The Nice! brand name, two years in the making, began to appear on Walgreens store shelves last month on food products from soup to nuts. The rollout of more than 400 items, mostly grocery and paper products, is scheduled to accelerate this month and wind up at all 7,742 Walgreens and Duane Reade drugstores nationwide by January 2012.

“You will see a lot of transition within Walgreens brand portfolio over the next 12 to 18 months,” said Maurice Alkemade, divisional vice president, general merchandise manager for private brands in an article for the trade publication Private Label magazine.

Graphics on Nice! are bold, clean, and designed to be easily recognizable and simple to shop. An integrated marketing campaign will build on the brand’s message around quality and savings compared with other national brands, as well as the wide variety of everyday essentials under the label accessible from neighborhood Walgreens stores.

AC Nielsen consumer research shows that 75% of Walgreens shoppers purchase store brands in Walgreens.

Summer is here and it is hot. All supermarkets are shrinking their frozen category shelves and groceries are putting their small freezers in front of everything else to welcome the ice cream season where sales will pick up because of the hot summers we have in Lebanon.

Lebanese consumers are very familiar with ice cream brands, for me and since i was a kid, still remember mainly Gelati Cortina and Bonjus, then many local brands came along like Gelati Dolsi and last year we had a new player Cornelli. This post is not about international ice cream brands, but most of them are also on the Lebanese market.

Bonjus ice cream is a brand extension to the original juice product that is 46 years old and to a certain extend it fits and serves the global brand positioning among other players. Well managed brand extensions not only provide new sources of revenue, they can also reinforce brand meaning and help to build brand equity.

But sometimes the brand extension and stretching can hurt and damage the parent brand.

Taanayel Les Fermes ice cream is not the right brand extension for a typical dairy products brand.
No matter how juicy and succulent the advertising campaign is and will be, my first thought will always be the dairy products because of the brand name in first place.

Surely milk is used in both lines (dairy and ice cream) but for me, the brand does not fit the product.

A wonderful example that brands and location-based networks will get married and this will be the final business model to FourSquare, GoWalla and all the rest … as i mentioned in a previous post here.

In Germany, a billboard for the GranataPet brand dog food lets consumers (or actually, their dogs) get a sample by checking in via Foursquare. As this video shows, once you check in, dog food comes out of a dispenser at dog level. As detailed, the checkins are noted on a distant server that is connected to a black box in the billboard that controls the dispenser.

At its Consumer 360 conference in Orlando, Fla., on June 22, New York-based Nielsen unveiled an approach that could greatly improve the chance of a new product’s success. Based on tracking 600 product launches and testing 20,000 initiatives, the approach could raise the chance of succeeding in the marketplace from 10 percent to 75 percent.

“By identifying key criteria every successful new product must meet, we’re helping marketers know where to focus their efforts in new product development and in-market execution,” said Vicki Gardner, senior vice president, product innovation North America, Nielsen. “As a result, companies gain a huge leap forward with more actionable advice and better decision-making, and that means better investment of new-product marketing dollars.”

Nielsen’s criteria — which encompass five main areas — are:

Salience
1. Does the product offer a true innovation?
2. Will the product be noticed?

Communication
3. Is your message conveyed in a simple, persuasive way?
4. Do you have a clear and concise message? Is it conveyed without clutter?

Attraction
5. Does your product have a substantial need/desire? Is it solving a problem or meeting consumers’ needs?
6. What is your product’s advantage? Is it better than others currently in the marketplace?
7. Are your product claims believable?
8. Are there acceptable downsides? (These are typically related to side effects for over-the-counter products.)

Point of Purchase
9. Is the product where consumers expect it to be? Can shoppers find it easily among the competition?
10. What are the cost/benefit tradeoffs at the shelf (price, calorie content, usage instructions, etc.)?

Endurance
11. Did you meet or exceed consumers’ expectations? Are you delivering on your product’s promise?
12. Will consumers continue to purchase your product in the future?

Do you have an iPad or Android tablet and a cat that you like making happy?
Friskies is excited to feed your cats’ senses with three new games made just for cats, “Cat fishing”, “Tasty treasures hunt” and “Party mix-up !”. The colors, movement, and game-play have been researched and tested for maximum feline fun.

The bare glass screen on the iPad stands up to your cat’s claws with no problems, but please be aware that a cat’s sharp claws could possibly damage add-on plastic film covers.

Tesco has unveiled plans to become a global brand owner, kicking off the strategy this month with the launch of non-Tesco-branded ice-cream and pet-food ranges.

It is examining all categories to find out where else it can create brands, with the ultimate goal being products that will be successful enough to be sold in non-competing retailers such as petrol stations and garden centres.

ChokaBlok ice-cream, La-thams dog food and NutriCat cat food will be the first ‘venture brands’, as they are referred to internally, to come to market. The launches are being overseen by brands development director Sidonie Kingsmill.

‘Our own-label business is very mature, so we’re looking at what’s next,’ said Kingsmill. ‘Our venture brands are very different to own-label; they will never be “me-too” products. We look at where the customer opportunities are, where brands are not succeeding and what we can do in addition to brands. We’re in a unique position as the biggest retailer, with access to the best suppliers worldwide.’

She added that brand owners such as Nestlé and Procter & Gamble knew about the launches, but claimed they ‘were not upset’ because the products offered something different and were good news for the overall category.

Marketing for the products, which includes press ads, websites and sampling, refers to Tesco only as the stockist. The launch of NutriCat, a vet-approved nutritional range, is backed by sponsorship of ITV’s Animal Kingdom.

All three brands will launch in Tesco’s central European stores in the coming weeks. The retailer also recently trademarked the term Carousel under the toy category and the word Muse in the confectionery category.

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk