“You say po-TAY-toe and I say po-TAH-toe … let’s call the whole thing off.” That was easy for songwriters George and Ira Gershwin to say. But the last thing the United States Potato Board (USPB) wanted was for Americans to call off their affair with the humble spud.

Even though potatoes account for nearly 15 percent of farm sales for vegetable crops (only grapes grow more cash for farmers), the U.S. consumer has been steadily spurning spuds for the last two decades. Since 1990, in-home potato consumption has boiled down 14.75 percent.

In 1971, it was a different story. Then, the newly formed, grower-funded USPB cooked up an informational campaign that scored high with consumers. “After that, our research showed that more than 90 percent of consumers agreed that potatoes are nutritious and not fattening,” says Linda McCashion, vice president of the Denver-based trade organization. “But now it’s changed. To many people today, potatoes are the enemy.”

Consumer support for potatoes peeled away for more reasons than there are ways to cook them. Over the last 30 years, the work week for married couples increased by about 17.5 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and fast-food restaurants more than doubled to more than 250,000. Consequently, on any given day, around one quarter of these time-starved U.S. adults and nearly one-third of children dine on fast food. As a result, the average caloric intake has bloated by around 15 percent since the 1970s, and obesity rates have doubled.

People were starting to look as lumpy as Idaho potatoes, spurring the low-carb Atkins Diet craze. Today, an estimated 25 million Americans are on the Atkins Diet or one of its many spud-spurning offshoots.

The USPB needed a way to plump up potato sales, but it decided traditional marketing such as television advertising wasn’t the answer. “We wanted an all-potato-all-the-time space where we could tell our story,” McCashion says.

The USPB decided to tell the potato story at a pop-up store in New York last November. Part of a three-year, $500,000 effort to “turn Americans’ attitudes about potatoes around,” as McCashion says, it was a strategy that had more layers than scalloped potatoes.

The USPB opened the store for five days during Thanksgiving week of 2006, when potato consumption is at its highest — 38 million pounds on Turkey Day alone. It chose a 5,000-square-foot space on the first floor of the Chelsea Market. Once the site of the National Biscuit Co., the complex is now home to a gastronomical amount of restaurants and bakeries, along with The Food Network.

“We knew that producers and talent for The Food Network’s shows would pass by the site,” says Amy Kull, senior vice president of St. Louis-based PR firm Fleishman-Hillard Inc., which helped produce the USPB event. “The store would keep potatoes top-of-mind as they developed their programming.”

But the producers of “Barefoot Contessa” and “Dinner: Impossible” were just a tasty side dish. The main entrée was kids. With an eye on capturing the younger demographic, the USPB had floated a giant Mr. Potato Head balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade since 2005. In 2006 it did again, but this time tied the balloon into the pop-up store, which it called the Healthy Mr. Potato Head Quarters.

The potato board used the AARP-eligible Mr. Potato Head (he’s 55 this year) as the re-arrangeable face of the pop-up store, which was divided into areas for both kids and adults. In the Potato Power Patch area, kids accessorized Mr. Potato Head and his significant other, Mrs. Potato Head, tried on temporary Potato Power tattoos, competed in a potato sack race, and posed for a picture with a costumed Mr. Potato Head, which they took home in a branded photo frame. At the grand opening, 100 high-school cheerleaders performed the Potato Power Song & Dance, then joined the activities inside.

For adults, “We wanted it to have a Whole Foods Market texture,” McCashion says, referring to the Austin, TX,-based chain of natural-food stores. Wooden floors the color of baked bread helped foster that feel, as well as the 4-by-12-foot Potato Varieties Display with 24 kinds of potatoes, from familiar yellow to exotic purple.

But strangely shaded potatoes weren’t the only colorful attraction. Hasbro Inc. — which makes the classic toy — displayed Swarovski Crystal Mr. & Mrs. Potato Heads, which the Neiman Marcus department stores crafted as one of its 2005 extreme Christmas gifts. The $8,000 toy tubers were covered with 50,000 of the glittering crystals.

At the Merchandise Showcase, attendees could spin a wheel to win a prize. If they answered a question about potatoes correctly, they won prizes including branded hats, pens, water bottles, and pins.

At the Cooking Station, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, authors of “The Ultimate Potato Book,” prepared decadent-sounding yet healthy delicacies such as Potatoes Florentine and White Chocolate Mashed Potatoes for the crowds.

USPB had two goals for the four-day event: Attract 1,000 visitors and generate 100 million media impressions. By locating the event in a popular, food-related venue during a week teeming with tourists, the USPB drew 2,000 attendees, about twice the target number.

With a variety of visuals to play off, media attention came easily, with Fox Broadcasting Co. and Reuters Group PLC filming stories on site. In the end, USPB estimates the campaign received 215 million media impressions. With results like that, these potatoes were sweet.

In 2006 Motorola decided to join the fight against AIDS in Africa by teaming up with the (Product) Red initiative, a philanthropic program conceived by U2 rock star Bono and philanthropist Bobby Shriver (son of Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps). The initiative started with an idea as bold as a red stop sign: Coax some of capitalism’s hippest corporate icons to produce a river of crimson-colored goods whose sales would generate a flood of money to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. This corporate dream team now includes Schaumburg, IL,-based Motorola Corp., along with Apple Inc., Converse Inc., and others who would basically help save the world by selling cool stuff. The companies develop special “Red” versions of their products and then donate a portion of each sale to The Global Fund.

Motorola created red versions of two of its most popular phone models, the MOTOSLVR and the MOTORAZR, to sell as part of the initiative, but it needed a compelling strategy to promote its philanthropic products. According to the National Philanthropic Trust for Charity in Jenkintown, PA, this is a golden era for charity: Americans gave $260.28 billion in 2005 (the last year for which data is available), an increase of 6.1 percent from 2004, while annual giving has increased in 41 out of the last 42 years. But this is also a time of stiff competition. There are approximately 1,010,400 charitable organizations in the United States, each vying for the limited money and attention of the giving community. How do you compete for mindshare when you have an army of rivals almost twice the population of Las Vegas?

Motorola’s solution was a pop-up store. In this environment, says Randall Ng, managing director of Manhattan-based Fitch New York, which helped design Motorola’s pop-up event, “We could control 100 percent of the (Product) Red and Motorola brand experiences.” Motorola opened its temporary storefront for two weeks last October on Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue. Called Moto (Product) Red, the store’s name blended the company’s brand with the larger vision of a better future for Africa. Visitors entered through a corridor of red, fabric-paneled walls on which Motorola silk-screened the (Product) Red manifesto: “If you buy a (Red) product … at no cost to you, a (Red) company will give some of its profits to buy and distribute … medicine to our brothers and sisters dying of AIDS in Africa. (Red) is not a charity. It is simply a business model. You buy the (Red) stuff, we get the money, buy the pills, and distribute them. If they don’t get the pills, they die. We don’t want them to die. We want to give them the pills. All you have to do is upgrade your choice.”

The dramatic manifesto, as well as accompanying statistics on AIDS, had the clipped tone of modern film noir, compared to the usual Sally Struthers weepathon of many philanthropic appeals. Here, Motorola guiltlessly linked shopping with being a Good Samaritan. Immersed in an environment as full of hip humanitarian messaging as it was free of cynicism, it was possible to believe that a small act of giving something to yourself would also give days, maybe years, of life to someone else.

The phones rested on two perimeter fixtures and pedestals where visitors could take photos with them, then print the photos out or e-mail them using a high-speed T-1 line. To avoid any lag time between pitch and purchase, where the helper’s high might wear off, visitors could buy a phone on the spot, then sign their name on a Hall of Fame board, which visually reinforced their act of enlightened self-interest and support of the (Product) Red mission.

For the store design, Motorola relegated the phones to a second-banana status next to (Product) Red branding and messaging. The product took up maybe 5 percent of the store’s total space. The manifesto, the AIDS statistics, and the Hall of Fame transformed the phones from a commodity purchase to a charitable act.

Motorola’s goal was simple. It wanted to fill up the slots in the Hall of Fame during the store’s two-week run. While the company is zip-lipped about how many people purchased Moto (Product) Red phones during the two-week event, estimates indicate that sales were 20 times that of a comparably sized storefront. Meanwhile, the (Product) Red initiative overall has raised $25 million for AIDS-related causes in Africa. It’s probably the only time Motorola was happy to finish in the red.

“What do women want?” Sigmund Freud once asked. If the father of psychoanalysis didn’t know, you can bet your Aston Martin the American automotive industry has trouble figuring it out. With sales for the big three domestic car makers, General Motors Corp., Daimler Chrysler AG, and Ford Motor Co. crashing like a Corvair — U.S. automakers sold 90 percent of vehicles purchased here in 1979; now they sell less than 49 percent — car makers knew they needed a new strategy.

So when Dearborn, MI,-based Ford wanted to boost sales for its mid-sized Fusion in 2006, after skidding through 11 straight years of sliding market share, it decided to go for the women’s vote. According to studies by Road & Travel magazine, the Automotive Service Councils of California, and Ford itself, women influence 85 percent of all vehicle-purchasing decisions, and ultimately buy 45 percent of all cars.

Ford started by taking a page from someone who knows more about women and cars than James Bond: Toyota Motor Co. The Tokyo-based company and Ford have been jockeying with each other fast and furiously for the No. 2 slot in American automotive sales. But Toyota had the inside track because when it came to buying cars, it knew who wore the Dockers in the family. Toyota’s focus groups showed that safety and security topped the list of women’s concerns, which is why its marketing stresses its airbags and the renowned reliability that won’t leave drivers stranded on a lonely road at night.

But Toyota’s marketing mix was stuck on cruise control with ads in mainstream media and women’s specialty magazines. That’s where Ford saw a chance to make Toyota eat its dust. “We thought if we could put customers’ butts in the seats, we could win them over,” says Whitney Drake of Ford’s communications department. “The question was, how do we reach them to do that?”

Ford decided to go where the women are, holding a series of pop-up events in malls. To launch the events, Ford teamed up with fashion magazine Ellegirl and co-sponsored a runway show for New York-based women’s fashion designer Alice + Olivia during Fashion Week in New York in 2006.

The company selected 10 cities for the events, including Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Atlanta, cities with traditional status as key Ford markets, and where imports such as Fusion’s chief rival, the Toyota Camry, are popular.

For men, who buy a car based on fuel economy, horsepower, and how sexyfast it looks, just hauling in a Fusion and parking it at a mall would have been enough. But women are different. “They take their time,” Drake says. “They like to ask questions, and do their research.” Instead of staffing the events, which Ford named Fusion Studio D, with testosteronic guys, Ford arranged for female racecar drivers to talk about the Fusion’s safety features and reliability.

At each pop-up event women could test-drive Ford Fusions in the mall parking lot to earn gift certificates for a store in the mall. Inside the mall, Ford set up a temporary store where it offered beauty treatments and makeovers, stations where visitors could custom-design T-shirts, listening stations where customers could listen to and take home free CDs of new musical artists, and health-and-fitness consultations with a personal trainer. In some locations, Ford even delivered a twist on the speed-dating phenomenon, where singles could sign up for seven-minute get-to-know-you mini-dates while cruising around in a Fusion.

The events were also scheduled to coincide with the Susan G. Komen Foundation Race for the Cure, a series of runs/fitness walks held throughout the United States to raise money for breast-cancer research. Ford built on the 11-year relationship it had with the charity by displaying a Fusion decaled in the new Race for the Cure “Warriors in Pink” motif. Ford’s history with the foundation helped build affinity with women by demonstrating meaningful support for a major health issue vital to is target market.

Ford’s goals were as simple as a Model T. Hoping for 500 to 1,000 people at each event, it averaged more than 1,000. Ford also wanted to attract what it called “conquests” — customers new to Ford. Because the buying cycle is so long (women take an average of 17 weeks to research, shop for, and ultimately buy a car, as opposed to 14 weeks for men), it was difficult to tie sales immediately to the pop-up events. But by the end of 2006, nearly 80 percent of Fusion buyers said they would recommend the car to a friend, which is probably why sales of Fusions revved up by last March to reach a 48 percent increase over the previous year. With results like that, Ford will leave its competitors feeling car sick.

Ever since the first frozen pizza was put on ice by the Roman Ravioli Co. in Hackensack, NJ, in 1947, its taste has been compared to the cardboard box traditional pizza comes in. It took almost 50 years, but with the introduction of rising-crust frozen pizzas such as Kraft Food Inc.’s DiGiorno brand in 1996, the frozen-pizza market expanded from a stale $1.7 billion in 1995 to a tasty $3.3 billion-a-year industry, according to the National Frozen Pizza Institute. The Northfield, IL,-based Kraft wanted DiGiorno to take a bite out of pizza chains such as Pizza Hut and Dominos, and it did, becoming the favorite brand of pizza in 21 percent of households the company surveyed.

But now Kraft wanted a bigger slice of the fresh-pizza market — the kind dominated by mom-and-pop pizza parlors — which Kraft pegs at a family-sized $30 to $35 billion. It planned to take a bite out of that market with its new DiGiorno Ultimate, version 2.0 of the pizza that landed an Edison Best New Products Award, given by the American Marketing Association, in 1996.

“DiGiorno Ultimate has vine-ripened tomatoes, premium Italian cheeses, and specialty meats,” says Lisa Gibbons of Kraft’s corporate affairs department. “It was a brand new product that needed a brand new marketing strategy.”

The new strategy included a pop-up store in the heart of pizza-loving Chicago. Besides being near the company headquarters, Chicago was one of 12 cities Kraft targeted for the product’s rollout. “The Midwest is in our backyard,” Gibbons says, “and it’s always been big on pizza.” More than big. In some ways, it’s the Silicon Valley of pizza. With fewer Italian immigrants tied to old-world culinary traditions, it’s been the incubator for major advances in pizza — like Ike Sewell’s mattress-thick deep-dish-style pie invented in the Windy City in 1943.

Kraft took over a space on famed North Michigan Avenue formerly occupied by the Terra Museum of American Art, and went Little Italy on it. The tomato-sauce-red brick facade and the blinking neon pizza in the window brought pizza-joint flair to the heart of Chicago. A sign on the door alerted the daily rush of 40,000 passersby that there was “Free pizza today!” when it opened at 11 a.m. each day on a Friday-to-Sunday weekend last March. (The pizzeria stayed open as late as 10 p.m. except on Sunday, when it closed shop early.)

Kraft also hired a group of actors to portray an Italian family, who stood in the doorway of the pizzeria warmly inviting people to come in and have a free bite to eat. Inside, the 1,000-square-foot facility was the image of a cozy home, with rust-colored drapes, terra-cotta flooring tiles, and a kitchen with a stack of pizza boxes that made it look like a spontaneous party after work.

It was the kind of kitchen you might see on the television show “Desperate Housewives,” which explains why Kraft brought in Doug Savant, who plays pizzeria owner Tom Scavo on the salacious show. At one time a pizza-delivery boy as well as pizza maker himself in his starving-actor days, before he was “Desperate,” Savant was the event’s public persona, who appeared on local media and in the store.

The staff of up to 10 people handed out three of the four varieties of the new pizza on branded napkins, as well as coupons for later use, thus extending the life of the event. To keep the look and feel of a home, Kraft hid a commercial oven behind the faux homestyle one and passed the pizzas through the fake oven when they were ready. It held branding to a minimum in the interior, with only the napkins, coupons, cards that identified the different pizzas, boxes of the pizza on display, and a small banner near the ceiling imprinted with the DiGiorno name. Outside, the building was emblazoned with the tempting words, “Digiorno Ultimate Pizza.”

Kraft didn't know if a family-sized portion of the pedestrian traffic would come through the temporary pizzeria’s doors. With potential foot traffic outside the pop-up shop estimated at 120,000 over its three-day run, the store served up more than 25,000 slices of the pizzas — which it calculated meant one slice every five seconds. It also means Kraft enticed as much as 20 percent of the normally hurried passersby to stop in for a taste of the new DiGiorno product.

The local media exposure also exceeded expectations, with coverage of the event on morning news shows from all five area affiliates, including CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and WGN. While closed-mouthed on the total number of media impressions, Gibbons says, “It was more than we than we had anticipated for all 12 cities in the rollout. The pop-up store strategy worked extremely well.” Pizza cake, you could say. e