Blair Speedy August 13, 2012 The Australian PATTIES Foods managing director Greg Bourke has a message for food manufacturers complaining about competition from supermarkets’ in-house brands: innovate, cut your costs and stop blaming your customers. The company behind football staple Four’n Twenty meat pies and a host of other food brands, including Nanna’s, Herbert Adams and Creative Gourmet, is a rarity among companies exposed to the discretionary retail sector, this month forecasting annual net profit to rise by as much as 7 per cent. Bourke says he is dismayed when comments accompanying a trading update mentioning competition from supermarket brands are portrayed as another food manufacturer complaining about being squeezed by the two major supermarket chains. “We’re not anti-supermarket, we’re not anti-customers,” he says. Rather than the supermarkets squeezing him for ever lower prices or deleting his products to make room for their own in-house brands, Bourke says the pressure…

Julian Lee Date August 13, 2012 The Age LARGE companies that fail to remove false and misleading comments from their brands’ Facebook pages within 24 hours face potential court action, the competition watchdog has said. Companies are required to monitor comments left by the public to ensure they comply with advertising guidelines and consumer law, after a ruling by the advertising industry’s regulator last week that everything that appears on a brand’s Facebook page is advertising. Now the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has lent its voice to the Advertising Standards Board ruling, which has thrown the marketing industry into turmoil as companies face the prospect of being penalised for what members of the public post on their sites. An ACCC commissioner, Sarah Court, said she expected big companies that used Facebook to promote themselves to take down comments within a day or less. ”If you are a big corporate…

Chris Zappone August 10, 2012 The Age We’ve probably all done it: directed the parcel delivery to the office rather than home. Companies, though, are starting to push back, appealing to staff not to jam the office mail room with personal packages. It’s not just the paperless office that’s fallen by the wayside. Firms daily take delivery of an emporium of online purchases that employees find more convenient to direct to their workplaces than their homes. For NAB’s wealth division, that collection included televisions, shoes, wine, cosmetics, books, saucepans, handbags and even children’s toys. All too much for the division’s general manager Paul Carter. “At least 60 per cent of all courier items currently received are not work-related, which equates to around 50 pieces of mail each day,” an exasperated Mr Carter told staff in an email. “This is unacceptable and I ask that all future personal items are directed…

Staff Writers August 10, 2012 news.com.au IT’S no secret Google employees get a sweet deal when it comes to job perks, including gourmet food, on-site doctors and free haircuts. But until now, we didn’t know just how good they have it. Google’s chief people officer Laszlo Bock has revealed a new “death benefits” that means employees are covered not just in life, but in death. The never-before-released details of the tech giant’s perks program include an amazing benefit that if a Googler dies while under the tech giant’s employ, their spouse or life partner will receive 50 per cent of their salary for the next decade. We’ll say that again. The next decade. Death benefits extend to all employees and do not require any tenure or accruement. “One of the things we realized recently was that one of the harshest but most reliable facts of life is that at some…

Sarah Needleman August 10, 2012 The Wall Street Journal A STREET fight is brewing across the US between gourmet food-truck vendors and restaurants – not over the grub, but how it’s sold. Under pressure to protect bricks-and-mortar restaurants from increased competition, several big cities are starting to apply the brakes on a rising tide of food-truck vendors with fully loaded kitchens. Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and Seattle are among the cities enacting laws that restrict where food trucks can serve customers in proximity to their rivals and for how long. Some food-truck operators argue that they shouldn’t be punished for offering an innovative service, especially since many cities already allow restaurants to open up alongside one another. “The rules are unfair,” says Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, a food truck in Chicago serving Asian-style cuisine that includes short ribs and mango lychee. Three weeks after she launched the…

August 9, 2012 The Age “Now retailers understand smartphones have changed the way people shop. They are seeing customers use their phones in their shops” … Natasha Rawlings. You’re walking down the street and feel that familiar vibration in your front pocket – you’ve received a message – only this message is not from one of your friends, it’s from a retailer near you. StreetHawk, which was launched in January this year, identifies where a shopper is in relation to a store and sends a notification about offers and products, based on what the person has previously bought, or “liked”, or other information the retailer has about the shopper in its database. The app uses cloud-based technology to create “set-and-forget” smartphone marketing campaigns. Chief executive Natasha Rawlings explains “set and forget” as a marketing approach that allows retailers to target audiences with minimum effort. “Retailers can set up a campaign…