Business Diary: Want to snackify your beverage?

Indra Nooyi, the chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, is widely admired around the world, but has set a new standard for weird business-speak in talking about her company's purchase of a Russian dairy and fruit juice giant yesterday. "We see the emerging opportunity to snackify beverages and drinkify snacks as the next frontier in food andbeverage convenience," Ms Nooyi explained. Come again?

Time to buy them all a Yorkie bar

One of the upsides to the wintry weather that has affected us all over the past week is that it has brought communities together. You know the sort of thing – neighbours helping neighbours and so on. But will all the snow really teach us to love lorry drivers, as the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport begged people yesterday? It hopes you'll forget all the bad driving in normal times, let alone the jack-knifing lorries that have jammed roads these past few days. CILT boss Steve Agg says: "We must all realise the incredibly important job which that lorry, and its driver, are trying to do – delivering the goods and services, food and drink, and essential supplies that we all rely upon."

Broken heating is snow joke

There are downsides to the snow too, of course, and not just the obvious ones. The over-cheery bonhomie of marketing folk is beginning to grate, for example. Take the people at HomeServe, the company which repairs and insures people's boilers. How did it choose to headline an announcement about soaring numbers of call-outs? With this headline, naturally: "Snowballing emergency calls". We'd laugh if we weren't too busy shivering.

RIM spends its money on tat

The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish design firm thatspecialises in mobile phone interface work, is no doubt delighted to have been bought up by Blackberry maker Research in Motion. RIM seems pleased too, praising thecompany to the rafters and promising to integrate its skill set. Still, is it really wise for RIM to describe the company by way of an acronym? Annnouncing to the world that you are buying "tat" seems like a bad idea to us.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk