Frito-Lay will unveil today a marketing campaign that focuses on 80 "local" farmers from 27 states who grow the potatoes that are used to make its chips, Bruce Horovitz reports. And consumers who type in their ZIP codes and the first three digits of the product code on a bag of chips into the Chip Tracker widget at Lays.com will be able to see the location of the plant where their chips were produced. "Lay's Local" will be the brand's biggest 2009 campaign, says Dave Skena, vp of potato chip marketing at Frito-Lay. It also features 40,000 in-store displays …

Missouri-based Energizer Holdings will buy the SC Johnson's Edge and Skintimate shaving brands for $275 million and is launching an offering of 9.5 million shares of common stock in order to fund the deal in cash. If it doesn't complete the offering by June 1, it may pay SC Johnson with a new class of non-voting preferred stock, Julie MacIntosh reports. Energizer's Schick unit will sign a five-year contract manufacturing agreement with SC Johnson and be given a perpetual license to some of the Edge and Skintimate business' intellectual property. Best known for its eponymous batteries, Energizer also …

A new airline starting up this summer will offer passengers free meals and no baggage fees. Only hitch is that you've got to walk on all fours, climb into a cage and be willing to be called a "pawssenger." In the beginning, Pet Airways will fly out of five cities -- Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago and Denver -- on Beechcraft planes that normally carry 19 humans. Fares start at $149 each way, water and food included. Pet Airways' planes have been reconfigured with carriers and the dogs and cats (only) will be watched by an attendant full …

His face is plastered across one out of every five subway cars.

KFC's grilled-chicken launch managed to strain relationships with three core constituents -- consumers, the media and franchisees -- writes Emily Bryson York, and turned into a marketing fiasco right up there will all-time classics like New Coke and the McDonald's Beanie Babies giveaway. To begin with, the creative -- "Unthink KFC" -- is not only underwhelming, it also seems to undermine the No. 1 product, fried chicken. Then KFC's Oprah-fueled promotional giveaway that seems to have caught franchisees off guard led to NPR calling the marketer "the James Frey of fast food," referring to the author of a memoir praised …

For more than a decade, NASCAR expanded voraciously but Chrysler's bankruptcy -- and the overall condition of the U.S. auto industry -- is just the latest setback for the once red-hot phenomenon, Valerie Bauerlein reports. NASCAR television viewership fell to an average of 6.83 million viewers last year, off 18% from its peak in 2005 of 8.35 million, according to the Nielsen Co. Ticket sales are down by as much as 20% at some races, and there are gaping blocks of empty seats at some venues, including the hard-core racing town of Talladega, Ala. NASCAR teams and tracks have …

P&G plans to more than double its sales to $175 billion over the next 15 years by making a major push into countries that don't yet buy detergent, shampoo, diapers and razors in the same quantities as U.S. consumers do, if they buy such products at all, David Holthaus reports. India, most of Africa, much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East are the target areas. About 90% of the world's babies are born in these developing markets, demographics that have not escaped the attention of P&G executives. "P&G's center of gravity will shift toward developing markets," says COO …

Pyotr Smirnov, a nearly illiterate serf, went to Moscow in the late 19th century and used ingenious marketing to build the Smirnov vodka brand. Squabbling heirs and the Bolshevik Revolution buried the brand until after World War II, when a visionary marketer outside the family devised a plan to resurrect the high-quality vodka. The story of the brand comes alive in a new book by Linda Himelstein, who became interested with the story of the rise and demise of Smirnov when she was a writer for BusinessWeek magazine during the 1990s and felt compelled to unravel the …