Want to dress your dogs up for Halloween like the dudes from Duck Dynasty? You’re in luck. Walmart has already had a great deal of success selling products branded by the A&E hit show that had 9.6 million viewers for its April season finale. Now the partners are looking to churn out more products as the show continues to strike licensing deals with other retailers. 

Duck Dynasty currently has products in six of Walmart’s departments, such as apparel, home goods and sporting goods, AdAge notes, but the plan is to expand into seven more departments before the holiday shopping season hits. Consumers won’t have to wait long, though, for some of the products. Duck Dynasty bandages will hit the market this month just in time to patch up the summertime skinned knees and elbows of kids pretending the're members of the show’s famed Robertson family.Continue reading...

Canada’s oldest retailer launched a major rebranding effort the same week that Target christened its first stores north of the 49th parallel. Coincidence? Maybe, but probably not.

The Bay, which has its roots in Canada’s fur trade, will now be known as Hudson’s Bay. It won’t be that much of a stretch for consumers, considering the new name is a nod to its parent company, Hudson’s Bay Co., but it will mean its unique stylized-ribbon “B” in The Bay will be retired.

A return to the iconic retailer’s classic full name with a word mark—which will be used on all marketing and media materials, as well as online and on in-store displays—is its first major logo rebrand since 1965.Continue reading...

"The Freedom Group came in and consolidated production and just alienated everybody because they bought up these great brands and then destroyed them... it is fu***ng up some of the best brands in the gun world."

Robert Farago, publisher of the popular gun blog The Truth About Guns, told me that about the Freedom Group a month before the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, involving its gun brand Bushmaster. It was a month and a few days before Cerberus Capital Management announced it would sell its 95 percent stake in Freedom Group, citing the school tragedy which had, in its words, "raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level."

Investors saw Cerberus' move as a surprise (an added wrinkle: the father of the founder of Cerberus lives in Newtown) despite the raging gun debate. But many in the gun owning community saw it as a ray of hope. Finally, maybe, some classic gun brands would be free from an umbrella group that, in the opinion of many, was destroying untold brand value.Continue reading...

After clamming up in the wake of the Newton, Connecticut, school shooting massacre on Friday, the National Rifle Association finally broke its silence today to announce a press conference on Friday, and released a statement that read in part:

The National Rifle Association of America is made up of four million moms and dads, sons and daughters – and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown. Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting. The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.

The debate on America's out of control spiral on gun vioence dominated the news cycle and social media today, as more young victims of the Sandy Hook shooting were buried. A few turns in the events as the debate played out on Twitter leading up to the NRA's statement:Continue reading...

Newtown, Conn., and its survivors have only begun to cope with the aftermath of the rampage that ended in the deaths of 28 people, 20 of them first-graders, on Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary school.

But it didn't take long for gun-control advocates to urge President Obama and all politicians, not just Democrats, to take a stand and rev up action for tighter controls on the types of weapons used by the shooter, Adam Lanza, as polls show that the majority of Americans favor gun control laws.

Those measures are shining a spotlight on "Big Gun" brands such as Smith & Wesson and owners of gun makers such as Cerberus, whose privately held Freedom Group is a "firearms conglomerate" (as Fortune puts it) that produces the Bushmaster .223 assault weapon (and a "man card" campaign raising hackles across the web) used by Lanza, along with his mother's Glock and Sig Sauer handguns.

Cerberus is taken to task in Eliot Spitzer's Slate column today, because the private-equity firm has acquired the find-it-at-Walmart Bushmaster and other top gun brands over the past several years. Meanwhile, investors nervous about the prospects for gun freedoms have been sending down the stocks of Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger. Even a hunting-gear retailer, Cabela's, has been caught in an investment downdraft since the Newtown massacre, Investor's Business Daily reports.

Naturally coming under the spotlight once again is Sig Sauer and Glock, an Austria-based arms manufacturer with a U.S. office in Georgia. Its semiautomatic pistols have been used in some of the biggest recent mass murders including the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and killings at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.Continue reading...

Amazon's brand value soars 32% in Interbrand's 2012 Best Retail Brands report.

Apple's iPad challenger Proview is open to a settlement as Apple extends checks on Chinese suppliers. Apple also signed China Telecom as second iPhone seller.

Cabela's expands and rolls out smaller-store format.

Coca-Cola sponsors teen parties in Tanzania.

FedEx may be eyeing TNT Express.

Ford signals moderate growth and expansion in China.

Gap teams with fashion bloggers for Be Bright global launch.Continue reading...

One of the more sensical and impressive brand extensions of the last year has been video game maker Activision's release of outdoor adventure titles under the marquee of American hunting and fishing outfitter Cabela's. The outdoor gear retailer turned out to be such a natural for a videogame brand extension that the pair followed up their Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2011 video game with more titles for 2012.Continue reading...