Emporio Armani has signed celebrity soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo to take David Beckham's place as its chief underwear model. His first global campaign will launch in summer 2010. Beckham has starred in a series of seductive ads wearing skimpy briefs for Armani for four years. But he's not ready to hang up the shorts quite yet. Instead, he'll launch his own line of briefs next year. Beckham's representatives have opened advanced talks with suppliers, Darren Davidson reports, with price points and retailers still to be finalized.

Women control 72% of consumer spending in the U.S., observe the authors of Women Want More, and they write that the purchasing power of women is only going to continue to get stronger worldwide. Boston Consulting Group coauthors Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre say that although many retailers and consumer goods companies know that women are in charge of shopping and households, top management ranks remain predominantly male. "Silverstein and Sayre, as befits Boston Consulting Group consultants, offer an ambitious and systematic view of the opportunities, based on a study of 12,000 women in …

7-Eleven is testing a new plastic wrap developed by Fresh Del Monte Produce that purportedly keeps bananas yellow and firm for five days -- more than twice the current shelf life for bananas going au natural, according to produce actuarial tables. By keeping most oxygen and moisture out, the wrap slows respiration and ripening. Selling yellow bananas "is one small example of what we need to do to reinvent ourselves," says CEO Joseph DePinto. He expects to sell 27 million bananas this year, and the test in 27 locations around Dallas could extend to most of …

Who needs a traditional marketing budget at all? Evidently not Mint.com, a two-year-old personal finance site with 1.6 million users that Intuit bought for $170 million last month. Noreen O'Leary writes that CMO Donna Wells, a veteran of huge media budgets at major marketers, has built the brand "on the cheap." In fact, she says her total expenditures are about what she would have spent in two days at Expedia. How does she do it? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, iPhone apps, a blog and Google analytics, of course. She estimates that total marketing costs over the …

A new report next week from Forrester is going to recommend replacing "brand manager" with "brand advocate," Jack Neff reports, and if its advice is taken, folks bearing the new title "will be seemingly more powerful and consumer-centric, much nimbler, and more real-time-oriented than the brand manager of today." "Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age" also suggests marketers adopt on-the-fly budgeting and media plans that can adapt quickly to changing conditions. It also recommends a more prominent role for "consumer intelligence" -- market research and analytics -- as well as for "predictive modeling." …