General Mills creates a "we" brand, one box top at a time.  By Dori Molitor. (more)

When Mary McBride and her band tours, their venues are "hospitals, homeless shelters and rehabilitation centers," reports John Jurgensen in the Wall Street Journal (6/14/10). Mary calls this tour "The Home Tour," and sometimes expresses the idea by quoting Maya Angelou: "I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself." Mary and her band will lose money on this tour, but that's not the point. "I have a very generous band who has bought into this idea," she says, "and the notion that payoff comes in different ways."

Mary's idea is simply to show "how communities can be nurtured, whether by sharing shelter, stories or -- for an hour or two -- some live music." She got the idea while "visiting homebound elderly people in Washington on behalf a foundation called We Are Family. Originally, she thought she would map a tour "where she could tack on money-making club dates," but the number of free dates far outnumbered the paid ones. She does get some free lodging courtesy of Starwood Hotels and discount Ryder truck rentals, which is nice.

Mary actually is no stranger to unconventional tours, having previously embarked on "The Five Borough Tour," in which her tour bus was taxicabs. Nor is she a total stranger to success, having contributed a tune called "No One's Gonna Love You Like Me," to the "Brokeback Mountain" soundtrack. Her music is said to fall somewhere "between country, folk and the blues, singing with a blurred voice that situates her somewhere between Lucinda Williams and Melissa Etheridge." Mary's latest record, "The Way Home," will be released June 22nd.

Optimism is the pulse of the next Pepsi generation. By Dori Molitor. (more)

Retailers and brands must work together for the shopper's greater good. By Beth Ann Kaminkow. (more)

Panera Bread's pay-what-you-can experiment at a St. Louis cafe is leaving some patrons both skeptical and baffled, reports Stephanie Strom in the New York Times (5/21/10). The concept is not a Panera restaurant but Panera donates the food, customers determine the prices and any profit goes to charity. To some, this is a mind-bender. "I don't have the foggiest idea of where the money's going," says David Eisenbraun, who left just $15 for a meal worth $24.95. He adds: "Are they in it for the good press?"

Hrmph. Some gratitude. Some good press! But Panera chairman Ron Shaich thinks the idea of letting people pay what they can for meals is worth a shot. "It's a test of human nature," he says. "The real question is whether the community can sustain it." That question was answered with a resounding "no" at Terra Bite Lounge which abandoned a similar format because the neighborhood was heavily populated by teen eaters, who apparently took unfair advantage of the cheap eats. Other such restaurants have simply given up.

However, One World Everybody Eats has survived by asking everyone to pay at least "$4 for a meat or fish entree." It also swapped out its open money basket for a lockbox, but gives away "about 15-20 of the roughly 60 meals it serves each day ... to needy customers, some of whom wash windows, sweep or break down boxes for an hour or so in return." Giovanni Bouderbala, One World's head chef and director says that when this works, it's great: "They leave here with a full stomach and feeling like they earned their meal, which is the idea."

It's like the Pepsi Challenge for the digital generation, says CMO Jill Beraud. An exclusive Q&A interview by Tim Manners. (more)

Blake Mycoskie of Toms Shoes fame says he never intended to wrap his brand equity in a charity, reports Christina Binkley in the Wall Street Journal (4/1/10). "I wasn't out to do good," he says. "I'm an entrepreneur." It's true: Before founding Toms Shoes, Blake occupied himself with a "drivers-ed company, a laundry firm and an attempt to create a reality-TV network" (he had been a contestant on "The Amazing Race"). He was bouncing around Buenos Aires, hankering after cheap polo lessons, when "he met wealthy urbanites who were donating used shoes in local villages."

As Blake explains: "It just hit me ... Instead of a charity with handouts, why not create a company where that's the whole purpose? I thought, you buy one pair of shoes today so we can give one tomorrow. We'll call them Tomorrow Shoes. No, we'll call them Toms Shoes for tomorrow." Over the past four years, Toms Shoes "has given away 600,000 pairs of shoes ... selling their counterparts at roughly $55 each." That works out to about $33 million in shoes. These days, Blake hangs with Bill Clinton and Toms "was recently ranked #6 on Fast Company magazine's list of most innovative retailers."

Next week, on April 8th, he's planning a promotion, "One Day Without Shoes," which challenges "people to go barefoot and feel what it's like to be among the world's shoeless." His goal is to get 300,000 people to participate -- so far he's got 70,000 signed up at onedaywithoutshoes dot-com. While this appears to be a one-off promotion, Toms does go "a step further than most in blurring the difference between brand and charity; the brand doesn't exist outside the charitable work. Its success shows that good works can be a powerful profit engine." Says Blake: "When you incorporate giving into your model, we're proving it to be good for business."

"The majesty of the act was offensive to him," says A.E. Hotchner, explaining why Paul Newman never signed autographs in a USA Today piece by Bob Minzesheimer (3/23/10). A.E. -- or Hotch as his friends call him -- is out with a new book called Paul and Me, that Hotch began writing as "notes to himself after Newman's death" in September 2008. The story goes that the two men became friends before either was famous, and both were struggling. "Paul and I were in the same boat," says Hotch. "I was trying to go beyond freelance magazine writing and Paul didn't know if he could make it as an actor."

Their connection was through Ernest Hemingway, whom Hotch met in Cuba in 1948. Hotch ended up adapting a Hemingway short story, The Battler, into a TV play. Paul originally was cast in a supporting role, but got the lead after James Dean died in a car crash. Years later, Hotch and Paul coincidentally both bought homes in Westport, Connecticut, where they famously "began a line of food products that grew from a prank by two friends with no business experience into a charity that has given away $300 million since 1982" (link).

Paul came up with "Salad King" as the brand name, but thought the better of it after fellow Westporter Martha Stewart pointed out that "kings have always put their names in their titles, like King Paul the First." To which Paul replied, "This dressing is not for royalty, it's for commoners. How about Newman's Own?" The name was left over from a restaurant idea he and Hotch had conceived, but never hatched. "I'd tend bar and you'd be the ingratiating greeter," was how Paul described the concept to Hotch. (Paul eventually did open a restaurant, the Dressing Room, which remains alive and well in Westport).

Luxury brands can make us look (and feel) good. By Cable Daniel-Dreyfus. (more)

Cynthia Magnus says she often finds clothes -- destroyed and discarded -- behind the H & M store on 34th Street in Manhattan, reports Jim Dwyer in the New York Times (1/6/10). She recently came across "about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up." Just to be sure the clothes couldn't be worn, "someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors." Cynthia went through it and was amazed by what she found.

"Gloves with the fingers cut off ... Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth-graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men's jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy white fiber fill was coming out in white cotton." She also found bags filled with "sturdy plastic hangers." She took some of the bags, hoping to find someone who could repair the clothes, and kept the hangers for herself.

"A girl can never have enough hangers," says Cynthia. She's also written a letter to H & M's head of corporate responsibility, Ingrid Schullstorm, volunteering "to help H & M connect with a charity that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash." As it happens, there's a "big collection point for New York Cares, which conducts an annual coat drive" just around the corner from the H & M store. Within a couple of days, H & M agreed to donate discarded clothes to charity.