"So," you may be asking yourself after a hard day in the marketing trenches followed by a frugal trip to the supermarket, "what exactly do I do with this can of Spam I bought?" Well, lucky for you that Hormel has begun a "Look What You Can Do" promotional campaign for the iconic delicacy in a partnership with broadcast marketing company CRN International. It is, in fact, the first campaign to market a large number of Hormel brands -- Dinty Moore stews, Hormel Chili, Hormel Mary Kitchen Corned Beef Hash, Hormel Canned Chicken and Hormel Bacon Bits are …

We've been calling it 'The New Frugality' since Nov. 10, 2008, but it's official now because consultancy Booz & Company says so after a survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers found that "a strong value consciousness that dictates trade-offs in price, brand, and convenience has become the dominant mind-set among consumers in the United States." Furthermore, as you probably expected, this mind-set is "reshaping their consumption patterns in ways that will persist even as the economy starts to recover," Matthew Egol, Andrew Clyde and Kasturi Rangan write. All "we-told-you-so's" aside, the piece is …

At least 10 brands appear in "Telephone," Lady Gaga's racy nine-minute video with Beyoncé, but one of them may be nearer and dearer to her pocketbook than the others. A source "close to the situation" tells Holly Sanders Ware and James Covert that Gaga has a financial stake in Polaroid that allows her to participate "in the future of the company in a meaningful way." Without disclosing the details of her financial arrangement, Polaroid announced in January that Gaga would become the brand's "creative director and inventor of specialty products." Sources say, however, that …

Borders is stealing a page from the standard coffeehouse business plan by encouraging shoppers to think of it as a home away from home. Last month it quietly unveiled a program that invites book club groups to convene at its cafe spaces in an effort to reshape itself into a local gathering place instead of a faceless superstore, Sandra M. Jones writes. Corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich., has shipped signs and posters that urge shoppers to get out of the house and bring their clubs to its 507 outlets across the country. "We're encouraging stores …

PepsiCo says it will remove high-calorie sweetened drinks from schools for kids up to age 18 in more than 200 countries by 2012, Bruce Horovitz reports. Bruce Silverglade, legal affairs director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, took the occasion of yesterday's announcement to applaud Pepsi and blast Coca-Cola "for insisting on targeting high school students in most countries around the world." But branding expert Jonathan Salem Baskin was more cynical about Pepsi's motives: "So how are we supposed to show our appreciation to Pepsi? By doubling our consumption?" Coke won't sell sugared drinks …