Wal-Mart will reduce prices by hundreds of millions of dollars this holiday season on items like lean ground beef, some board games, children's activity kits and Hot Wheels, says its chief merchandising officer, John Fleming. "This is going to be a difficult holiday. [Consumers'] wallets are challenged," he told analysts during the first day of the 16th annual analyst conference in Bentonville, Ark. Shopping at Walmart stores saves the average American family about $3,100 per year, according to CMO Stephen Quinn. About 56% its U.S. customers were conscious of prices in 2006; 69% are price-conscious now. Lana …

Here's the pitch: Buy a deep-discounted book at Target, Wal-Mart, or Amazon, send Sears the receipt and get a credit of $9 towards anything you buy from Sears online.

It's adding the quarter-pound Double Cheeseburger to its dollar menu through March 31.

Although there's no link between seals and maple syrup, the actress-turned-animal-rights activist wants animal lovers to boycott Canada's syrup until the country bans seal hunting.

In response to a question about how marketers can rebuild trust with consumers, Lawrence Flanagan, CMO for MasterCard Worldwide, says that global economic crisis has heightened our desire for control over our lives and points out that we now have the tools to express ourselves and be heard. But the transformation of power to the consumer offers opportunities as well as challenges, he maintains. "Done right, you can build an influential community that is the ultimate voice of your brand," he says. "They truly become your brand ambassadors or brand advocates, exhibiting the highest form of …

In a keynote speech at a business and entertainment conference in Los Angeles yesterday, Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger said that a studio chief today must be both a visionary who picks popular movies and an adept brand manager with a head for business, Dawn C. Chmielewski blogs. "The business model that formed the underpinning of the modern-day motion picture business is changing right before our eyes, in profound ways," Iger said. "That means you're going to have to change your business in profound ways, or you will no longer have a business." …

Under tight security deep in a war room called, incongruously, the Pink Room at Mattel's design center in El Segundo, Calif., Ann Zimmerman reports that yet-another new Barbie has been birthed. She is a "Fashionista" with 12 movable joints that allow girls to pose her like a Vogue supermodel. But she's not the only pretty face with nimble limbs in town. Spin Master's Liv dolls have 14 movable joints. And in the Van Nuys, Calif., headquarters of MGA Entertainment, former Bratz designers have been devising accessories that girls can color for the new Moxie Girlz line. The sniping …

Columnist Chris O'Brien, a proud Gen Xer born between the early 1960s and late 1970s, took a trip with Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, into the lair of the cohort that followed his -- the Gen Yers (aka, The Millennials). That would be the mall. Yarrow and Jayne O'Donnell have written Gen Buy: How Tweens, Teens, and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. Yarrow tells O'Brien that the average member of Gen Y visits the mall four times a month and stays more than 90 minutes …