"Victory is contagious, and food always tastes better when you win," says Ray Artigue, the former senior vice president of the Phoenix Suns, who is now a professor of practice in the marketing department at the W. P. Carey School of Business and director of the W. P. Carey MBA

We all know the Best Buy brand — the big-box stores have been around for 30 years, populated by employees wearing blue shirts, selling products emblazoned with the yellow tag. Around 10 years ago, services began taking center stage — derailing some industry leaders and empowering others.

With the economy continuing to falter, consumer product and service companies are looking for every edge to bring in business.

Wearing faded gray jeans, a gray striped shirt and black sneakers, Tony Hsieh hardly looks the part of a $1 billion company's CEO.

In Canada, a group of Nike employees meets once a week in the same place at the same time for a creative brainstorming session. But there's an element that keeps the sessions from going stale. The meetings are on a Toronto subway car.

Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke learned a lesson from Media Relations 101 the hard way when they introduced a plan of action to stem the financial crises and did not suggest a catchy name for it.

Brothers Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman followed different paths in life, but they decided to collaborate on a book when they realized that Ori, with his MBA, and Rom, with a Ph.D.

In his book "OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder," Lucas Conley asserts that branding has gotten out of hand. At it's worst it is deceptive, he writes, and it diverts companies away from real product improvement to focus on superficial details.

The Chinese don't do things halfway, as anyone who's visited Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics can attest.

Parsimony is a little like dancing, according to marketing Professor John Lastovicka. It's something anyone can learn, but some have more talent for it than others. What's more, the truly penny-wise take pleasure in their penny pinching.