Practitioner Member of the Association for Business Psychology (ABP), the leading professional body representing business psychology.
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Communication usually tops the list of skill sets you can bring to the workplace. And it makes sense; after all, an organization is primarily a team of people, and you'll be much more effective at collaborating and problem-solving if you communicate well with others.
If we're lucky, most of us will be able to recall a manager who had a positive influence on our careers. When we ask ourselves why we considered them to be such great managers, we might recall factors such as excellent training, useful feedback, effective communication, or ongoing support.
Keeping up to date with the latest marketing trends and practices can seem like a daunting and never-ending pursuit. No sooner have you finally mastered the latest online practice, than a brand new social media platform emerges and completely changes the playing field.
Leah Tierney is a consumer psychologist who works in content marketing at Shutterstock. This post was originally published on the Shutterstock blog and has been reprinted with permission. Selfies are overflowing on every social media site, with everyone from the Pope to Obama being spotted in one.
Think about the last time you had the task of making a decision as part of a group. Imagine one person proposes an idea that everyone responds to enthusiastically. You, however, have some doubts. Do you speak up and voice your opinion? Or, do you keep quiet and decide to go along with the majority?
Perhaps one of the strongest forces driving our motivation to share is based on our sense of identity - more specifically, the desired version of ourselves that we want to project onto the world. In a social-media sharing study conducted by The New York Times, 68% of respondents said they share to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about.
As with all forms of art, our preference for images tends to be highly subjective, with personal tastes differing from one person to the next. Having said that, science would suggest that there are certain categories of images that are more likely to elicit strong emotional responses than others.
At the core of every great marketing campaign, you'll find a series of key factors that contribute to the campaign's success - planning, resources, budgeting, timing, and sometimes even a stroke of luck. But all these things are not enough by themselves, and every successful marketing campaign must also share one fundamental attribute: a demonstrated understanding of the customer.
The topic of body language has to be one of the most fascinating areas of psychology. Although we're generally unaware of it, we send out and receive non-verbal signals all the time, and we use them to communicate our thoughts, attitudes, intentions, and emotions.
We're often told that seeing is believing, but when it comes to matters of vision, our eyes have a habit of deceiving us. For centuries, people have been fascinated with optical illusions, and with good reason: While they're fun to look at - often challenging us to see things in new ways - they also reveal a great deal about how the brain interprets what we see and shapes our perception of reality.
How you feel throughout the day can greatly impact your creativity. In general, positive emotions have been found to more strongly and consistently enhance our creative processes, but negative emotions can be beneficial too.
"Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the thing that he can least afford to waste." -Thomas Edison While some people are able to power through the day, maintaining focus and accomplishing their goals, time management is an area where most of us tend to struggle.
In addition to enabling users to share your content, it's important that they can actually see all of the "liking," "sharing," and "following" that has been taking place. Make sure you utilize your online presence by visually displaying the number of followers, likes, and shares that your website and its various content has generated.
Music is one of the major triumphs of human creativity, often moving us in a way that can be universal across cultures. It has powerful effects on our brains and bodies beyond what we see in other animals; encouraging us to dance and sing, giving us goosebumps, moving us to tears, and often inspiring and facilitating our other creative endeavors.
One of the best-known fMRI marketing experiments was conducted in 2004 and compared preferences for Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Participants who favored Coca-Cola showed more activity in the hippocampus and other brain regions associated with memory, but only when they were told what they were drinking.
Most impressive, perhaps, are the physical changes that occur in our brains. When viewing pictures of infants and baby animals, a part of the brain known as the nucleus accumbens is activated, and a huge surge of the pleasure hormone, dopamine, is released.
As online marketers it's likely that you have knowingly (or not) utilised social proof before, so today we give you the lowdown on what the term means, and present you with five useful examples of how it can be leveraged to your online marketing advantage.