With a smaller footprint, the fast-casual Denny's Café concept will allow the chain to expand into up to 700 urban suburban locations, David Demers, its director of development projects and services, tells Elissa Elan. The first of three company-store tests opens Nov. 1 in Orange, Calif. The 3,000-square-foot store will feature about half of the items available in a full-service unit. Demers says prices will be "in line with or more favorable than" those at traditional Denny's. "There is no replacement for the traditional Denny's experience," Demers says. "In fact, we were told by our focus …

Charisse Jones takes a look at the advertising fisticuffs between two airlines that have more "liberal" luggage policies -- Southwest and JetBlue -- and those that don't, which seems to be just about everybody else. JetBlue's "You Above All" campaign has a spot where a taxi driver tries to charge an extra $25 for luggage stored in the trunk. Southwest, the only U.S. carrier that allows the first two bags to be checked for free, has been running its "Good Cop, Bag Cop" ads since September and launched a "Bags Fly Free" last year.

Michael Learmonth reports that retailers hope that iPad will be a magnetic gizmo of sorts this holiday season, drawing shoppers through the likes of Target, Best Buy, Sam's Club and Walmart. "Expanding distribution to Walmart and Target makes the iPad more accessible to more Americans," says Forrester consumer product strategist Sarah Rotman Epps, and allows them to touch the TouchPad (except in Target, where the device is behind glass). Apple is requiring retailers that feature the iPad in circulars to devote an entire page to the device and be featured in their local TV ads.

Starbucks has taken full ownership of Urban Coffee Opportunities, a rare 50/50 partnership with basketball great Earvin "Magic" Johnson's Los Angeles-based Johnson Development Corp., a division of Magic Johnson Enterprises. The company had opened more than 100 Starbucks locations in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., since 1998, Lisa Jennings reports. Johnson says his company "remains committed to serving urban America and we look forward to working with Starbucks on its community development initiatives." On Wednesday, the Los Angeles city council selected Magic Johnson Enterprises as among a …

New York University finance professor David Yermack calculates that Michelle Obama created $2.7 billion in value for the fashion and retail companies whose products she wore over 189 public appearances between November 2008 and December 2009, according to The Harvard Business Review. That's good news for companies like J. Crew, Allison Linn reports, but the research also notes that some of that gain comes at the expense of companies that lost market value in relation to her preferred designers.

Josh Bernoff, svp of idea development at Forrester Research, says top-down ways of running the marketing department are on their last legs and you'd better start training your people about what's important to you, and then trust them to do things right. The reason? "Your voice -- the marketer's voice -- is going to be drowned out" by consumers talking to one another on social networks. Forrester has developed a tool called Peer Influence Analysis that shows that consumers generate 500 billion impressions upon one another regarding products and services every year -- or 2,841 impressions …

AT&T, which will reportedly lose its stranglehold on Apple iPhones when Verizon enters the picture in January, is adding competing handsets and retraining store staff to prepare for the future, Greg Bensinger reports. Its shelves will stock more than 20 smartphones during the holiday shopping season this year -- including ones running Microsoft and Google software -- as opposed to about 10 in 2009. Yesterday, AT&T reported that more than half of new customers chose a device other than the iPhone last quarter, up from 36% a year earlier. "We made a conscious decision to give …

Tara Siegel Bernard reports that credit card issuers are developing plastic that may not come with bells and whistles but are pretty darn close. Citibank, for example, will test one next month that has two buttons and tiny lights that allow users to choose whether they want to pay with rewards points or credit. Citi's cards -- known as 2G -- are as thin and flexible as normal cards but contain a battery with a four-year life and an embedded chip. "It's a big deal," says Megan Bramlette, director of research for the Auriemma Consulting Group. "If once a …