Word: marketization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...greeting to its competitors: "You're toast." The company launched a new 99[cents] line, undercutting the basic price by a buck, and threw a $50 million ad campaign behind the new product. (Tag line: "Why not?") Hallmark too is trying to ignite sales in its 20,000 mass-market retail outlets and erase any notion consumers might have that it's a high-priced product. But the move--remember Marlboro Friday, when market leader Philip Morris cut the price of smokes?--will fall heavily on its struggling rivals, who can least afford it. "When the leading brand advertises...
Essentially, Hallmark is abandoning the high ground of prose and pictures for a frontal assault. Although the company still sells premium-priced (about $5) cards in its own shops and franchised outlets, the real battle has shifted to the mass-market stores, such as supermarkets and discounters. There the cardmakers are left slugging it out over exclusive contracts for coveted shelf space. The aggressive deals cut by retailers, combined with slowing sales volume, have put the squeeze on profits...
...with 150 employees and real revenue, has a good chance of launching a successful offering. Adult companies have gone public before--Playboy Enterprises in 1993 and New Frontier Media last year--but none of them, served up amid a frenzied IPO market, have been pure Internet plays. (One other, much less endowed company, efox.net Inc., has registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO.) And remember, many recent Internet IPO stars were companies with no earnings--think Marketwatch, theglobe.com and Geocities. IEG is already hugely profitable. If it were comparably valued, it would be worth hundreds of millions...
School resistance to these kinds of ventures has been steadily worn down, ever since Channel One began offering schools free video equipment in return for showing kids a daily TV newscast filled with commercials. Now some companies are allowed into schools to do their market research. Noggin, an interactive TV network created by Nickelodeon and the Children's Television Network, meets with more than 300 students at a New Jersey school during lunch and recess for the express purpose of finding out "what sparks kids." To thank Watchung School for its cooperation, the network has "contributed" $7,000 worth...
...know the Internet is cool, fun and convenient--and fast becoming indispensable. What we don't know is whether Internet companies are worth the stratospheric prices they command in the stock market. That's the big risk you take in owning high flyers such as eBay and iVillage. Sure, they keep going up. But with little or no earnings, it's tough to gauge their ultimate value--and, possibly, not since William Henry Seward paid the Russians 2[cents] an acre for Alaska has a population (Internet junkies, in this case) been so thoroughly taken to the cleaners...