Olivier Francois, Chrysler's brand chief, is bringing back "models wearing metallic minidresses" to automotive marketing, reports David Welch in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (3/15/10). "I am doing here what I know from [home]," says Olivier, whose home is France and claim to fame is Fiat's recent success in Italy. His goal is "to attract a younger, hipper, wealthier customer as Chrysler's traditional buyers age and dwindle in number." To accomplish this, he's not afraid to court some controversy, as well as "generate new heat around the brand's muscle cars."

During the SuperBowl, for example, he ran a "slyly sexist commercial for the Dodge Charger" called "Man's Last Stand." The spot "featured closeups of regular guys saying: 'I will shave. I will carry your lip balm. I will put the seat down." And then the voiceover, as a Charger speeds away adds, "Because I do this, I will drive the car I want to drive." The spot did create buzz, including a great YouTube spoof done from a woman's perspective: "I will put my career on hold to raise your children. I will diet, botox, and wax everything ..." (video)

Whether that kind of buzz translates into sales remains to be seen, obviously. Olivier also says he's on the lookout for cars that "people want to make out in." This would be a switch "for an automaker best known for the Town & Country minivan." And it may not help attract more women to, say, Dodge, whose buyers are three-quarters male -- or soccer moms and dads, for that matter. Industry analyst John Wolkonowicz is among those doubting that what worked in Italy for Fiat will work for Chrysler in America. "Americans don't have that kind of loyalty," he says.

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"We treat customers like we'd want to be treated," says Terry Sutton, vp of customer satisfaction at L.L. Bean, in a BusinessWeek piece by Michael Arndt (3/1/10). For Bean, founded some 98 years ago, this has meant big changes, most of them digital. "Wherever they want to shop, we have to be there," says Terry. For openers, this means "a website that makes placing orders intuitive and package tracking simple." Bean has also "opened the site to customer ratings and reviews of its wares, even if they are negative."

The Bean site offers instant messaging and email with call center agents, and plans are to add a "click and call" button "that will prompt a help call within two minutes to any online shopper who wants more information." Even more impressively, Bean "switched to a new bank that agreed to split the cost of free return shipping to holders of the L.L. Bean credit card." None of this should be surprising, given the retailer's famously "liberal return policy and folksy sales staff."

The surprise is the extent to which it has transformed Bean's business: "This year, for the first time, internet sales will top catalog orders." This change has not come without significant disruption at Bean. With phone orders declining, it is closing "one of its four call centers," although the center's employees will continue to work either from their homes or other sites. What Bean won't do is offshore its back-office, or cut benefits; the philosophy is that "happier employees mean better service." As Terry says, "The technology has changed the game, but the basics haven't changed."

When he first started, Jake Burton figured that all he needed to do was make and sell 50 snowboards a day, reports Bruce Horovitz in USA Today (2/8/10). The problem was, he sold just 350 for the year, which was 1977. He did manage to double that the following year, and was doing fine until his bank cut off his financing in 1984 "when its executive decided snowboarding was a passing fad." So, Jake became a "one-man cheerleading squad for the sport. He visited hundreds of ski hills that had banned snowboarding," and persuaded them to allow it at their resorts.

This wasn't part of Jake's original vision. "When I started Burton Snowboards, I had no idea snowboarding was going to be done at resorts," says Jake. "I thought people would do it in their backyards. I wish I could take credit for having the vision that it would become this big." But it did, and so did his company, which today commands "40 percent of the world's snowboard market. Sales ... are believed to reach almost $700 million." The business has now diversified into surfing as well as skateboarding gear, and has also opened "several brand stores."

The reality is that Burton "now makes more money selling apparel, often to folks who have never been on a board," but it's possible that Burton could become a billion dollar company within five years. Jake says he doesn't think about that, but his success "surprises no one more" than himself. "I was a punk," says Jake. "I got kicked out of boarding school at 15." Now 55, Jake still doesn't comb his graying hair, and says his brand keeps it cool because decisions "are made by a guy and his family who snowboard 100 days a year," and not by Wall Street.

Ten years ago, Lego "seemed to have lost its way," but now it is enjoying "a sharp revival" of its fortunes, reports Kim Hjelmgaard in the Wall Street Journal (12/24/09). In fact, in the first half of this year, Lego's sales were up 23 percent, compared to a five-percent decline in toy sales globally. This still places Lego, at $1.83 billion in sales, as the third-largest toy company after Mattel ($5.5 billion) and Hasbro ($4 million). But its robust position is somewhat surprising, given that its toys tend to be a bit complicated and expensive.

Sean McGowan, an industry analyst, explains, "The fact that Lego is relatively expensive is secondary to the fact that it provides many hours of repeatable joy ... Parents remember that, which makes a $40 purchase a better value than $20 toy that may lose its appeal by the time Christmas leftover sandwiches are served." The company's chief executive, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, says the company's success is also a function of its perceived virtues, particularly where its licensing deals with Star Wars are concerned.

"We take the virtues of Lego and the virtues of Star Wars and create something more optimal out of it," says Jorgen. "Here you have a category [videogames] where many parents perceive it as not really creative and not very good for their children, but when it becomes Lego ... it has the benefits of both worlds." He compares playing with Legos to reading books, suggesting that the toy "teaches children to be systematic, creative problem-solvers." Jorgen has also embraced the virtues of cost-cutting, having "cut jobs and outsourced manufacturing to far-flung places like the Czech Republic, and, more recently, Mexico."

3M, Hershey and Pitney-Bowes are using "innovation centers" to get face-to-face insights into what their customers really need, reports Mary Tripsas in the New York Times (12/27/09). At 3M's St. Paul headquarters, the center is known as "World of Innovation," with similar centers located in Japan, Brazil, Germany, India, China and Russia. John Horn, a 3M vice president for research and development, says the objective is to get a grip on "what our customers are trying to accomplish, not what they say they need."

To get at this, 3M exposes customers to "more than 40 of what it calls technology platforms ... that can potentially be combined and applied to meet a range of different markets." The hope is that this will prompt "novel connections -- like using dental technology to improve car parts," for instance. Hershey's innovation center, meanwhile, is "aimed at retailers" and features "a tasting room ... where corporate scientists discuss trends and retailers can sample products under development and offer feedback."

Hershey's innovation center also includes "a mock store where Hershey illustrates merchandising ideas. Hershey hopes to make shopping easier by organizing the candy aisle by how products are used (candy dish, gift-giving or family movie night) instead of product line." And at Pitney Bowes, customers are encouraged to load their own applications into Pitney Bowes systems and experiment. "We're hoping to get at things they wouldn't have thought about," says Pitney evp Leslie Abi-Karam. "In the long run, we expect that working with customers in our innovation center will alter our development trajectory."

"All of our social problems arise out of doing the wrong things righter," said the late Russell Ackoff, as quoted by Stephen Miller in a Wall Street Journal remembrance (11/11/09). "The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better!" That may sound like it comes from the Dr. Seuss school of business management, but it's the kind of thinking that helped Anheuser-Busch "achieve national dominance."

For A-B, it turned out, the wrong thing was to increase advertising budgets or try to improve the taste of its beer. Mr. Ackoff determined that neither of these initiatives increased sales. So, his advice was to keep the ad budget flat, and pass the savings along to consumers, "making Budweiser inexpensive compared with local brands." A-B followed this strategy from 1961 to 1976, during which time it quadrupled sales.

Indeed, over the 30 years the company worked with Mr. Ackoff, its "market share grew to more than 40 percent from seven percent." A-B gratefully funded a business graduate center at Wharton (link) in Mr. Ackoff's name, where "he trained generations of management graduate students in an unconventional program that," as he put it, had "no curriculum, no classes, no examinations, no admission requirements -- only exit requirements." He attributed his holistic perspective to his training as an architect, and eschewed the term "guru" in favor of "teacher," his idea being that he was simply "helping his clients design their own solutions."

The problem with many companies is that they judge employees on everything except "whether the job gets done and the customer is happy," write Brian M. Carney and Isaac Getz in Freedom, Inc., as excerpted in the Wall Street Journal (10/15/09). The authors draw from the philosophy of Jean-François Zobrist, a former chief executive, who observed that there are two kinds of companies -- "how" companies and "why" companies.

The "how" companies "spend their time telling workers how to do their jobs," while the "why" companies "replace all the 'hows' with a single question: Why are you doing what you're doing?" Where the "how" approach completely ignores customer happiness, the "why" question has only one answer, which is "to keep the customers happy." And if you're keeping the customer happy, the "how" is pretty much irrelevant.

The authors also write about "the hidden cost of top-down thinking," which refers to a failure to account for "disengaged, stressed out, ill, or even absent" employees. This hidden cost results in "turnover, workplace stress, conflict-ridden labor relations," as well as "a lack of innovation and slumping organic growth." They also call for a new kind of leadership, where leaders eschew status symbols and subordinate themselves to their employees. The key, they say, is to make your people feel like "human beings instead of human resources."

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Illy, the Italian coffee brand, is moving in on Starbucks by "joining forces with independent coffee shops," reports Julie Jargon in the Wall Street Journal (11/3/09). Illy calls its program Artisti del Gusto (Artist of Taste) and brought it to America last year, having launched the concept in Italy three years ago. Illy's idea is simply to "get its name in front of more customers without having to buy or rent its own shops."

In exchange for signing a three-year exclusive with Illy, the shops receive "Italian espresso machines, coffee cups, artwork, drink recipes and intensive training, after which the cafe becomes a certified Illy purveyor." Sean Lupton-Smith, owner of Cafe Nineteen in Atlanta, says the program is working well for him. Where he previously sold a no-name cup of coffee for $1.60, he now sells Illy-branded cups for $3.00. He says his coffee sales have tripled.

Sean feels the Illy imprimatur helps him "offer a consistent experience ... and be strong enough to stand up to the Starbucks around the corner." Hanna Suleiman of Caffe Greco in San Francisco meanwhile reports her "sales have increased by 10 percent and profits by 3 percent since the shop signed up with Illy a year ago." So far, Illy has inked 28 U.S. cafes, "plans to add 100 more in the next three years" and expand into Mexico and Canada. Starbucks currently has more than 11,000 U.S. stores.