Marketing

When Margot Fraser visited her native Germany in 1966, she discovered a pair of homely sandals called Birkenstocks that soothed her chronically aching feet. Thinking that American women would welcome this alternative to the pointy footwear fashions of the day, she brought a few pairs back to her home in Santa Cruz and began a word-of-mouth campaign. She and her husband soon had to move their cars out of the garage and convert it into a warehouse to hold all the shoes.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, poking fun at people who bare minute details of their lives online, rattled off some of the more "riveting" updates on Blippy.com, a new social networking site that lets people share their spending habits with friends. "$10.94 at Wendy's." "$7.68 at Panda Express." "Wow, this is more exciting than going through old receipts," Colbert cracked during his late-night show last month. "It's going through new receipts." Even in this exhibitionist age, Blippy is stretching social norms by asking people to disclose information that used to be off limits: personal finances.

For Pepsi-Cola Co., which will spend $100 million to introduce its Pepsi One diet cola on Oct. 17, getting consumers to notice the latest entry in the cola wars is just part of the battle. "Soda companies usually do a terrific job of building awareness that they've got a new product," said Gary Hemphill, vice president of Beverage Marketing, a New York-based magazine. "The big question is whether people will go back for that critical second sip."

Last summer, Hewlett-Packard Co. found itself in an awkward position for a premier computer company: It hadn't fielded a single candidate in the fast-growing market of digital music players. HP had gone through numerous music player designs and had built several prototypes to show to focus groups around the country. But people kept saying they preferred the celebrated iPod from Apple Computer Inc. Tom Anderson, HP's vice president of marketing for consumer PCs, couldn't say he was surprised.

a three-dimensional online society where publicity is cheap and the demographic is edgy and certainly computer-savvy -- should be a marketer's paradise. But it turns out that plugging products is as problematic in the virtual world as it is anywhere else. At www.secondlife.com -- where the cost is $6 a month for premium citizenship -- shopping, at least for real-world products, isn't a main activity.

Video game heroine Lara Croft is an adrenaline junkie unafraid of getting bloody. But in Germany, the buxom starlet of the "Tomb Raider" series doesn't bleed -- even if she's being mauled by a tiger. Although the $25-billion video game industry is global, the games themselves aren't. They reflect the distinct cultures and traditions of different markets, and game publishers carefully tweak their titles to tone down offensive material.

In Los Angeles, where medical marijuana dispensaries outnumber Starbucks and McDonald's restaurants combined, a mood-altering beverage with a cannabis-oriented marketing campaign is gaining traction. Southern California has become the bestselling market for Mary Jane's Relaxing Soda, a sugary drink laced with kava, a South Pacific root purported to have sedative properties. Matt Moody, a Denver nutritional supplement developer who created the beverage, said the name is an unabashed reference to weed, though the relaxant compounds in kava are chemically unrelated to those in marijuana.

Hoping to stem massive customer defections, supermarkets are electronically tracking each shopper's purchases to tailor special deals for individual customers. In doing so, supermarkets are shedding a longstanding reluctance to treat customers differently and are moving toward a tiered pricing system in which loyal shoppers pay less. "We're talking about different prices for different people," said Brian P. Woolf, president of the Retail Strategy Center of Greenville, S.C.

During a visit to a Gap store two years ago, Patrick Robinson didn't need to try on a pair to know that the chain's jeans were the wrong fit. "I felt there was a problem, and the problem was the jeans hadn't been moved forward with the brand," he said. "The jeans were an old story." It wasn't idle criticism. Robinson had just been brought in as Gap's executive vice president of design to shake things up amid growing concern that the brand was losing its appeal. Over the next year and a half, he led an overhaul of the chain's denim, the biggest reworking of jeans in the company's history.

Lil Simmons was looking for an insurance policy to protect her against the financial nightmare of old age: entering a nursing home and quickly going broke. She came up empty. "I wish there was something good out there," complained Simmons, 70, who talked with a dozen insurance agents as a volunteer investigator for Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) and Consumers Union. "But I wouldn't touch any of those policies."