Although smartphone fans remain a small part of all shoppers, marketers must contend with those who use them inside stores to check on prices and compare them to the competition's. "The retailer's advantage has been eroded," Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights tells the Journal. IDC recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store's prices. "The four walls of the store have become porous." Among those most vulnerable are retailers of branded, big-ticket items such as electronics and appliances. Even Best Buy has been impacted by …

As consumers become "unreachable," every contact counts.

The automaker will give those who purchase a new Toyota by Jan. 3 a $500 debit card for tweeting about it. The company is hoping to get users to spread the word even if they don't end up buying a new car. Kimberley Gardiner, Toyota's national digital marketing and social media manager, says the carmaker is hoping to build awareness of its annual Toyotathon by leveraging social media.

This is one of those stories that you better read -- and fast -- because the trend it describes is nearly passé by the time you get to the end. The gist is that large corporations that are looking for new stories (of the selling variety) have taken to looking for them among Brooklyn's tiny entrepreneurs with insider knowledge and they are finding success to varying degrees. An example: a national print ad for Ford's Edge introduced the managing editor/partner of Brooklyn Based, an emailed newsletter, who forecasts national trends such as "gourmet canning" and "the art of urban …

The company's execs are calling cities like San Francisco and critics like the Center For Science in the Public Interest "food police" and claiming that "more than nine out of 10 customers" disagree with a call for regulating Happy Meals toys. "We've seen many years of someone trying to dictate behavior through legislation. Our Happy Meals have been supported by parents since the 1970s. The nutrition of Happy Meals, which include apples, meets FDA guidelines," CEO Jim Skinner told the Financial Times. "We sell choices on the menu that make our customers feel better." …

The nation's largest electronics chain by revenue blamed slow consumer adoption of pricier new technologies like 3D and Internet-enabled TVs for a 5% drop in U.S. sales over a year ago. It saw sharp declines in sales of TVs, less of a demand for notebooks and slower videogame sales. Meanwhile, in what Connecticut Atty. Gen. Richard Blumenthal calls "a tale of two websites," the Minnesota-based company is being forced to repay customers for bait-and-switch advertising, according to The Day of New London, Conn. One website was to lure customers in to Best Buy, according to …