to choose from, retailers are getting picky about which properties they'll back, particularly with consumers cutting back on discretionary purchases. Stores are …

Bob Lutz, who holds wide latitude over General Motors' vehicle choices, says expanding sales of the muscular, rear-wheel-drive Pontiac G8 may warrant its rebirth as a Chevrolet Caprice. After a slow start amid high gas prices and image problems at GM, the $28,000 car is "finally being discovered," he says. The revival of the G8 under would reverse an earlier decision to stop importing the vehicle to the U.S. from a plant in Australia, John D. Stoll reports. A GM spokesman says that it's "premature" to speculate on whether the G8 will be salvaged but Lutz, in an email, cites …

Justin Moyer reviews Mark Thomas' book, which exposes Coca-Cola's "shameful unwillingness to investigate its anti-union, anti-environment bottlers." He says Belching Out the Devil does for soda what Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation did for the hamburger.

Hershey is closing its Hershey's Gifts online service at the end of the month. It sells an assortment of products from as low as $10 to as high as $150; offerings include chocolate-covered macademia nuts, tins of milk chocolate-dipped pretzels and an assortment of Hershey's Kisses products, W.J. Hennigan reports. "The current business model is not sustainable," says a spokesman.

McDonald's will announce today that it will begin a 29-day in-show promotion for its new Monopoly game on the new primetime Jay Leno show starting Oct. 6, Theresa Howard reports. "Leno was at one point a McDonald's crew person," says Peter Sterling, McDonald's vp for marketing. "People love him."