Fast Company
Amazon Prime members who use their Amazon Visa rewards card to make purchases at Whole Foods will get 5% back. Non-Prime members aren’t left out in the cold, however. As long as they use the Amazon Rewards Visa card at Whole Foods, they’ll get 3% back on every purchase. The move is yet another benefit to being a Prime member and also aims to help undercut the “Whole Paycheck” view of the grocery chain.
Forbes
When Mike Breen provided the voiceover for Tissot's new NBA All-Star ad campaign, it came as little surprise that the ESPN announcer employed an old-school approach to the call. The commercial, which debuts during NBA All-Star
Saturday Night, features a man forced to make a gut-wrenching decision as he prepares for a date. As a mythical shot clock winds down, the man opens a case with a half dozen Tissot watches.
USA Today
For the first time in 10 years, cereal maker General Mills will introduce a new marshmallow shape to its popular cereal, a white unicorn with blue and purple colors for its horn and mane. The unicorn will join seven other marshmallow shapes: hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, blue moons, rainbows, red balloons. The hourglass will be phased out to make room for the unicorn.
Boston Globe
Nicole Slotterbeck wasn’t just annoyed by the “mystery” packages that kept arriving from Amazon, she was frightened. First was the bra — in her size. Then came sexually suggestive merchandise. The response from the Internet giant has been muddled. When asked specifically for Amazon’s protocol for dealing with customers who complain about receiving “gifts” from anonymous senders, the retailer declined to share that information.
Guardian
The chicken delivery problem is so severe that the company cannot say when operations will be back to normal. But it said it was working “flat out” to resolve the crisis. Signs on many of the closed stores said: “Sorry, we’re closed. We deliver our chickens fresh into our restaurants, but we’ve had a few hiccups with the delivery today. We wouldn’t want to be open without offering our full menu, but we’ll be back at the fryers as soon as we can.”
Fast Company
New data from Digimind, which tracks consumer sentiment, suggests thatthe Doritos brand has taken a significant PR hit. By coincidence, thefirm was already tracking sentiment around Doritos for the Super Bowl,and it found that negative opinions about the brand spiked 138%between the game day on Sunday and two days later—after the storiesabout “Lady Doritos” made the rounds.
Grist
Absolut is already committed to a carbon neutral distillation process,but now it’s aiming to bring even more transparency to that process.And it’s not letting anything stand in its way. Not even clothes.Absolut’s new ad, a short film titled, “The Vodka With Nothing toHide,” features real employees from the company’s distillery in Åhus,Sweden. And they’re all naked.
Drinks Business Review
Nestlé has introduced a 700ml bottle made from 100% food-graderecycled plastic, known as rPET, for its Pure Life Purified Waterbrand in North America. The Nestlé Pure Life 700mL bottle will befeatured in a short video highlighting its use of recycled materials,and encouraging consumers to recycle the bottle so that it can be madeinto a new one. The video can be found on the brand's social mediachannels and website.
Chicago Tribune
Firearms companies face declining sales, falling stock prices andtremendous debt. With Republicans in control of Washington, there'slittle chance of firearms regulation-even in the face of Wednesday'smassacre in Florida. Now that Donald Trump is in the Oval Office, fearof new gun laws has receded, industry executives said. And so havesales, hurting both retailers and manufacturers.
CNBC
Nestle cited "challenging environments" in its North American and Brazilian markets and weaker sales at the end of the year. The Swiss food giant posted net income of 7.2 billion Swiss francs ($7.76 billion), versus 9.652 billion francs expected by analysts in a Reuters poll. Sales were reported at 89.8 billion Swiss francs, a 0.4% increase on 2016, but below expectations in a Reuters poll of 90.097 billion francs.