Karen Talley reports that Costco is moving into mall spaces where department stores once resided, taking over the role as the anchor retailer. The mall stores will generally be the same size as its regular stores and carry the same product array, according to co-founder and chairman Jeff Brotman. "Our preference is to never be in a mall or by a mall," Brotman tells Talley. "But in metro areas there just is not that much land, and we still want to expand. We will continue to penetrate areas" using the mall approach. Costco's older stores generally …

Jon Brancheau, who has been Nissan's marketing chief for three months, evidently made the rounds yesterday to chat about sundry items of interest at the automaker, which is on a mission to overtake Toyota and Honda to become the No. 1 Japanese car maker. Rupal Parekh corners Brancheau for a Q&A in Ad Age about the state of the economy, boosting marketing spend and the doping controversy that has begun swirling around Leaf spokesman Lance Armstrong, whom he supports. "The claims are all unsubstantiated up to this point," says Brancheau. "He's iconic, and he's almost the …

Kelly Whiteside writes that it's hard to figure out when college athletic conferences became "brands" but the transition from motley collection of a few teams to "a brand to be marketed, sold, downloaded and tweeted" is quite clearly complete. Leading the pack -- or the Pac, we should say -- is the expanded and renamed Pac-12 conference under the leadership of commissioner Larry Scott, who brought his football coaches to New York for a media blitz in late July that included their ringing the opening bell on Wall Street and unveiling a new logo. A movie trailer about the …

Harsha Agadi, the new CEO of Friendly's Ice Cream, wants to aggressively expand the 75-year-old brand across the U.S. and overseas from its New England base and double the sales of its packaged ice cream, which is distributed more than 4,000 retail outlets. "My immediate vision is to get this brand across $1 billion," says the CEO of Church's Chicken; the chain currently does $725 million in annual sales. Friendly's is very similar to Church's, Agadi tells Donna Goodison, which he took to more than $1 billion in sales during his tenure from 2004 to 2009. …

Duff Wilson reports that AARP is releasing a report today that shows the retail prices for the most popular brand-name drugs increased 41.5% over the past five years. During the same time frame, the consumer price index rose 13.3%. "Brand-name retail prices have been accelerating year-to-year even when inflation has been non-existent in the rest of the economy," says John C. Rother, the AARP's evp for policy and strategy. Drug industry officials respond that the findings do not reflect that generic drugs now account for about 75% of all prescriptions in the U.S. It points to a government survey …