by Marc H. Rudov | January 28, 2015 | Article
Two execs from Chock Full o’ Nuts, the 89-year-old, Manhattan-based coffee company, now owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage Group, recently visited Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice. Their mission: Challenge the two teams, Vortex and Infinity, to create...
by Marc H. Rudov | January 23, 2015 | Article
AT&T plans to acquire DirecTV by May 2015, barring any regulatory snags, for $48.5B. This unwieldy combination will create organizational and branding indigestion. Will the DirecTV name survive? Should it? How will AT&T differentiate it from U-verse? At 20M+...
by Marc H. Rudov | January 19, 2015 | Article
A big part of Apple’s brand is ease of use. Successful suppliers like Apple simplify customers’ lives and never ask them to perform heavy lifting. Simplify and ease. What a concept! Long before YouTube and the iPhone, everybody owned a VCR. Comically, most...
by Marc H. Rudov | January 16, 2015 | Article
I am amused at all the declarations of devotion, of late, to customer service and customer experience — the management jargon du jour on Twitter. Like discovering that water flows downhill, CEOs are just now realizing that taking care of customers is good for...
by Marc H. Rudov | January 11, 2015 | Article
Quick, name the largest American manufacturer of paperclips. Unless you’re in the biz, you can’t. Answer: ACCO, for American Clip Company, which began operations in 1903. The other major supplier is Officemate International. According to the Wall Street...
