Sarah Gilbert
Portland, Oregon - http://www.cafemama.com

Sarah Gilbert is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union's Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. So she tried her hand at *setting* strategy, working for a number of exciting and under-discovered startups in various product management roles, all of which seemed to center around writing business plans and, yes, making spreadsheets. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now works for AOL and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.

Sarah Gilbert
Portland, Oregon - http://www.cafemama.com

Sarah Gilbert is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union's Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. So she tried her hand at *setting* strategy, working for a number of exciting and under-discovered startups in various product management roles, all of which seemed to center around writing business plans and, yes, making spreadsheets. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now works for AOL and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

In the suburban landscape littered with big-box retailers, it is no secret which are the favorites of the Friday morning housewives, the Saturday afternoon family shoppers. These are the stores so formidable that families can often be spotted pushing two carts to haul their weekly stock of everything from boxed wine and board books to T-shirts and toilet paper. And Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) are the very exemplification of our Battle of the Brands showdown: for most of you, it's either one or the other, never both. In the world of bargain retail megastores, loyalties run deep.

And naturally, both Wal-Mart and Target are forever trying to move in on each others' turf. While Target has always been known for its partnerships with cutting-edge fashion icons (regular shoppers often call it "Tar-jay," with a French accent, though the corporation is firmly rooted in the American Midwest), Wal-Mart has been known for tripping over its own fashion foot. Wal-Mart has emphasized its ability to deliver every single last thing to its customers (from banking to bebop to "green" coffee).

This year has marked a few nuances to the two companies' strategies. Target has been wooing upper-middle-income shoppers who are now looking for better values, with a rumored experiment with high-end cosmetics, a refinement of its furniture offerings, and a focus on labeling foods so consumers will feel more secure purchasing its fresh groceries.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

For every time in your adult life, there is a lifestyle store to go along with it. IKEA is your freshman year in college, your first job, the apartment, you share with three strangers you met on Craigslist. Crate & Barrel is growing up: housewarming gifts, engagement parties, wedding registries, dinner parties. At IKEA, you can very well imagine arguing over who does dishes; with Crate & Barrel, you suspect a maid should be doing them (or at the very least, a whisper-quiet stainless steel dishwasher).

The two stores, too, are redolent of the cultures that incubated them. IKEA is Scandinavian, cool and spare and with the timeless efficiency and modernity of the Swedes. Crate and Barrel, on the other hand, was started in Chicago by a couple who had just returned from a European honeymoon; it reflects the penchant of well-to-do Americans to catch up every imported fad and embrace it as their own. So while Crate & Barrel's style hops from Japan to Tuscany to Providence and never seems to settle on a single influence, IKEA's is constant, playful, deliberate.

Like any lover of food, good company, and pretty glassware of moderate means, I have gone through both the IKEA and Crate & Barrel phases, and come through the end of them and settled back again on IKEA. I appreciate its constancy and wide selection, and especially its focus on children (as it turns out, the love-and-marriage set often ends up having little ones who quickly break the dozen old-fashioned glasses, the heavy water pitcher, the handsome oversized plates); I like that I can still find some of the same forks I purchased 10 years ago when I was in my first-job stage. The way I think about it, Crate & Barrel is the wedding, but IKEA is the marriage -- the lifestyle store that you can live with when the honeymoon is a distant memory.

Vote in our poll for IKEA or Crate & Barrel as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

While I won't claim the title of Most Hip Person on the planet, I do have a fair bit of "new media" credibility. And I think it should be instructive that I've finally embraced (or at least given a friendly pat on the back to) Facebook, whereas News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace continues to horrify. Where Facebook pokes, MySpace cackles wickedly; where Facebook exposes me to unwelcome questions from first grade classmates, MySpace exposes your children to unwelcome advances from questionable adults. Facebook is silly; MySpace is spooky.

The two social networking sites sprung up at about the same time, but focused on vastly different niches. Facebook was originally meant to monopolize electronically on the popularity of the "Freshman Facebook," a publication put together by most colleges displaying the faces of the new students and immediately hoarded by upperclassman hoping to find their one true love (at least for tonight). Why not bring the desirability of fresh faces to a much wider audience? At first the network was limited to college students, but soon the barely legal founder was pitching his product at a bigger market. And then my boss asked me to join and the rest is writing on my wall.

MySpace, on the other hand, was initially marketed to indie bands (although it wasn't meant to be a niche, its developers were active in the LA music scene and thought that would be a great way to attract other users) as a way to spread the musical love and relieve struggling artists of the need to sink money into building a website. The concept was a virtuous circle -- musicians attract fans, fans attract musicians, and so on forever.

Now musicians are still on MySpace, and college students are still on Facebook, but while Facebook seems to have (if not transcended at least) risen above its origins to attract "networks" and "groups" whose affinity ranges from a common employer to a favorite politician or social cause; MySpace has sputtered, devolving ever more into awful allegations and truths. Pedophiles are reported to find victims through their MySpace pages, and the site is notorious for cyberbullying (scary!). On the other hand, there is a big kerfuffle over Scrabble on Facebook (silly!).

I reluctantly set up an account on FaceBook several months ago, and now it's moderately interesting as a way to reconnect with friends from 1st grade, and occasionally peek in on the lives of my college and business school classmates. It occasionally bugs me with its "pokes" and "candy corn" (what the heck?) but it's not riddled with often obscene and sometimes frightening content, as is MySpace; the space that's not mine, at all.

Vote in our poll for MySpace or Facebook as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

Oh, how the sugary have fallen. Ten years ago, even five, you and I both know how this would have come out. In the standoff between longtime national fried-dough pusher Dunkin' Donuts and upstart sweet freak Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (NYSE: KKD), Krispy reigned supreme. The chain was rolling out new franchises as fast as dough circles could parade around its restaurants on shiny metal racks, and each time it did local police stations did overtime directing traffic.

Somehow, the mighty fell after the considerable sugar high, largely connected to poorly-managed finances, badly-handled expansion, and a sudden national fear of carbohydrates. All the while, Dunkin' Donut managers everywhere continued to plod along, making the doughnuts, and quietly stirring a blue-collar breakfast revolution. One day America woke up and realized, hey, Dunkin' Donuts' coffee is good! Someone named it "Better than Starbucks" and it soon became clear that the product guys had realized something: we make a lotta money off of coffee. Actually, more than half of the company's revenue.

This post is one of several on business heirs apparent. Let us know in the comments whether you think Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer should take up the reigns of Estee Lauder, and be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

A cosmetics empire might seem the ultimate in puffery, the very materialization of vanity. But the venerable empire built by Estee Lauder and her powerhouse son, Leonard, has turned makeup into a very real financial juggernaut. And Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, Leonard's niece, is not only the public face of the company but also the considerable creative brain of its marketing soul.

As granddaughter of the company's founder, Aerin is surely far-removed from the hardscrabble life that was The Estee Lauder Companies Inc (NYSE: EL) beginnings. She is a child of great wealth and, as such, is the inheritor not just of money and corporate responsibility but also of appearances. Aerin is not just the face of the company, but of a certain sense of style; her choices, from her cutlery to the clothing her two boys wear to (of course) her lip gloss, are signals to a certain subset of the fashion world. Aerin is not just the harbinger of styles, she is a style.

Can one go from being the face of a company to its head? If anyone is positioned to do so, it's Aerin. She didn't just grow up in the center of the fashion world, but in the center of the "old American money" world; her best friends are Lauren duPont and Renee Rockefeller, and they've been teaching her the ways of the powerful since she was a child.

This post is one of several on business heirs apparent. Let us know in the comments whether you think Shari Redstone should take up the reigns of National Amusements, and be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

In no family-led company is the heir more apparent -- and, ironically, so far from being handed the reins -- as in Viacom, Inc. (NYSE: VIA). Sumner Redstone, chairtyrant and controlling shareholder, is so vastly old that he has become his own caricature. At the age of 84, Redstone is only that much more isolated and authoritative than he was at 83; since then, he's reportedly trying to force his daughter, Shari Redstone, off Viacom's board (as well as having divorced his wife of 55 years in 1999 and become embroiled in a lawsuit with his son, Brent). Lately, even his May-December marriage to Paula Fortunato has been rumored to be in trouble.

Though the trust documents are private, it seems to be general knowledge that Sumner's estate names his daughter as the company's chairman-to-be when he dies. He's certainly not making his twilight years pleasant for her. Not only is he irascible and uncommunicative, but he's given her a very difficult task -- running the worst bits of the business. As head of National Amusements, Shari oversees the movie theaters that were the source of the family's fortune, but which her father believes are relics of the past. (National Amusements, owned privately by Sumner and Shari Redstone, is not a division of Viacom, but holds a controlling voting interest in both Viacom and CBS.)

This post is one of several on business heirs apparent. Let us know in the comments whether you think David Lauren should take up the reigns of Polo Ralph Lauren, and be sure to check out the other heir apparent posts.

David Lauren is unusual among his two siblings and father, Ralph: he is not an entrepreneur. Ralph Lauren is, after all, the very definition of a self-made man, having brought himself up from his humble beginnings as Ralph Lipshitz (it was his brother who suggested the name change) and forged a company worth several billion dollars today. But as the only Lauren sibling to work for Polo Ralph Lauren (NYSE: RL) -- as the SVP of Advertising, Marketing, and Corporate Communications -- he has been called the "heir apparent" to his father by more than one fashionable pundit.

As a junior investment banker, I analyzed Ralph Lauren's balance sheet more than once, seeking to show how well it might fit with another fashion house. The numbers were convincing, and it's probable that many a quiet chat was held between high-powered apparel executives based on these balance sheet combinations. The fact that nothing has ever materialized from this Wall Street cajolery is testament to the thing we all talked about but never appeared on our PowerPoint pitch slides: Ralph Lauren likes control. (I remember a story about a major photo shoot held up for hours because Ralph didn't approve of the shade of beige used in some thread, or something similarly outrageous.)

Many a sensible succession has been held up because the aging founder was unwilling to give up the corner office, in corporations and in kingdoms alike. For all his patrician good looks and endless charms, Ralph is rather unyielding in his patriarchy and certainly has not made David's path to the CEO spot a hop, skip and a jump.