Avon's board has run out of time to accept a $10.7 billion takeover bid from makeup giant Coty, because the latter is withdrawing its offer and moving on.

Coty has made a few attempts in recent months to purchase Avon, but the struggling company kept telling umming and hawing. Coty, in the press release announcing it had rescinded its offer after Avon refused to call, commented, "While we are disappointed, we wish you success in pursuing your standalone turnaround strategy."

While the pair aren't likely to kiss and make-up, the news didn’t go over well with investors. The Wall Street Journal reports that Avon Products shares took a 9.8% fall Tuesday morning.

”Avon's annual profit has shrank in each of its last three years, and its first-quarter results contained further disappointment, as margins fell yet again and executives warned that results in the U.S. and Brazil will weaken further still,” the Journal adds.

The one positive thing Avon is hanging onto right now is that it has a new CEO, Sherilyn McCoy, who came over from Johnson & Johnson late last month to try and lead the company back to more stable ground.Continue reading...

Did Apple just get its biggest break ever in its ongoing PR crisis over its Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn? It turns out that one the most vocal, most popular critics of Apple's China-side manufacturing arrangements manufactured details of his visits to those very factories.

A Marketplace look into the claims made by Mike Daisey—the former Mac fanboy turned Apple China labor critic and performer of the popular one-man monologue "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"—reveals numerous inaccuracies between story and truth.

Daisey's detailed stories of meeting teenage and poisoned workers outside the Foxconn plants have been shared and traded around the globe. TechCrunch, HuffPo, HBO's Bill Maher, all retold Daisey's story as fact. As did we.Continue reading...

While Burger King is hanging out with Clive Owen, its rival burgermeister, McDonald's, is being egged by the likes of Ryan Gosling over its poultry practices.

The back story: When McDonald’s was informed that one of its egg suppliers was treating its chickens horrendously by shoving them into increasingly crowded spots to live upon the remains of now deceased chickens as well as cutting off their beaks so they couldn’t peck one another, the company immediately got out of the contract.

But protestors and activists want the fast-food giant to do a lot more than that. Celebrities including Ryan Gosling, Zooey Deschanel, Alicia Silverstone, and Steve-O (of Jackass fame) have signed a letter to McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner that asks Mickey D’s to release the birds from their impossibly small cages, according to ABC News.Continue reading...

When it was announced in August that Dow Chemical planned to spend $10.8 million to have its name emblazoned in a fabric wrap around London’s Olympic stadium for the Games next summer, there was an angry outcry, particularly by athletes and Olympic organizers in India.

After all, it was there that the Dow subsidiary Union Carbide leaked enough gas and chemicals to kill approximately 15,000 and leave many others sick back in 1984. There was even talk that the Indian Olympic team would boycott the Games, but that was rejected on Saturday.

Dow didn’t own Union then, but Indian residents are feeling the fallout and Dow’s name doesn’t exactly inspire the Olympic spirit in many Indian residents. Now TheHindu.com reports that Dow has “agreed to remove all its branding from the London Olympic stadium.”Continue reading...

Everybody loves Michael Jordan, right? The ultimate brand spokesman, who won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls, has been affiliated with a slew of brands in his 48 years: Nike (which produces his lucrative Jordan Brand line), Coca-Cola, Gatorade, MCI, McDonald’s, Chevrolet, Wheaties, Rayovac, Ball Park Franks, and Hanes.

Since March of 2010, he’s been the majority owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats, the first former player to hold such a title. Since he’s seen both sides of the coin, you’d think that when the NBA lockout occurred, Jordan would have been able to help broker a deal between the players and his fellow owners.

Instead, Jordan went hard-line against the players, not wanting to give in an inch, and reportedly getting fined by the NBA for his public comments. Now that the lockout's end is looming, one wonders how much his sudden tough-guy appearance hurt his brand.Continue reading...

Change is coming to your Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, but it’s going to take two years for it to happen. In fact, your baby may have grown right out of using these products by then. Following the recent dust-up, the company will remove a chemical from its baby shampoos that is potentially carcinogenic, but it will take two years for the shift to totally take place, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The change isn’t just to shampoos, actually. The formaldehyde-releasing preservative, Quaternium-15, will be taken out of hundreds of J&J products, the paper notes. The nonprofit Campaign for Safe Cosmetics first raised its concerns with J&J about the chemical back in 2009 and the company began phasing its use out then. But it is still pervasive and the company promised to have it gone from its products in two years. 

CEO William Weldon told the group in a letter that “the company is making the effort even though the trace amounts of formaldehyde exposure pose little risk,” the paper notes, writing that a full bottle of shampoo has the same amount of formaldehyde as what a person would endure "by eating an apple or pear, in which it occurs naturally."

Like the act of Tebowing before her, Los Angeles gallery owner Kristen Christian managed to create a sensation extremely quickly by using social media.

Christian is the founder of Bank Transfer Day, which took place on Saturday, Nov. 5. The idea, for those of you who’ve been under a rock recently, was for people who are fed up with the actions of big banks (read: Occupy Movement activists and almost everyone else)  to take every last penny out of those banks and stick it into a small community bank or credit union where actual face-to-face service might be a reality.

Nearly 80,000 people had signed up via the movement's Facebook page and Twitter feed as of Friday to say they’d be making the switch, according to the Village Voice. The Christian Science Monitor estimated that before the day even hit, almost 850,000 people had already made the switch; ABC News estimated about 1 million customers were making the switch.Continue reading...

"No pants day; batting, owling and planking; people thinking they are vampires and zombies; the world's gone crazy ... No! The world's gone Four Loko!"

So begins the press release for Phusion Products' new Four Loko beverage campaign, the brand's latest in an ongoing effort to clean up its image by mocking its image in the media.

In a true bit of irony, the brand is now doing almost exactly what it told us a year ago it "made a conscious effort to reject."Continue reading...