Categories
Branding

How to Develop a Memorable and Unique Brand People Will Love

Running a successful business is no walk in the park. Getting a company off the ground and spreading brand awareness takes hard work, dedication, and determination. No matter what field of business you’re in, your brand needs to stand out from competitors, resonate with your target audience, and be appealing to the eye. To help you on your journey, here are some tactics that will help you design and develop a brand that consumers will love.

Find Your Purpose

For your brand to stand out for all the right reasons, you need to establish your niche and show how you’re not like competitors. You need to determine what kinds of products or services your business offers to consumers and why you should be the go-to over rivals. If you start off without a solid plan in place, you’re more likely to fail within the first year. And with half of all startups losing momentum within the first twelve months, having a solid business plan behind you is key for success. 

Create a Striking Logo

Your brand’s logo will say a lot about your business. When consumers research your brand, your logo should be a combination of imagery and text that lets people know who you are, what you sell, and how you differentiate from everyone else. An eye-catching logo also fosters brand loyalty, helping to build a strong following. The packing is just as important as the product, which is why your logo needs to be clearly displayed to build recognition and trust among your customers. 

Know Your Target Audience

If you don’t know who your target audience is, you will have difficulty building a memorable and trustworthy brand. Whether you want Gen Z to take notice of you, or you’re after millennials, your products or services need to correlate well with your audience. Conducting market research, checking your website’s performance and using Google Analytics are just a few tactics you can perform to establish who is interested in your brand. 

Use Social Media Channels

As each year passes, the number of social media users increases. All new startups and established companies use social media as a way to build their brand and connect with their customers. Creating social media business pages on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should be your first step in building brand awareness. If used correctly, social media can be a great way to boost revenue and turn potential customers into long-term followers. 

Have Patience

Success rarely happens overnight for entrepreneurs, so you need to have patience and drive to see the results you want. Developing a brand takes time and hard work, which is why you must stay motivated and try out different approaches until you create a brand that catches your audience’s eye.

All the recognizable brands we see online and in day-to-day life had to start out somewhere. If you’re launching a startup, the sole goal will be to drive as many consumers as possible to your business. All the tips above can help you create a memorable brand that will keep your operation on top.

Categories
Technology

A Human Centric Approach For Digital Transformation

As a business professional, it’s pretty easy to rationalize putting your digital transformation into play today. Not only does it allow better productivity and cost-saving, but it’s also an essential strategy in the face of the current COVID-19 crisis and the resulting forced work/buy-from-home setups. However, making this shift is more than just setting up network security or ditching your printer. Your entire organization has to support the change, help everybody develop the new capabilities they’ll need, and understand the impact on the business’s culture or structure. And in this sense, successful digital transformation is 100 percent about people.

A catalyst for digital adoption

Before the pandemic, leaders understood that digital transformation is inevitable, and they made definite plans for the shift. But those plans weren’t one-size-fits-all. Each business set its budget and pace based on industry and company specifics, and in a lot of cases, the strategy was a gradual progression to new tools and ways of operating.

Then came COVID-19. Things had to shift. With lockdowns and general social distancing measures from local and state governments, the physical office wasn’t doable for thousands of businesses anymore. Many companies had to pivot to a remote environment in just a matter of days.

There’s no doubt this was stressful for everybody involved. But out of necessity, people responded. They figured out what would work, at least temporarily, and they started to realize that their digital shifts didn’t have to be so gradual or wait. In this way, although companies worked with employees, partners, and stakeholders to increase digital adoption long before the virus hit, the pandemic served as a positive catalyst that helped make the shift to remote work much more rapid. With no other choice but to serve clients through a near 100 percent digital experience, they had to adapt quickly — and they did.

COVID-19 gave companies a massive push toward digital transformation. But now that we have had this initial push, it’s critical to keep moving forward. We must understand the gap between our companies’ current performance and capabilities and where they need to be in the market to stay competitive.

Perhaps the biggest secret to avoiding a backslide is the development of talent agility. Nick Gidwani defines talent agility in an article for Pathgather as “A company’s ability to change the composition of talent inside the organization quickly and cost-effectively. It takes into account all the levers that are needed to build and develop talent: Learning & Development, acquiring and retaining talent, and engaging them.” The more agile your talent pool, the better your business can constantly reshape itself to address new market challenges, offer new products and services, and fend off competition.

There are six key aspects of talent agility you must embed in your organization to sustain momentum with your digital transformation in the months and years ahead:

  1. Your people are embracing change. Although workers in some industries are more worried than others, Pew Research found that 65 percent of Americans expect robots and computers to probably perform jobs people do. A CNBC/Survey Monkey survey also indicated that over a quarter of workers (27 percent) say they’re worried that their job will be eliminated by technology in the next five years. Feeling threatened in this way is hardly good for morale or productivity. By providing assistance for digital adoption and helping them understand and take ownership of the change, you’ll control fear in your workforce and encourage collaboration instead of consternation.
  2. Your workload might have changed. Many companies are rethinking responsibilities and even adjusting the size of their workforces as they look to the post-COVID-19 future. So it’s important to help people recognize the part they’re playing and how they contribute to value creation and make sure that workloads stay truly balanced despite any reassigning that’s happening.
  3. You might need to upskill to address talent scarcity and skill gaps. Remote strategies and tools often require different skill sets than those employees might demonstrate in the traditional office or infrastructure. You might need to acknowledge that some or even all of your employees just aren’t equipped to drive recovery or accelerate growth. Ensure they have the training and opportunities they need to thrive in the new environment — rather than assuming they can no longer do the work.
  4. Your work culture might have shifted. Remote work presents new benefits and challenges that can influence your entire company atmosphere. As part of your ongoing retention strategy, work purposely to ensure that people aren’t afraid to ask questions or challenge existing ideas and that they all stay committed to similar values and priorities.
  5. You need to reinforce employee engagement. The link between learning, engagement, and retention is clear: Deloitte found that engaged employees are 87 percent less likely to leave their organizations. You will need to find new ways to ensure that people are interested and happy even when not in the office and subsequently want to participate in work activities.
  6. Your workforce is diverse and cross-functional. Leaders used to think that homogenous teams were easier to manage. But similarities among members created biased patterns of problem-solving. Developing talent agility requires cross-functional, collaborative teams to be the norm and abandoning the silo mentality.Some degree of employee pushback during a significant change like the current digital transformation shift is normal, if only because there’s some comfort in what’s familiar. But there’s no going back. The world is changing and evolving, and it’s up to us to change with it. To come out ahead, rather than letting the pushback overwhelm or control you, intentionally build a customer and employee-centric culture that allows you to pivot based on needs.

    Digital Transformation is More About People Than Technology [Entrepreneur]

About Our GE Network Expert - Min Tang

Categories
Finance & Capital

What Can You Include in a Debt Consolidation?

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of the verb consolidate is to “join together into one whole” or to unite. In the debt world this means bringing multiple miscellaneous debts under the same umbrella, so to speak. The goal is to make it easier to keep track of debts and pay them off, shorten the repayment timeline on said debts and reduce the amount of interest you ultimately pay when doing so.

Using a debt consolidation loan to streamline other numerous debts is perhaps the most popular method here. Most, if not all, consumers would admit that being responsible for one monthly loan payment is simpler than trying to juggle various other debts — and that it’s preferable to pay less interest than more, of course.

But not every debt under the sun is eligible for the consolidation process, nor would it make a whole lot of sense to consolidate certain types of debts based on their interest rates. Keep reading to learn more about what it’s often possible to include in a debt consolidation as well as what types of balances are typically excluded from this process.

Types of Debt You Can Consolidate

The types of debts most eligible for consolidation are unsecured — or not tied to physical assets that the lender could repossess in the event of default.

This makes the following debt types solid candidates for consolidation in many cases:

  • Credit cards: It often makes sense to consolidate high-interest, revolving credit card accounts because they tend to be one of the most expensive types of debts to carry over time. This is particularly true for cardholders paying the minimum amount due each month, as doing so usually extends the lifespan of the credit card balance by years and tacks hundreds if not thousands of extra dollars onto the price tag.
  • Private student loans: Whether or not it makes sense to consolidate student loans usually depends on the type — federal vs. private — as well as their interest rate.
  • High-interest personal loans: Say you took out a personal loan in the past when you had worse credit, but you’re now able to qualify for a more competitive interest rate. It could make sense in cases like these to take on new debt to pay off the old debt for less. Similarly, if you took out a payday loan in the past and now are able to secure a loan at a lower interest rate, it almost certainly makes sense to include this in the bundle.
  • Medical bills: If your medical bills have gone to collections and there’s no way to negotiate with your provider, it may make sense to seek out a more reasonable interest rate via consolidation.

Notice we said “in many cases.” This is because there’s no one-size-fits-all rule determining if it’s a smart idea to consolidate certain debts. Much of the outcome rests on whether or not you can qualify for a debt consolidation loan at an interest rate lower than your current debts.

Types of Debt You Cannot Consolidate

On the flip side, secured debts that are backed by collateral are usually ineligible for consolidation, with the two biggest examples being mortgages and auto loans. However, it also doesn’t make much sense to consider consolidating these as they tend to carry low interest rates as is. For instance, it wouldn’t make sense to consolidate an auto loan on a used car at 9 percent APR if you’d only be able to qualify for a consolidation loan at 12 percent APR.

A good rule of thumb to remember: You can usually include unsecured debts with high interest rates in the debt consolidation process.

Categories
Entrepreneurs

Singaporean Startup Ushers In Digital 4.0

Having the capability to forecast whether a first-year student will, at the end of her time in school, graduate at the top of her class or in the lower percentile may seem speculative work, but that is exactly what Azendian Solutions (Azendian) can equip learning institutions to do.

Just turned five years since establishment, Azendian currently focuses on enhancing education and institution performance as well as built environment sustainability by reducing carbon footprint and improving the productivity of operations.

The Company is headquartered in Singapore and has developed its proprietary LiteOn Campus—a solution designed to enhance productivity for resource deployment and facilitating the learning journey of students in educational institutions. Its other solution, LiteOn Estate, is a smart-building solution that brings digital 4.0 capabilities to the built environment which can reduce the carbon footprint produced by real estate properties.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital 4.0 capabilities by businesses and organizations. Azendian has been expanding its capacity to meet this increasing demand.

Azendian Solutions group managing director Bill Lee believes data is a crucial asset for all organizations. Effective use of data and adoption of Artificial Intelligence will bring about new performance previously not attainable and it will also determine their success in an organization’s journey towards industry/digital 4.

The Singapore-based data and analytics company also collaborates with Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore to champion data-driven AI-enabled solutions for digital 4.0 smart building solutions. The partnership with the institution’s School of Engineering, School of Informatics and IT and their estates and facilities management team aims to co-develop AI solutions and offer teaching, training, and case study material to prepare Temasek Polytechnic’s students and industry professionals for the digital 4.0 marketplace.

Azendian’s LiteOn Estate solution taps on WingArc1st’s MotionBoard technology, and together with other industry-leading solutions, it will be featured in Temasek Polytechnic’s integrative built environment center as a showpiece and training center.

The LiteOn Estate solution targets to increase productivity and reduce the carbon footprint, incurring less expenditure with chiller plant and air-side energy optimization.  It also enables fault detection and predictive maintenance as the data-driven and machine learning-powered solution also has a self-learning algorithm to detect minute changes in equipment component behavior and their output. It is a real-time solution that requires minimal human intervention. The automated solution uses its technologies to draw data, optimize, and write back new setpoint strategies on a real-time basis.  The engine automated self-learning model claims to improve performance over time and it auto-detects changes in the environment, for example aging equipment, changing environment condition, and heat load demand. It continuously hunts for the most optimal set points to ensure the expected comfort level for occupants while using lesser kilowatt-hours or energy to do so. The solution can achieve up to 20 per cent energy savings, depending on conditions.

“WingArc1st Inc. develops and distributes products and services that focus on the technology of data utilization primarily in Japan. We are very pleased to collaborate with Singapore-based Azendian, whose strengths lie in data analytics, to further distribute our one-and-only-unique-solution to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) region. Now that we have a strong business bond with Azendian, with whom we share very similar future visions, we would like to see business growth for both parties from now and forward,” remarked Jun Tanaka, chief executive officer, WingArc1st Inc.

The data empowerment company WingArc1st Inc entered into a business partnership with Azendian on 9 October with the aim to deploy the data analytics solutions in the LiteOn series embedding MotionBoard in the ASEAN region.

Azendian Solutions is based in Singapore and has been expanding across South East Asia. Japan and the other developed markets across Asia are also key growth markets for Azendian and we are very excited to have forged this strategic partnership with WingArc1st Inc to support each other in our ambitions for these regions. WingArc1st solutions’ real-time and high computing performance complements Azendian solutions. It is a win-win for Azendian and WingArc1st,” added Lee.

Azendian’s initial growth phase covers  South East Asia and Japan. In the next growth phase, it is expanding to Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  Beyond that, they are also looking to expand to the rest of the world. On the product front, they are looking to expand their domain offering from estate and education to other areas too.

The company is completing its Series A+ fundraising,  to support the development and expansion of its product offerings, delivery, and marketing capabilities in South East Asia. Azendian is targeting its Series B fundraising in 18 month’s time when it will be ready to expand its solutions beyond South East Asia and Japan to other regions.

Singaporean Startup Ushers In Digital 4.0 Leveraging Data [Entrepreneur]

About Our GE Network Expert - Min Tang

Categories
Social Marketing

The Psychology Of Colors In Marketing

Do you feel serenely calm when surrounded by green fields and blue skies? Have you ever wondered what the color red represents and why you feel slightly alarmed when staring at a stop sign? Those are just two of the many effects color has on the human psyche. It’s all part of a study referred to as the psychology of color.

What is the Psychology of Color?

Color psychology studies how different colors determine human behavior. The psychology of color is used in advertising and marketing to evoke emotional reactions. That sounds simple at first blush, but there’s a lot to unpack in that statement.

Before we look at how color meaning affects human behavior (and how certain colors elicit different reactions), let’s take a quick journey through the history of color.

In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton observed sunlight passing through a glass prism and how the light was reflected into various colors. He identified initially six wavelength shades: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. He later added indigo, according to Wikipedia.

But color psychology predates Newton’s time by thousands of years going back to the Egyptians. They studied color’s effect on mood and used color to accomplish holistic benefits.

More recently, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called color the “mother tongue of the subconscious.” His psychological studies led him to develop art therapy. He believed that self-expression through images and colors could help patients recover from trauma or distress.

Have you noticed how colors go in and out of style? In the 1970s, earth tones were popular but gave way in the 80s to turquoise and mauve. Later, pinks and blue-grays came on the scene.

For example, look at the TV series Mad Men, which ran from 2007 to 2015, but whose fictional time frame ran from March 1960 to November 1970. Viewers may recall how color palettes changed over the years. The muted browns and grays of the Eisenhower era succumbed to the bold shades of chartreuse, persimmon, and banana yellow of the late 60s.

How Do Colors in Marketing Influence People?

Color meaning and the psychology of colors can powerfully impact people’s behavior and decision-making. People make subconscious judgments about a person, environment, or product within a few seconds or minutes. Color plays into this initial impression.

That fact is not lost on brands and advertisers. They know certain colors, tints, hues, and shades evoke emotion and move people to action. This effect is both subtle and powerful.

Through their choice of color in logos, packaging, signage, and advertising, brands can influence consumers to buy on impulse, or choose their product or service over a competitor’s.

Think about your favorite brands and how certain colors predominate. Do their logos sport bright red like Target or Netflix? Or are you a person who likes the colors black and white like Nike? Perhaps you prefer yellow and are drawn to Best Buy or Subway.

Color can often be the sole reason someone purchases a product. Research conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo found that 93 percent of buyers focus on visual appearance. And close to 85 percent claim color is a primary reason when they make a purchase!

Let’s take a look at color meaning as it applies to marketing, including the best colors to use. We will also evaluate meaning of colors and examples of branding colors.

Red Color Psychology

The color red creates a sense of urgency, suitable for clearance sales. It also encourages appetite. Thus it is frequently used by fast-food chains. The color physically stimulates the body, raising blood pressure and heart rate. It is associated with movement, excitement, and passion. It gets people to act and is important for call-to-action buttons, for example, on a website.

McDonald’s chooses the high-energy color red (combined with yellow), which appeals to children, kindles appetites, and creates a sense of urgency. This tactic has been great for Micky D’s. It might not have been the same ridiculously big chain it is today without using the color so effectively. Red is all about emotions and passion, which is how McDonald’s wants you to feel about its products. Remember the McDonald’s advertising campaign, “Loving it.”

Target provides another example of the use of the color. Its logo, one of the most widely recognized symbols in North America, grabs customers’ attention. It creates the idea of excitement in shopping there, and the urgency to purchase the brand’s great deals or latest, trendiest merchandise.

Green Color Psychology

This color is associated with health, tranquility, power and nature. It is used in stores to relax customers and promote environmental issues. It stimulates harmony in your brain and encourages a balance leading to decisiveness.

Starbucks is a major global brand that uses this color scheme. Green shows that Starbucks hopes to promote a sense of relaxation in its cafes, inviting customers to come in for a coffee break during a stressful day.

John Deere is another company that uses the color in its branding. This makes sense because the brand is associated with farming and agriculture. John Deere’s color branding is immediately recognizable on its machine in a field or back yard.

Whole Foods also incorporates the color in its logo. The brand is associated with health and nature and prides itself on high-quality, natural, and organic products. In fact, wholesomeness is the very essence of what the company stands for.

Interestingly, BP also uses the color, whether intentionally or not, associating it with the environment.

How to Use the Psychology of Colors When Marketing [SmallBizTrends]

About Our GE Network Expert - Min Tang