Posts tagged as:

psychology

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp report: Designing communications that resonate

02.22.2010
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Effective marketing starts with people. Because understanding your customer is crucial for the success of your sustainable brand, John Marshall Roberts devoted most of his Sustainable Brands Boot Camp session* to psychology and the understanding of your audience’s worldview. To design effective communications you must understand how your audience makes sense of the world — [...]

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Review: Crowds are us

02.05.2010
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How times change: In the 110 years between the work of Gustave Le Bon (1895) and James Surowiecki (2005), crowds went from embodying stupidity to being wise. Compare and contrast:

Le Bon: “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. [T]he crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.”

Surowiecki: “[U]nder the right [...]

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Review: “Business and the Buddha: Doing Well by Doing Good”

01.22.2010
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“Buddhism in business, yeah right,” I thought when a friend handed me Business and the Buddha. It just seemed like too much of a stretch to apply one in the other. I stand corrected.
Lloyd Field makes a convincing argument for applying the principles of Buddhism in capitalist business. In the process, he outlines an alternative [...]

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Review: Employee engagement and sustainability

01.15.2010
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Ever since I worked on my bachelor’s thesis about internal public relations at Volkswagen Slovakia, I’ve been interested in the dynamics of the relationship between a corporation and its employees. The topic has recently moved to the forefront of my attention, along with 12: The Elements of Great Managing.
A report on The Gallup Organization’s massive [...]

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Applying positive psychology in marketing

01.04.2010

Positive psychology keeps cropping up on my radar, whether it be through works like Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience or the “Stiglitz Report”. In a nutshell, if traditional psychology deals with pathologies of the human psyche like mental illnesses, positive psychology focuses on human strengths and virtues, studying ways to enrich individuals’ lives. What would [...]

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Sustainable business as an end in itself: Extrinsic vs. intrinsic goals in marketing

12.31.2009

Goal setting is a basic step in developing your marketing strategy – you need to know what you’re aiming to achieve in order to determine how you’re going to get there. The problem is, your business goals rest squarely in the future. External factors often determine your goals: your leisure activities that require financing, your mortgage [...]

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Book review: “Influence: Science and Practice”

12.11.2009

“With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended. [W]hen making a decision, we will less frequently engage in a fully considered [...]

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Choice or no choice: Is that really the question?

12.09.2009

Just as I was getting ready to revive the Solutions for Sustainable Consumption series with a post about offering consumers a third choice (think “paper or plastic or…”), two developments forced me to reconsider.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 30th. The founder of structuralism in anthropology had discovered that all narratives are built around binary oppositions.
Writing [...]

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Objections? Play into them!

12.08.2009

It happens: something about you or your product raises eyebrows, turns noses, or raises other objections. There are a number of ways to overcome objections (interestingly, online articles on overcoming objections typically relate to network marketing). I believe the best way to overcoming objections to your self, your product, or your company is to play [...]

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