That was the question asked and answered at a recent auction for this rare, 125-year-old stamp. It’s called the “Treskilling Yellow”, and its claim to fame is that it should have been green. It was recently sold to a secretive  investor group at an unknown price, but the last time it publicly changed hands was in 1996 when it went for the equivalent of (hold on to your hat) $2.3 million. Those who should know say that despite the undisclosed price of its recent sale, this remains the world’s most expensive stamp.

There’s no question the price was high. But was it fair? At first glance, that’s more difficult to answer.

Let’s see. There was a willing buyer, which apparently is happier now in possession of the stamp than it was with two or three million bucks. And there was a willing seller, who (much more understandably) is happier having traded his or her yellow scrap for greenbacks. Both parties believe they are better off having made this transaction. Sounds fair to me.

It’s natural for people to think of  low prices as “fair” and high prices as “unfair.” But where, exactly, does one draw the line between “low” and “high”? The answer differs by category, by product, by geography, by economic conditions, and by a host of other factors that no individual person is fit to judge, other than for himself. A “fair” price is neither high nor low; it’s simply the price at which willing buyers and sellers meet.

Personally, I think the group that bought the stamp is crazy. Unless they can find someone crazier to pay even more for it and make out like bandits.

Now that would be unfair.

A few years back I had the opportunity to soak up the wisdom of Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, as he reflected on the history of his company. Intuit is the maker of Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax accounting software applications.

Intuit recently announced its quarterly results—an incredible 13 percent increase in revenue and a 16 percent rise in operating income. This is a company that has enjoyed steady success for a long period of time, and Cook’s remarks reveal insights into why.

Cook revealed the backstory behind the launch of QuickBooks, Intuit’s small business software. Prior to QuickBooks, the company was focused exclusively on Quicken, its groundbreaking consumer product. Subscribing to a belief in a “relentless focus on the customer,” Cook said Intuit was slow and perhaps a bit reluctant to expand to another market. In fact, the idea for QuickBooks arouse when Intuit discovered that 50 percent of Quicken users were using it for business, a fact Cook says he basically ignored for two years.

When they did decide to get into the small business market, Cook and his team did it with nerve. “If you go to a new segment,” he said, “you have to be relentless about building from the ground up. You can’t just hack something together.” Shortly thereafter QuickBooks, “the first accounting software to do accounting without accounting,” was born. The target was companies with fewer than 20 employees who weren’t accountants and didn’t want to be accountants.

With a combination of diligence and urgency, Cook did his homework, drawing on his experience as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble. “It’s very common for people to say they do one thing and then actually do it a slightly different way,” he said, citing as an example the fact that people say they sort laundry more often than they actually do. He focused his team on developing a product with the right functionality, while recognizing the danger of feature creep that tends to plague new software (and delay its launch). “The reason we do version one of any product is so we can do a great version three,” Cook said.

Version one was good enough to win a commanding share of the market, despite a price point ($99) that was double that of competing products. The price was, Cook admitted, “built on a hunch,” but because QuickBooks was dramatically different its price was fairly inelastic.

Since that time Intuit has steadily added features and functionality (and margin) to the QuickBooks suite of products, which now start at $199.95. The company confidently promises that the software will pay for itself in 60 days.

Cook has since relinquished his CEO title (he’s now chairman of the company’s executive committee) but his influence is still apparent and there’s no reason to mess with success. “The difference between a groove and a rut,” Scott says, “is whether your stuck.” I’d say Intuit has been in a groove for some time now.

I recently read a terrific new book by Les McKeown called Predictable Success. While the title makes McKeown’s book sound like the antithesis of When Growth Stalls, I was amazed by the parallels between his work and mine.

Of the many passages that caught my attention, this one in particular stood out: “Just like any other complex entity, the Predictable Success organization is far from perfect—it will make mistakes, hit roadblocks, and is just as exposed to the impact of external events beyond its control as any other organization. The difference is in how the Predictable Success organization responds to those difficulties.”

I couldn’t agree more with that statement, and two recent announcements in the business press prove the point.

The first is about the incredible second quarter results announced by Whole Foods, where same store sales rose 8.7 percent. That’s a far cry from the company I wrote about back in August that was distracted by its 2007 acquisition of rival Wild Oats and the drawn-out antitrust battle that resulted. In a Wall Street Journal article around that time, Whole Foods’ founder John Mackey was dismayed by how the company had lost its way, saying “We sell a bunch of junk.” It was then Mackey decided to refocus the brand back to its natural foods roots. Less than a year later, here we are talking about the “predictable success” that resulted.

The second is Ford’s recent announcement that it was shuttering for good its 71-year-old Mercury brand. Ford has done a tremendous job under CEO Alan Mulally of sharpening its focus as a company, but was unfortunately unable to resuscitate a brand that had become unfocused since its 1960′s heyday.

In his book McKeown quotes Jack Welch, who said, “The only way to change people’s minds is with consistency.” Whole Foods recognized the error of its inconsistent ways and quickly recovered, while Mercury languished too long in its own and has paid the ultimate price as a result.

Business is a contact sport, and there are many things that can derail a company for good when growth stalls. But as McKeown points out in his book, each of us can increase the odds of attaining “predictable success” if we’ll stay as alert to what’s happening within our organizations as we do to external events.

Thousands of years ago King Solomon said, “Know well the condition of your flocks.” It’s as good advice now as it was then.

“Can the experience of an emotion persist once the memory for what induced the emotion has been forgotten?”

That’s the question posed—and tentatively answered—by scientists at the University of Iowa as published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  They studied a select group of patients with severe amnesia using emotional film clips to investigate whether or not their emotions would persist beyond the memory of the clips they watched.

Sure enough, the emotions lasted longer than the memories. Both positive (happiness) and negative (sadness) emotions were tested, and both yielded similar results. The authors said, “These findings provide direct evidence that a feeling of emotion can endure beyond the conscious recollection for the events that initially triggered the emotion.”

The implications for marketers are significant. Many brands focus their efforts on the rational side of the equation, trying to convince people why they should buy their products or services. This study suggests that emotional appeal is just as—if not more—important. In other words, the emotional associations tied to your brand are more lasting than any specific claims you make.

There’s a cliche in our business that people buy on emotion and justify with fact. Like many cliches, perhaps it attained that status because it’s true. The evidence seems to suggest that’s the case.