Brand awareness follows a certain process. The customer has a perceived need for a product. In many cases, he will seek information on what product to buy – He will often evaluate his alternatives. Think about people, rather than consumers. Think about experience, rather than products. Think about dialogue, rather than information delivery. We call this Emotional Branding. Emotional branding works best when you’re approaching your audience as individual people who live and work and think and dream—and when you engage them with all of that in mind.
Money matters ! They say money can’t buy happiness, but who hasn’t pictured how wonderful life could be if you bought new set of wheels? Of course, such purchases don’t actually provide the lasting euphoria you’d imagined. The human mind doesn’t always work in our best interests when it comes to spending decisions. But the good news is that scientists are trying to tackle the problem—and uncover how we can retrain our brains to make better choices. Scientists studying how people make economic decisions have found that your brain can work for and against you. Knowing this, you can start taking steps to train your brain to make better money habits.
Let’s face it – financial status or habits rarely determine who you’d ask out (or who to accept) on a date. But should you continue onto the second date if the potential partner is a spendrift? There will be many clues about a person’s financial situation and how they handle money as early as the first date. Your reaction to these clues will depend on your financial beliefs and habits, but early consideration of what they might imply will help you determine if a date is financially compatible before you get entangled in a relationship. “Can money make us happy if we spend it on the right purchase?”
Spending on experiences—rather than stuff—tends to makes us happier. The anterior prefrontal cortex is a part of your gray matter, adept at integrating information and doing complex tasks. You might call it your brain’s adult supervision. It counters the brain’s more primitive regions that “developed to improve our species’ odds of survival” and are driven to “crave what looks rewarding and shun what looks risky.” Experiential purchases make us happier than material items because of the advantages that are inherent to experiences. And all of the research shows that if you pick material items that meet those same needs, they’ll make you just as happy.
Trick our brains into not overspending: Knowing what you spend can go far to help you get spending under control. “Most people know how much money they earn and usually know their net worth, but usually don’t know how much they spend.” Keep a log of your outlays, and you may see the wisdom of the old saying, “Knowledge is power.” There are things you can do to limit the pleasure of buying in the moment. spending money is much easier when you’re paying with credit. People use credit cards for convenience reasons, which means there’s not that immediate, painful experience that makes you think twice about the purchase. So if you think you’re not managing your money well, the most obvious place to start is with managing your cash. Psychologically, it’s more difficult to overspend when using paper bills—you’re not pushing the pain into the future.
In our research, when we ask people to recall the last time they spent money on something that they thought would make them happy, a typical story is: “I went into the mall, and I envisioned myself buying these shoes. I thought they would make my life so much better. I thought that people in my social network would be impressed.” They expect people will notice and compliment them on those shoes—and then they’re quite disappointed when it doesn’t happen.
What happiness research shows is that when you put your joy in the hands of other people, you’re not going to be as happy as when it’s internal and true to who you are. We call this “transformation expectation.” If you don’t have anticipatory happiness, you’ll say, “I want to enjoy the fine things in life right now.” People need to have a vision— Is this purchase happiness-oriented? Is it going to bring me closer to friends and family? Is it going to make me feel competent? Is it going to express who I am? Am I doing this because of my internal values? If the answers to those questions are yes, you’re probably fine to buy it.
No longer are we confined to basic messaging on social media. Social media is becoming a key component of our marketing functions, but how do we ascertain whether or not our messaging is as powerful as it could be? Marketing is evolving; it’s time to take our strategy to the next level, by harnessing the power of the single largest source of unsolicited consumer conversation: social media.
When a spike in conversation occurs, parse down to the time period where it is occurring and focus in on the audience speaking. By running an opinion monitor, you can collect insights deeper than positive, negative, and neutral sentiment, and see what consumers actually care about. You also have the ability to search for past content that resonated well with your audience, aiding your re-marketing strategies.
Identifying your brand influencer’s can sometimes prove tricky. Identify the biggest influencers of your brand, you can also find those who discuss your brand the most. Locate where social media users are discussing your brand the most and then determine the interests of those users.
Learn How Your Customers Differ From Your Competitors’ – Not only can you build a Monitor to follow your own brand, you can also run Monitors on your competitors. This can provide great insight to your brand by allowing you to view consumer discussion around your competitor.
With sophisticated social media analysis, powerful customers can empower marketers to make better decisions than ever before. Social media listening can help your company to learn who is talking about your brand and in which way. Branding changes in today’s business world are more complicated than ever and demand a deep analysis of your customers.
Technical language can be a daunting task for one who has limited knowledge or usability of the same. Jargons are what separates us from the techie geeks. I have often heard how technical books grab shelf space until absolutely necessary to venture on. However, we all need to keep ourselves up-to-date in this digital world. Let me make an effort to simplify this task & make it interesting for all who are willing. “a framework is just a bunch of code that the programmer can call without having to write it explicitly.”
.NET framework are agile software development programming model and are easier than ever before to create multi-platform software applications. NET is a Microsoft development framework used to deliver web-based software solutions. What’s less widely known unless you’ve been utilizing .NET of late is that in 2012, Microsoft released a number of updated development tools and frameworks that further improve the suite of .NET products. The .NET programming language sprung from Microsoft’s Next Generation Windows Services in the 1990s and it has evolved over time to become a flexible framework that lets software developers create affordable, reliable, secure B2B and B2C applications. .NET is a favorite among many software developers today for creating web-based applications because .NET run time allows apps to be coded in multiple languages, which means applications developed in the .NET framework can potentially run on any operating platform. It is also being used today to develop and deploy desktop and mobile applications that run off nearly on the same code base.
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need .NET Framework. The makers of all the crucial applications would have the time and resources to fully patch together their applications into self-contained packages, because developing for Windows would be an intuitive, mostly high-level process that independent developers could nail down in a fairly quick order. So nobody besides developers would need a package like .NET, which provides applications with an orderly way to access databases, web services, and other communication tools. But we don’t live in that perfect world. .Net is often a big download, and sometimes prone to errors —less so in Windows 7, but any big software patch has the potential for error. One problem .NET installations often run into is a need for space. The 4.0 version of .NET for standard 32-bit Windows systems requires 850 MB of free space on your primary Windows drive; a 64-bit Windows system needs 2 GB free, and Windows usually won’t ask you if you have space on another partition to spare. If your free space is smaller than these amounts, you’ll need to look at your hard drive and free up some space. However, every technology has its boon.
Few of the advantages of using .NET for software development projects are:
* The .NET environment includes many well-understood and commonly-used features and frameworks for importing and storing data, including Entity Framework and LINQ.
* Web applications created using the .NET architecture are reliable, trustable and secure.
* .NET is language independent, therefore lets the software developer choose from multiple supported languages, including C#, Visual Basic, and F#, to build an application. It provides a platform that allows a number of different programming languages to carry out a task.
* .NET and Visual Studio’s unit testing environments for debugging and performance are constantly improving with each new iteration, as opposed to languages like Java, which have tended to remain stagnant.
* With the release of Visual Studio 2012, there has been a significant increase of support for scripting languages like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. The Microsoft .NET Framework 4 redistributable package installs the .NET Framework runtime and associated files that are required to run and develop applications to target the .NET Framework 4.
On my attempt to make technology reading fun, like my page and give me your feedback. I will continue to explore topics that can make knowledge transfer an easy process.
Employee engagement is the key to retention and great talent development. We’re suddenly seeing companies tell us that “employee retention” has become a critical issue. Recently, I had a conversation with one of our HR manager who told me “we design our organization around high-turnover: we make sure jobs are easy to learn so we can rapidly assimilate new people.”
However, in my opinion, Employee Retention is the primary measure of the strength of an organization. If a company loses a critical employee, it is a safe bet that other people in the company are looking as well. Tenured employees drive far greater value than those who are “cycling through” the business. Most importantly, we have to remember that people are what we call an “appreciating asset.” The longer we stay with an organization the more productive we get – we learn the systems, we learn the products, and we learn how to work together. Initially most employees are a “cost” to the organization, and over time, with the right talent practices, they become more and more valuable.
Consider the real “total cost” of losing an employee:
* Cost of hiring a new person (advertising, interviewing, screening, hiring)
* Cost of onboarding a new person (training, management time)
* Training cost (over 2-3 years you are likely to invest 10-20% of an employee’s salary or more in training)
* Lost productivity (a new person may take 1-2 years to reach the productivity of an existing person)
* Lost engagement (other employees who see high turnover disengage and lose productivity)
* Customer service and errors (new employees take longer and are often less adept at solving problems). In healthcare this may result in much higher error rates, illness, and other very expensive costs.
* Cultural impact (whenever an employee leaves others take time to ask “why?”).
Retaining employees is an essential part of both workforce optimization and business productivity. Employee turnover generally causes disruption, expense, and recruitment costs, so it is imperative for most companies to increase retention rates and grow their employment brand and reputation. Employee retention is a form of savings in two senses: saving jobs and saving expenses-specifically, expenses associated with replacing an employee. Retention is measured by the percentage of workers who remain employed by a specific organization at the end of a given employment period, e.g., contractual, quarterly or annual.
So how do we retain our employees and expand our brand recognition?
Here are some pointers to help:
* The work environment – Retention is maximized in a company by creating a “win-win” situation between management and employees, where the needs of the employee are met to the greatest extent possible without sacrificing or losing sight of the needs and goals of the company. We’ve done lots of research over the years on recognition, engagement, leadership, and management. Once they are “safe” – i.e. paid well, they look for more meaningful value at work. Is this work taking advantage of my skills? Do people appreciate me? Is the environment inclusive and diverse so that I feel that I fit? Does this company do work I feel proud of?
Career opportunities – People want to work for a winner. What sets your company apart from your competition? How are you–and as a result, your employees–making a difference in your industry, in your community, and for your customers? Younger folks are motivated by growth, career opportunity, and meaning. Our research several years ago showed that while young people want the same types of benefits and work-life balance as older people, they are particularly focused on fun, collaboration, and the ability to be with others they enjoy. So the prospect of a “career” is more than just advancement.
* Compensation plays a role – Competitive benefits packages that fit the needs of the employees, small perks that are inexpensive but have psychological impact such providing as coffee and bagels in the mornings, contests or incentives, and clear communication of goals and expectations all can go a long way toward employee satisfaction. Promoting from within also provides a positive culture experience. Past experience we have show that for mid-performing people compensation is a “hygiene” factor – too little money will definitely create high churn, but over compensating people won’t make up for a poor work environment.
* Job fit is crucial – Human beings are often the happiest when they’re in the process of achieving a goal. Clear, achievable objectives that gauge personal, team and company performance provide the feedback employees need to confirm they’re making valuable contributions and accomplishing desirable goals. Study after study confirms that people have a deep desire to feel they’re succeeding and that their talents and capabilities are being used in a way that makes a difference to the business. When people sense their actions are fulfilling this desire, they begin to develop a sense of belonging and a feeling that your company is their company.
* Loyalty – Most effective way of retention is through Employee loyalty. We know that high-performing companies have loyal employees. So how are you going to demonstrate your commitment to your employees? How loyal are you to your employees? Are you more concerned about their success or their contributions to your company’s success? True loyalty is not an enforced requirement but an earned response to the trust, respect and commitment shown to the individuals in your company. When you demonstrate loyalty to your employees, they’ll reciprocate with commitment and loyalty to your business. Remember that people don’t begin their employment with you as loyal employees, but will develop loyalty over time as they’re trusted, respected and appreciated by you. Conducting “stay interviews” can offer insight from tenured employees as to why they have remained with the company and help to build an effective employment brand.
It is well understood that high-performing companies serve their employees just as well as they serve their customers. A retention rate of 100% is not always a desirable thing, because while staff development and value creation through human capital investment are vital, it is likely that there will be employees who need to be separated from the company for some reason. Ultimately the most successful and enduring organizations in business are those that have a common sense of mission, a deep respect for their employees, and put time, energy, and money into building a highly engaging environment. They carefully select the “right people” with lots of hard work, and once people join they take the time to make sure they have development opportunities to move up the value curve. In today’s heating economy and rapid shift in demographics, you’ll be competing for talent regardless of your industry.