Recently in All About Life Category

It is finally here! The official start of summer begins with the three day weekend - Memorial Day. Barbeques, picnics, the beach, pool and summer vacations all await us over the next three months. Memorial Day is truly an American holiday where food, friends and fun reign supreme. Let the celebration begin as 28 million people travel to a get-together over the weekend. That's up 5% from last year. After two-plus long years of recession, it's heartening to see economic growth in any form.

The news about Subway getting into the breakfast game made me question the move. Did they have to do this? Not everyone can do everything well. Five-dollar foot long sandwiches are working well for them. Why the need for breakfast game? It's because the quick service, aka fast food, category is ruthless. It never stops - morning, noon and night. Does it have to be that way?

Having grown up in the 60's and 70's, family dinner was just that - dinner. Everything revolved around dinner in the Field household. We ate at a certain time, and as children we were called in by a ship's bell mounted on the back porch. You could hear that bell from anywhere in the neighborhood. God help you if you were late. Many of my best, and also many not so fond memories, were of dinners at home. You felt protected and secure in that setting.

So many of us celebrate a special occasion or a holiday by popping a cork. A glass of wine is synonymous with good times and good food. In today's celebrity obsessed culture, wine making is now the cause celeb! Actors and actresses - old and new, hot and has been - are into wine making in a big way. The same holds true for golfers, chefs, auto racers and game show hosts. There's big money in grapes. According to the latest sales figures from 2007, celebrity wines account for 1% of the $42 million wine sales here in the U.S. It's up 17% over the previous year. Everyone is cashing in on their wine name cachet.

All of us who have been in the communications business for years, had drilled into us early in our college years the four P's of marketing - price, product, promotion and place.  This was one of those things like the chemical table symbols that just stuck in your head and stayed there forever; lead is Pb and gold is Au; and the lessons that you learned from your parents as they raised you from infancy.  Similar to the P's, the lessons you learned from them are indelibly etched in your mind.  It was interesting that the other day I learned another set of P's that came in an informative, inspirational way.  These new P's moved me in a way I haven't been in recent years.  I can't stop thinking about it.