Coty has signed Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger's youngest daughter, 17-year-old Georgia May Jagger, as an ambassador for its make-up brand Rimmel London, Jacquie Bowser reports. It also announced the signing of Canadian model Coco Rocha for its 2010 campaigns. Meanwhile, Women's Wear Daily's Julie Naughton reports that Sarah Jessica Parker's latest scent for Coty, SJP NYC, will leverage her Carrie Bradshaw role in the sequel of the 2008 blockbuster "Sex and the City" movie. In-store appearances and promotions tied to the movie's premiere are planned, and goodies will include cosmetics bags, bangles and …

Matthew Boyle writes that Hershey's request on its Web site for "big ideas" from the crowd is well advised considering the fact that innovation at the chocolatier seems to be all but dead. It's R&D budget is just 0.5% of sales, resulting in just 40 new products thus far this year. In the mid-2000s, Hershey regularly launched over 200 products a year, according to Mintel. Net sales are up, to be sure, but that's mostly due to huge price hikes that mask a 3% drop in sales. The "stubbornly conservative stance" of the Hershey Trust, which controls about 80% …

General Motors board member Stephen Girsky says that General Motors' turnaround plan assumes that the company will hold on to the "19% and change" share of market that it had in the third quarter. "That is what everything is being based on," he said during a panel discussion at a conference at Columbia Business School yesterday, Caroline Hunter and Kevin Krolicki report. Girsky joined GM's 13-member board as a representative of the United Auto Workers union when the automaker emerged from bankruptcy in July. Looking 10 or 20 years into the future as electric cars are …

We've heard that some folks can divine the future by reading tea leaves; Safeway CEO Steven Burd is more inclined to examine coffee grounds. "When we went into the recession, we saw a change in the mix of lattes versus coffee, and now we've seen -- it's early but we're seeing -- a trend back to lattes," he told investors yesterday while announcing that third-quarter profits were boosted by shoppers trading up to more expensive items. They are also buying more expensive wines, Burd says, which suggests that "we're at, or near, the bottom of this …

Oh, boy! This may turn out to be like one of those T Rex versus Spinosaurus wrestlemania epics where the earth is trampled, bystanders trammeled and both combatants walk away licking their wounds. Miguel Bustillo and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg report that Walmart.com launched a "brash" price war against Amazon yesterday by announcing that it would sell 10 forthcoming books such as Stephen King's Under the Dome and Sarah Palin's Going Rogue for $10. Amazon quickly matched the offer. Wal-Mart raised the stakes by lower its prices to $9. It's also selling 200 best-sellers for 50% of their list price. …

Joe Duffy, meanwhile, says that the Apple's venerable "Think Different" spot -- "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes ..." -- created by Chiat/Day for Apple is perhaps the best example of brand positioning he has come across and is an exemplar of a brand that has created its own language. The principal and chairman of Duffy & Partners says that while he has always had trouble learning foreign languages, he's very good at making up new languages for brands (if he does say …

Apple sees the Windows 7 launch as its best chance in years to win over longtime PC users, Peter Burrows reports, and it probably will bombard buyers with advertising in the coming weeks that pokes fun at users trying to upgrade from XP while also making the point that Macs are less susceptible to viruses and are best suited to iPods and iPhones. "We've been through these transitions before, and no matter how you look at it, it's still Windows," says Philip W. Schiller, Apple's svp for marketing. "When all is said and done, the Mac picks up …