All articles by Glenn Rifkin

Artificial intelligence research used to focus on teaching machines to think. Until a Belgian MIT professor taught them to shop.

You need to win it all to create a powerful brand, right? Think again. This baseball team hasn't won it all since 1918, but fans keep coming back.

This broadcaster has built and leveraged powerful commercial brands, all while keeping a careful eye on its nonprofit mission.

Can a consumer product be launched globally in a short time? It can if sufficient resources and time are allocated to planning the effort.

This publishing and research company creates high-performance brands in country after country. It does so by sticking to its entrepreneurial roots.

Though more known for his legendary publicity stunts, Richard Branson has led Virgin Group to success with a singular, flamboyant style. Learn the secret of how he tackles the big bad wolves of many industries.

To create a successful merger requires respecting each partner's differences. It also requires procedures for settling disputes and integrating workforces strategically.

As product life-cycles become shorter, the ability to innovate becomes a more important factor. But how do you innovate consistently? And how do you manage creative people whose jobs require them to "think differently"? Broderbund shows the way.

The way to create a world-class brand is to give customers what they need, when they need it, and never let them out of your sight.

Harley-Davidson has been able to build a community of enthusiasts around its brand that includes members from very diverse groups, and with almost no advertising. How does the king of heavyweight motorcycling keep its fans so loyal? It gives them a reason to "belong."

Once a purely American sport, basketball has been transformed by the N.B.A. into a global phenomenon. What marketing lessons does the N.B.A. teach? If you promote it, the fans will come.

Sound marketing principles from an unlikely source, the Grateful Dead rock group. Jerry Garcia and his fellow musicians emerged from the non-materialistic counterculture of the 1960's to create an exceptionally strong and lucrative brand name that has stood the test of time, and even Mr. Garcia's death in 1995. The basis of the Grateful Dead brand was the group's sustained personal relationship with its customers, derived from an unusual dedication to playing its distinctive and improvisational music at live performances.