MAM
MiD Day launches new positioning to identify with city
Mumbai: Afternoon daily tabloid, MiD DAY, has adopted a new positioning to identify strongly with the city, differentiating it from the other English dailies.
‘Mid Day My City…My Life!’ is a special anthem that celebrates Mumbai’s spirit and aspirations, the city where MiD Day comes out from and circulates. The new tagline symbolises how a person’s life revolves around a city and how its ups and its downs affect their lives.
The new positioning is an extension of the core objective of MiD DAY – to deliver local city news in an interactive manner.
The idea behind ‘My City…My Life!’ is that young working professionals today connect with the city at various touchpoints and, therefore, they take a lot from the city and simultaneously give back to the city as well. The values that define this target group are ‘breaking out’ and ‘breathing free’ and this enmeshes well with MiD DAY’s brand values.
MiD DAY aims to extend the brand to different mediums and create new, improved and stronger touchpoints to connect with the people of the city and influence their lives. This will help MiD DAY create its own space to interact with the consumer and “make competition irrelevant”.
MiD Day MD and CEO Manajit Ghoshal said, “MiD DAY stands up for the city and its citizens and drives the change. It has expanded its horizons to create something ‘intangible’ and helped people experience the MiD DAY brand in a variety of ways. The tagline is also an attempt to create an emotional framework while talking about our legacy in the city of Mumbai. It is a more holistic brand tagline as it will appeal equally well to the consumers, as well as the B2B fraternity.”
MiD Day competes with Mumbai Mirror, the morning taloid from The Times of India Group. The market that way stands separated as MiD Day would basically aim at readers who are commuting back home. MiD Day shut down its morning edition in 2009. MiD Day costs Rs 3 while Mumbai Mirror is priced at Rs 2.50 or Rs 5 if bought with The Times of India (standalone price of TOI is Rs 4).
In 2010, Jagran Prakashan Ltd acquired MiD-Day Multimedia‘s newspaper business in a share swap deal. MiD-Day shareholders were to receive two shares of Jagran for every seven held as part of the deal. The enterprise value of MiD-Day‘s print business had worked out to Rs 2 billion, including a debt of Rs 200 million.
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
