Wal-Mart ditches the smiley face..

My husband the ever astute television watcher had been commenting to me more than once recently how he noticed that none of the Wal-Mart ads that he saw on television contained the familiar yellow smiley face. It appears that Wal-Mart has decided to become more "glitzy" in their advertising, as the CNN article linked in the title points out, they've hired an ad firm and they've also started doing more research:

"Marketing had been considered a support function at Wal-Mart," says Stephen Quinn, who was promoted to chief marketing officer last year. "I had to convince people that it could have a direct impact on sales."

...He applied practices common at consumer product companies like PepsiCo's Frito-Lay North American unit, where he'd been chief marketing officer. Quinn spent two years conducting quantitative research - something Wal-Mart had avoided - to determine why consumers shop at the retailer and what they want. When, for example, pharmacy customers told researchers that they broke pills in half because they couldn't afford their full prescription, Wal-Mart conceived its wildly successful $4 prescription drug plan.