Fun fact: “Adidas” does not stand for “All Day I Dream About Sports.” It’s short for Adi Dassler, the company’s founder.

Yet, if you repeat a factoid often enough, it has a way of entering the zeitgeist. That’s especially true for statistics ringing with truth.

Case in point: everyone knows it costs 5x more to acquire customers than to get customers to return. This factoid (this time in “10x” form) even appeared in “The Office,” when an intern attending business school at night quizzed hapless boss Michael Scott. The joke was that the branch manager didn’t understand a basic business fact.