Writer/director Jason Reitman came up with the idea for "Up in the Air" -- which stars George Clooney as a "corporate downsizer" who flies around the country and fires employees -- back in the day when times were flush and most mid-level executives worried more about layovers than layoffs. Changing economics presented a marketing challenge by the time the movie opened Friday, Claudia Eller writes. "People may not want to spend two hours with something they're living with every day," says Russell Schwartz, a movie-marketing consultant. "It's also a movie that's being released against the tide, when uplifting …

Even major, well-advertised brands are not immune to retailer's efforts to improve margins and lower prices these days, Jack Neff reports. You just have to look at Costco's decision to strip Coca-Cola products from its shelves in a pricing dispute to realize that. CVS/Caremark will remove most Energizer alkaline batteries from its stores by early next year, claiming that it found that customers respond best to seeing a single national brand -- Duracell -- in alkaline. But Neff reports that analysts and marketers believe that increasing leverage and margin at the expense of brands is another …

Volkswagen has a plan to be the No 1 automaker in world by 2018, not only in sales but also in profitability. It plans "not just to survive but to thrive," says Christian Klingler, Volkswagen Group management board member in charge of VW brand sales and marketing. That means that it wants to be "ubiquitous, top-of-mind, the very definition of 'automobile,'" reports James R. Healey. But some U.S analysts remain skeptical -- if for no other reason than the company's performance in the U.S., where it believes it can triple sales. "They continue to let people down when …

It was clearly the year of the mobile-device "app" but "like any new channel," Brian Morrissey writes in Adweek, "efforts have been a hit-and-miss affair." He and Laurie Burkitt, writing in Forbes CMO Network, agree that the most important feature that a branded app must possess -- and something that traditional marketing is not necessarily known for -- is "utility." "Gimmicks are fun, but brands ultimately need to create something people can use," Brandon Evans, managing partner and chief strategy officer of social media agency Mr. Youth, tells Burkitt. Two other must-have attributes, she reports, …

Businesses with the best new product track records do three things well: They create a clear sense of project goals, they nurture a strong project culture, and they maintain close contact with customers throughout a project's duration, according to Mike Gordon, Chris Musso, Eric Rebentisch and Nisheeth Gupta. The writers, who surveyed more than 300 employees at 28 companies (mostly in the automotive, high-tech and medical-device industries), say that that the teams who embraced these tactics were 17 times as likely to have projects come in on time, five times as likely to be on budget, and twice as …