Category Archives: business

New Saturn campaign: a victim of old thinking?

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Saturn is set to launch an interesting new promotion this Summer.

Saturn to Park Competition On Dealership Lots
by Karl Greenberg
Friday, Jun 1, 2007 5:01 AM ET

SATURN MAY BE ROLLING OUT a fresh line-up of vehicles this year, but consumers visiting Saturn dealers this summer will be surprised by the pair of cars parked next to Saturn’s Aura sedan: Toyota’s Camry and Honda’s Accord.

The effort, a retail version of the overtly competitive “Ford Challenge” campaign by its cross-town rival, lets consumers shopping Saturn’s Aura test-drive the Camry and Accord, as well, when they visit Saturn. Continue reading →

US companies underperforming on reputation index?

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There’s a lot to be suspicious about anytime you come across a survey-based measure of reputation, especially when you’re working across all kind of international borders and trying to normalize for dramatically different sets of local and regional assumptions about how businesses ought to work. But even given this, the results from a new Reputation Institute study of corporate reputations raise some questions.

Mainly, how come American companies didn’t do better? Continue reading →

The looming macro-succession crisis

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I was reading a Seattle Times story earlier today on how men in their 30s are earning less than their fathers did. An interesting story top to bottom, but the concluding section drew me back around to something that I really haven’t talked about enough lately – the looming generational macro-succession nightmare facing corporate America.

Diehard careerist baby boomers also might partly explain the inability of 30-something men to move up the income ladder as quickly as their fathers. From the moment Generation Xers entered the workplace, boomers have been the “ceiling” blocking their way up the income ladder, said Peter Rose, a partner with marketing-research company Yankelovich in Los Angeles.”The boomers stand out in defining themselves in terms of their work and have shown a disinclination to get out of the way,” he said.

It’s hard to blame the Boomers for not getting the heck out of the way, although I’ve certainly been one of those Xers stacked up beneath that in-no-hurry-to-leave Boomer leadership dynamic. But there’s a basic numbers crunch that’s about to hit, and it’s going to throw a lot of companies into leadership transition crisis. Consider: Continue reading →

The local angle

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I live in the North Carolina Piedmont Triad, a thriving little 12-county market that includes Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Like most similar markets, there’s a keen interest in growth – for obvious reasons. And I’m fine with that – we’re all in favor of improved economic and cultural opportunities.

But sometimes I wonder what kind of pictures local leaders and developers have in their heads when they imagine how they’d like their city to be. The Triad Business Journal has a running poll inviting reader input on a rotating series of issues facing the market, and today’s question really jumped out at me: Continue reading →