Enough already with the gloom and doom! Let's turn to marketing the way we know and love it: singing fish in the grand tradition of the "Sorry, Charlie" School of Advertising. A McDonald's spot showing a fish mounted on a wall plaque in a garage singing "Give me back that Filet-O-Fish" has taken on a life of its own, says McDonald's spokeswoman Danya Proud. Google reports that searches for "McDonald's fish" are up 100% in the past four weeks and that the ad has been viewed on YouTube more than a million times, reports Theresa Howard. …

Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley tells Roger O. Crockett that the company has improved its new-product success rate from the industry average of 15% to 20% in the '90s to 50% today by clarifying and simplifying its processes, and quickly dropping products that don't look promising. "You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don't make the same mistake twice," Lafely says. Innovation has to be tied to a product or a service that meaningfully changes consumers' lives, according to Lafley. P&G invented a material in …

Chocolatiers and chocoholics contend chocolate is entering into the same realm as fine wines and cheeses -- indulgences connoisseurs treasure for their subtleties, Joshua Boak reports. The recent success of dark chocolate is a case on point. Sales jumped 35% to $829 million between February 2007 and February 2008, while all other chocolate sales inched up 1.5%, according to Nielsen Co. But that may change due to simple economics. Dark chocolate contains a higher concentration of cocoa and the increased demand for it has sent cocoa bean prices surging by 46% percent since October to $2,787 a ton. "You …

Forbes' Andy Greenberg warns that Sun "may be pulling a Yahoo."

I heard a JC Penney commercial last night, and although I can't tell you if it was on the radio or TV, I fleetingly thought to myself, "Oh, they're still around? That's nice. They're good people." Penney's has always had an aura of friendly Midwestern earnestness about it, like the kid who'd do anything for you in high school but you haven't seen since graduation. This morning Rachel Dodes brings the news that the Cindy Crawford Style home-décor collection will make its debut at Penney's new Manhattan store when it opens in July, and the moderately priced tableware, window treatments, …

New York salon owner Rodney Cutler, who doubles as Esquire's grooming editor, is now tripling as a Philips Norelco spokesman. And he has a theory about what he calls the "recession beard." Men are growing facial hair as an act of "playful rebellion," he feels. It's a sign of defiance and of not being a "corporate slave." Off-hand, you wouldn't think that's good news for a manufacturer of razors, but think about it. Guys are not walking around looking like Walt Whitman. Those stubbles are carefully coiffed. And that takes devices for facial-hair grooming, which grew …

In an apparent excess of holiday cheer, Domino's created an online-only promotion in December for a free pizza using the codeword "bailout." It never got the green light. Monday night, an "enterprising customer" discovered the deal by typing the word into a search engine. By the time Internet virality had had its way and the offer was shut down at 11 a.m. Tuesday, nearly 11,000 pizzas had been given away. "It had never technically been activated, but we hadn't turned it off, either," says Tim McIntyre, Domino's vp of communications. "I started getting calls at about 10 a.m. …

Aiming to capitalize on the growing demand for home-based care, General Electric and Intel will put their combined research and marketing muscle behind devices that enable medical professionals to monitor elderly and chronically ill patients remotely, Justin Baer reports. Both groups already sell their own line of home-health gear. They've agreed to invest $250 million in the next five years to research new technologies and combine complementary programs already under way at each company. "We are at an inflection point on healthcare," say Intel CEO Paul Otellini. The home-health monitoring market was expected to swell from $3 billion …