By John Waldron Today’s world is jam packed with ads and brand messages. No matter if we, as consumers, are watching TV, listening to the radio, browsing the web, checking social media, reading a newspaper, or just walking down the street – we’re being bombarded with advertisements from all corners. Indeed, a Media Dynamics study revealed that the average adult is exposed to some 362 ads every single day. That’s a terrific amount when you think about it. However, when you do take this figure into consideration, ask yourself: How many of those ads do you actually remember seeing? Not many. In fact, consumers have become so accustomed to advertisements that we’re blind to more than half of them. As you can see from the table below, of the 362 ads you saw yesterday, you only noted 153 of them (and I’d bet my bottom dollar you couldn’t recall what even 10 of them…

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New research finds that sharing consumers’ positive stories about a brand can be a highly effective online marketing strategy. This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. When we think of storytelling, we tend to conjure up memories of childhood — fairy tales, fables, and campfires. Stories are an essential form of human communication and are often among the first conveyors of cultural norms and values. There’s a reason why many childhood lessons are conveyed as stories: Research has shown that the human brain likes to encode, store, and retrieve information in narrative form. When consumers prepare to make purchase decisions, stories can deliver important information and shape the decision and the overall brand experience. With the advent of consumer-to-consumer, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, stories can be powerful tools for shaping cognitive processing, recall, brand image, and choice.…

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By: TJ McCue Look around: How common is it to see someone deeply engrossed in a video on their mobile device? In just a few years, it will take an individual more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month. Every second, a million minutes, or almost 17,000 hours of video content will cross the network by 2021, according to Cisco. Think about that – in just one second – more video will move across the internet than you could watch in almost two years of doing nothing else, including sleeping. Online video use is simply staggering from a consumer perspective. It is changing how businesses or brands communicate with customers and how we communicate with one another. As a guy who sees and reads a lot of technology research and is barraged by statistics of every order, I find…

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By Marcel Schwantes When employees don’t get the tools, training, time, development, clear expectations, vision, or resources they need to do their jobs well, employees experience low morale; they stop caring and they stop trying, unfortunately, as early as the first few weeks on the job. Unfortunately, not every person in a management role is created equal. If I may be candid, some have no business being in the role of influencing others. When the rubber meets the road, these are five of the most common toxic management behaviors I’ve encountered over the years. Managers that show narcissistic tendencies. In its extreme form, this is unfortunate for both manager and employee. For the manager, it’s an actual mental condition known as narcissistic personality disorder that requires medical attention. For employees, compulsively narcissistic managers could ruin their careers. Joseph Burgo, author of The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists…

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