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Brand loyalty: It's why we buy a lot of what we buy, and any company that sells anything is striving to induce that feeling in its potential customers. Last week, research consultancy Brand Keys revealed which American companies do it best.

With all the sturm und drang surrounding Facebook's upcoming May IPO, few media outlets are giving much oxygen to the IPO of online review hub Yelp, due March 2. It will give Yelp a market cap of around $800 million -- and the company isn't even profitable.

On the surface, it appears daily deals purveyor Groupon is more popular than ever. It ended 2011 with 33 million active customers in 47 countries, and it's growing fast. But look closer, and there are signs that "Groupon fatigue" is kicking in.

What if Facebook's IPO offering isn't actually outlandishly priced? What if $100 billion is actually a reasonable price? Let's go over a few of the reasons Facebook stock may be cheaper than worrywarts are leading you to believe.

Retailers are spicing up their brick-and-mortar stores to keep you walking through the door. Their game plan? To design environments that are equal parts high-tech and homespun. But will the changes be enough to keep physical stores from being reduced to showrooms for e-commerce sites?

No segment of the electronics industry better highlights the challenges of these times than the television business. With sales of standard TVs flagging, the industry is pinning its hopes to new models TVs equipped to handle Internet streaming, WiFi and more.

On Wednesday, Yahoo named Scott Thompson as CEO. He's a former PayPal president and veteran technologist -- and that's the trouble: Yahoo is following the same strategy that led it to hire Carol Bartz, who was ousted for failing to turn the company around.

New York Times is a survivor, but it's bleeding internally. Its stock has floundered in the single digits since March. It hasn't dished out a dividend in three years. Revenue has fallen every year since 2006. And its unclear if its Internet plans can sustain a traditional publisher.

The world's leading search engine has begun pushing its own flight search feature ahead of other organic results. Punch in "MIA to LGA" in a Google box, and the first thing you'll see after a shaded box of sponsored search results is Big G's own comparison engine. Only later do you see third-party providers, which are naturally unhappy about that.

At this time last year, maybe you thought the economy would be a bit more gracious by now. No such luck. But as we reflect on the year that was, here are six financial lessons that 2011 taught us all.