Industry News

STEPHANIE STROM June 12, 2012 New York Times Frito-Lay has long dominated the snack-food business by relentlessly focusing on the middle swath of America that eats chips and pretzels and party mix without regard to the effect on the waistline. Now, though, Frito-Lay, a unit of PepsiCo, is building a “company within a company” to pursue what might be called a 1 percent-99 percent strategy: creating high-end snacks as well as those that appeal to what it diplomatically calls “value” customers. The effort is all about what Tom Greco, president of Frito-Lay North America, has called the “bifurcation” of American snackaholics. By that, he meant that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,” said Ann Mukherjee, chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay North America. “Demographics, the aging population and changing ethnic mix, and bifurcating income are the trends reshaping the way people are eating,” Ms. Mukherjee said.…

Bruce Kasanoff & Michael Hinshaw 06-04-2012 This article is written by a member of our expert contributor community. Fast Company Massive disruption is coming, and the only question is whether your firm is going to cause it or fall victim to it. Disruption is not easy–either to create or to confront. We have no illusions about that. But in the spirit of helping established firms best serve their customers, we offer seven ways your firm could disrupt its own industry, raising the standards of customer experience and creating new opportunities for growth: 1) Totally eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points. Each industry has practices that drive customers crazy. Technology providers drive customers crazy with technical support that often requires long waits on hold and hopelessly complex interactions (“Just find the serial number on the back of your device and type that into the space provided along with your IP…

June 13, 2012 The Age It’s better for businesses to adapt to the way the world now works. ONE of the first lessons economists teach us is that the economy moves in cycles of boom and bust. A second, trickier, lesson is that although most of the changes going on in the economy at any moment are ”cyclical” (temporary), there may also be changes driven by ”structural” (longer-lasting) forces. In a speech last week, Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank, implied that much of the ”unrelentingly gloomy” public discussion about the economy may be caused by people mistaking structural problems for cyclical ones. Despite the official statistics saying the economy is quite healthy, people think it is weak and want the economy’s managers to get it moving by such standard remedies as a tax cut or a cut in interest rates. But if the problem is structural – if…

AAP June 13, 2012 A SODA war fizzed in New York as the city health department began to consider a proposal by health-conscious Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ban super-sized soft drinks. Bloomberg’s proposal on May 31 triggered a wave of reactions from the media, shop keepers, anti-obesity campaigners and New Yorkers who say they are tired of the mayor’s alleged “nanny state” tendencies. A full page ad in the commuter free sheet Metro showed a 32 oz soda cup of the kind popular in fast food restaurants and alongside this 26 packets of sugar. “Your kid just ate 26 packs of sugar,” the ad stated, before warning that “sugary drinks can bring on obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.” But in the same paper a letter from a home soft drinks machine company denounced the threat of new rules. “New York doesn’t need this legislation. Let the people choose.”…

Kate Schneider June 13, 2012 news.com.au THE days of travellers being slugged excessive fees just for using a credit or debit card to book a flight may soon be over. The Reserve Bank of Australia has decided to limit card surcharges to the reasonable cost of the merchant accepting the card. The varied standards, which will come into force on 1 January 2013, will essentially fix a $700 million-a-year credit card rip-off of its own creation by capping the surcharges. The move comes after Qantas hit out at claims it rakes in approximately $100 every year from card charges for flight bookings. Most consumers pay an average surcharge of nearly 2 per cent to use their cards for purchases, while merchants pay 1 per cent, however Qantas applies a flat fee that can add 8 per cent to a flight to Tamworth or Fiji. The RBA said the reasonable cost…

June 12, 2012 The Age NATIONAL Party senator John Williams plans to crank up his lobbying of the federal government to change legislation to curb the power of the two big supermarket chains after meeting some key independent grocery, liquor and service station operators. Williams said yesterday he had also met an expert in supermarket competition, Professor Frank Zumbo, to work out a game plan to rebalance the power of the two chains. “I met Zumbo on Sunday to discuss some of the issues and I plan to hold a few more meetings with the independents and meet with the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] so that we can get some action from the regulator and government,” he said. “What is happening in some industries, such as the dairy industry, needs to be stopped before too much damage is done.” Williams’ campaign comes as the Master Grocers Australia lobby…