The Pathmark supermarket chain is joining its parent grocery company, The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., in adopting paperless coupons, Brian Quinton reports, by launching an "Online Advantage" enhancement to its "Advantage Club" program. Pathmark's club card customers register online and start saving the online coupons they find at the site directly to their accounts. The savings are automatically deducted from their bills when they present their Advantage card at checkout. Shoppers can also use their mobile devices to log onto Zavers.com, the platform supplying the technology under the Pathmark Online Advantage program, and add coupons they …

One way to get shoppers pounding the corridors of its mall, executives of the Beverly Center figure, is to have aerialists somersaulting 80 feet in the air above them. And so, the mall plans to offer 60 free holiday showings of gravity-defying performers starting Friday, Andrea Chang reports. "It's just this big, grandiose, epic sort of show, and it's based on capturing the escapism that people were looking for in the 1930s when the country hit hard times," says Beverly Center gm Jeff Brown. Other Southern Californian malls may have slightly less grandiose plans -- South …

During a conclave called 2020Vision that it held in Atlanta last week -- its first such summit since 1998 -- Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent admitted that the company had lost its way for a spell as it focused on the "dashboard" and ignored what was going on "outside of our windshield." But, as with all admissions of that sort, Kent bore optimistic tidings touching on new products, pricing, targeting, marketing and media approaches. Underlying all of them was the theme of putting the consumer front and center, Natalie Zmuda reports. The end game is that Coke plans to …

Rather than rely solely on consumer surveys and focus groups to shape their advertising copy, marketers such as International Business Machines, Harrah's Entertainment and Microsoft are beginning to scan the Web to find out what consumers are saying about their brands and are using that information to craft their themes and executions, Emily Steel reports. Then, once the campaigns are running, the marketers are using the same Web-scanning technologies to monitor consumer reaction to their messages, and to fine-tune them. IBM, for example, has discovered that potential customers generally care less about technology for technology's sake …

Patrick May reports: "Dad would just shake his head and say 'This is silly,'" says Richard Dorsa, son of Eggo waffle inventor Frank Dorsa. "Then he'd say, 'I'm gonna get on a plane and show [Kellogg] how to fix this problem.' And he'd make up for all the missing waffles in a week or two. He was just that kind of can-do guy."

HomeAway, which operates an international network of Web sites for people who want to rent vacation homes, has signed Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo to star in an advertising campaign that will play on the pair's roles in the hit 1983 comedy, "National Lampoon's Vacation," Lori Hawkins reports. "We intend to have a lot of fun with the ad campaign, highlighting the travel mishaps that follow the Griswold family," says CEO Brian Sharples. "This theme will let us promote the benefits of vacation rentals as an alternative to hotels." The 30-second spot will air during the …

Columnist Tom Walsh writes that upcoming auto shows in Los Angeles and Detroit will be the most important in General Motor's 101-year history and the newly reconfigured company is doing things differently than it usually does. The biggest change, he says, is that it intends "to take the brands and new products directly and aggressively to consumers, instead of just to the news media for traditional unveilings." It will do that by building buzz on the streets, with new GM models popping up, for example, "in the trendy hangouts of Los Angeles this month, sometimes with stars like …

One of my favorite leading economic indicators is the health of the recreational vehicle industry, and John W. Schoen reports this morning that things are looking a wee bit better in Elkhart, Ind., which is the epicenter of RV production (about 70% of the nation's RVs are produced in Elkhart County). Not only is the economy picking up slightly, loans are being approved once again. But it's going to be a long journey to recovery. "Although RV makers are hiring back workers and shortening planned holiday furloughs," he reports, "the industry is still operating at its lowest level …

Working the street beat yesterday, Brandchannel blogger Peter Feld spotted two Nescafé worker bees setting up a sampling station for a taste test between "an unbranded, but clearly Starbucks-looking paper cup of instant [coffee] ... with a ceramic mug featuring the updated Nescafé logo above a Taster's Choice package." The copy on a banner reads: "A lot of hype. OR a lot of flavor," as a picture Feld took illustrates. Shouldn't there be question marks there? I mean, how can you conduct a legitimate taste test between Via and Taster's Choice when you've predetermined the answers? What is …