Word: profit
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Ford loves customers like Gail Reed. Last April, a few months before 0% financing wiped out profit margins on such standard models as Windstars and Tauruses, Reed, an Atlanta accountant, saw a picture of a pearl-white Thunderbird convertible and fell in love. She agreed to pay the full $39,000 sticker price and willingly waited nearly a year for delivery, driving off with her baby a few weeks ago. "I've always owned sensible cars," says Reed, 43 and single. "Then I started thinking, this T-Bird is a great-looking, fun car. If I'm ever going...
What accounts for the revival of convertibles? Automakers seem to have rediscovered a couple of old maxims about the sexy beasts: they can be profit machines, and they drive showroom traffic, bathing an otherwise humdrum line of sedans with an aura of cool. Honda's S2000, for example, is a curvaceous hot rod that's a hit with critics and customers. Honda limits supply to maintain overheated demand, so you can forget about a rebate. But volume isn't the point. Says spokesman Andy Boyd: "We want people to think Honda is about cars that are sporty...
...profit from automated tellers may eventually come through one-to-one marketing. While only about 500 machines worldwide are testing this technology, the Boston consulting firm Celent Communications predicts that the number will jump to 80,000 by 2005. Soon, as customers pay down their car loans, for example, their ATMs will suggest timely preapproved loans for a spiffy new vehicle. Or if a user doesn't have enough funds to cover a withdrawal, he could be offered overdraft protection or a loan-which is better than being told, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid...
Both the AIDS bike rides and the Avon Breast Cancer Walks, which together netted $69 million last year, are produced for charitable causes by a for-profit firm called Pallotta Teamworks. In the 1990s, Pallotta elevated the folksy fund-raising trend to a well-marketed mass movement with glossy brochures and inspirational videos. But that kind of approach is turning off do-gooders like Carol Peeples, 44, a teacher in Salida, Colo., who raised $2,500 for a Pallotta-run Avon Breast Cancer Walk last year. Peeples and other walkers received a coffee-table-book-size color catalog promoting various...
...years, Lee's company, Singa Takara Enterprises, struggled to turn a profit selling custom-made spook equipment to clients such as the Iranian secret police. Then, in December, one of Taiwan's tabloid magazines whipped up a scandal by distributing free copies of an X-rated video purported to be of former Taipei politician Chu Mei-feng as she entertained somebody else's husband. The couple was secretly filmed with a thumbnail-sized camera hidden in a bedroom. Since the incident, which became an Internet sensation, Lee can't keep his shelves stocked?and Taiwan is gripped with hidden-camera...