i didn’t think janet’s dunkin donuts’ employee-of-the-month notice could be easily topped, but then this little ray of sunshine beamed in…and made an otherwise nothing cyber-monday suddenly seem worthwhile. writes a longtime reader in minneapolis: “i normally overlook memos like these, but i’m so glad i took time to read this one. i promptly stole one of the many copies posted around my department and highlighted my favorite parts.” adds our submitter: “i have yet to find out who wrote this little treasure, but i plan to sleuth it out.” stay tuned for more on this developing story! related: cloudy...
Filed under: Magazines, The History of..., BreadWriting in Slate, Jewish food maven Joan Nathan ponders the bagel, that thick steering wheel of boiled dough that's such a cultural touchstone for American Jews. Now, a new book, The Bagel: A Cultural History delves into the subject, sussing out the bagel's ancient roots and exposing amusing details of the bagel's role in 20th century life. Apparently, breads with holes have been around for centuries. Italians had hard crackers called taralli, Romans had something called buccellatum and the Chinese something called girde. Egyptians, Nathan adds, had their own - you can see the...
Visit any Dunkin’ Donuts store nowadays and you’ll see signs that say something about how, in a blind taste test, people preferred the company’s coffee to Starbucks’. Yes, fine, the coffee is good, but have you tried the donuts? My God, are they delicious. I know it’s not “cool” to gorge on fried dough anymore, but try a plain stick, a glazed stick, and a chocolate glazed stick the next time you’re near a store. After a failed first try stemming all the way back to 1994, Dunkin’ Donuts is attempting to re-enter the Chinese market, according to the...
One of my favorite blogs is PassiveAggressiveNotes.com, and today they've got a doozy. Apparently, this branch of Dunkin Donuts really loves to reward their employee of the month by congratulating him or her personally on their receipts: If you're going to make fun of someone for being "slow," at least use spell check....
Want to keep Junior happy this Christmas while giving him a fun way to keep fit despite demanding his weekly McDonalds, Dunkin’ Donuts and KFC meals? Well, with the 1953 Corvette Pedal Car, he’ll have his hands (and legs for that matter) full, trying to emulate daddy by getting from point A to point B in a set of stylish wheels. Made by Kettler, makers of quality ride on toys in Germany since 1949, this is the heirloom quality pedal car modeled after a 1953 Corvette. Made with exacting detail that marked its larger predecessor as the most sought-after...
Unlike many regular coffee drinkers, I actually quite like Starbucks. I plan to write further about this, but Starbucks is innovative, open to consumer feedback (hence the Pikes Place brew) and make consistently good coffee. I written many times though that I prefer Dunkin Donuts - in part due to the pricing. One outcome of the economic climate is that cheaper coffee producers (namely McDonalds) are finding success as consumers aren’t willing to forgo their morning joe… but are willing to buy from cheaper locations. Douglas Fisher, president of consultancy FHG International Inc, said, “The consumer is retrenching. They’re out...
Dunkin’ Donuts took the gloves off in its battle against rival Starbucks with the October 21 launch of its “Dunkin Beat Starbucks” campaign featuring a national blind taste test where Dunkin’ coffee was preferred over Starbucks. Has the campaign resonated with coffee drinkers? *Daily reach is the number of people that visit a website on a given day as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users online that day. 45,516 people visited the dedicated microsite dunkinbeatstarbucks.com the week ending October 25 Weekly traffic to dunkindonuts.com jumped 61% to more than 196,000 the week after the initial media launch The daily...
One day several months ago, David Alston said to me at a conference something like this: “I just realized that there are two conferences going on here. One is in this room, and there are people with note pads writing feverishly and chatting with their neighbors. The other is out on the web, and we’re all Twittering the conversation out to others who aren’t even here.” That’s part of why we did the Twebinars, was because David and I were talking about how events need to stretch beyond the physical world now. I’ve recently started using BrightKite again, specifically...
Photograph of people celebrating under a giant flag in Union Square last night by semel17 on Flickr From the Gothamist Newsmap: A stabbing at Winthrop St & Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn, a Pedestrian Struck at 31 St & 7 Ave in Manhattan and a home invasion robbery on Atlantic Ave in Queens. More about that 10-year-old who saved a classmate from choking: Turns out he's an aspiring lawyer, will be saluted at an Islanders game and learned about the Heimlich from the Dunkin Donuts poster! If you work for the Manhattan DA's office but help lawyers for two men...
News roundup. I just savd you visiting 10 websites. AdAge today reports that “Internet Superstar” (by Revision3) is R.I.P. A moment of silence please for Internet’s Martin Sargent and friends. The show’s recent McCain spoof has a slow build, but some comic moments as McCain discovers a phone without a cord.. Microsoft is asking consumers to create ads because it realizes that its own marketing is so bad a freak with a webcam could top it. Celebrities are still using video to get us to vote. Sigh. Daisy Whitney reports that Strike.tv is live. Worth a visit, but I got...
From Serious Eats "Hey, Dunkin' Donuts: America does not run on Dunkin'. You guys owe me a new gas tank." —Stephen Colbert, on Monday's show opener...
Freshfuel and the Dieline point to some new logos from big players. Cluelessness on the half shell. Smart marketers understand that a new logo can't possibly increase your market share, and they know that an expensive logo doesn't defeat a cheap logo. They realize that the logo is like a first name, it's an identifier. So, when Pepsi and BestBuy start 'testing' logos, and proclaiming that a new logo might change their market share, I get nervous. You can't test a logo any more than you can test a first name. Sure, you can eliminate Myxlplyx as an outlier,...
It’s no secret that the Starbucks coffee brand has taken a bit of a bashing financially in the past 12 months. It’s brand was further tarnished over the past month by an article in the Sun newspaper claiming the coffee chain leaves a tap running constantly in all is shops worldwide. Furthermore, Dunkin’ Donuts, the coffee-and-baked goods chain, recently launched a new campaign in the US highlighting a survey in which discerning ‘joe’ drinkers said they prefer Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to java from Starbucks. The campaign also includes a new website titled “Dunkin’ Beats Starbucks.” Dunkin’ Donuts claims that...
The MTA is currently testing out new digital screens that display ads on the sides of buses running on the M23 route. The screens, which use GPS technology to change according to each neighborhood's demographic, are being installed by New York-based ad company Titan Worldwide; the company's website declares that the 12-foot displays "are bright and unavoidable and will enable advertisers to target mass audiences by time of day, block, zip-code, demography and ethnicity." Yay! As Titan's marketing director tells the Post, "In the morning, we can show Starbucks, and on the way home from work, a Budweiser ad."...
Hill, Holliday has created a new commercial and Web site touting blind taste-test results favoring Dunkin' Donuts coffee over Starbucks. I conducted a test of my own, pounding down Dunkin' coffee non-stop all day yesterday and Starbucks today to see which buzz is more righteous and "far out." For kicks, I also wore a blindfold. The Dunkin' coffee made me hallucinate that the sexy field researcher in the ad morphed into a giant Dutch man-cat who got my doughnut order wrong over and over, just like the counter help at Dunkin' in real life. After my first dozen Starbucks...
