Samir Sayed, Managing Director for ASEAN, Korea, Emerging Markets & Pakistan for Hybrid Work Solutions at HP says “The shift to hybrid work was so abrupt, we’ve not really considered how our behaviour should change to accommodate this new way of working. Should we be amending our behaviour to make hybrid work and hybrid meetings feel more normal? Thinking about how to make hybrid meetings feel more natural will create an equal meeting experience, whether people are in the room or dialling-in from home, which can come down to employers providing staff with the right technology and training.”  

“With people increasingly splitting their time between the office and home, how we conduct ourselves at work has changed drastically,” says Liz Wyse, Etiquette Advisor at Debrett’s. “It is clear that hybrid working offers many benefits, including greater flexibility and a better work-life balance. However, that’s not an excuse to let etiquette slip, and standards should stay the same regardless of where you’re working from. What’s the dress code when working from home? How do you eliminate distractions and present a professional façade online? This guide seeks to answer these questions so that both staff and employers can get the most out of a hybrid working arrangement.” 

The comprehensive guide offers insight into everything from how to behave on video calls and how to dress yourself and your background, to body language tips and the importance of eliminating distractions. Key takeaways include: 

1. Give a Royal wave: Ending a video call can sometimes feel a bit awkward. To make calls feel more friendly and inclusive, you can soften the abrupt finality of pressing ‘End call’ by giving colleagues a wave goodbye. 
2. Avoid video motion sickness: Stay in a fixed position during video calls. Carrying your device while you answer the door or wander around the office during video calls risks giving your colleagues a bad dose of motion sickness. 
3. No meeting munchies: You should try to avoid eating – you don’t want people to focus on the contents of your lunch rather than what you’re saying. It’s preferable to eat before you join a meeting. 

4. Beware the danger of diversions: Your home is full of diversions. Be it domestic chores, the garden or visits to the fridge – it’s all too easy to wander around doing jobs or making snacks, which ultimately distracts you from your job and impacts your productivity. 
5. Eliminate virtual background clutter: Indulge in a little set-dressing before your call. Evaluate your video background. Try to eliminate chaotic bookshelves, discarded clothing, empty take-away containers and distracting artwork. You want your colleagues to focus on you, not your background. 
6. Say no to stoic sickness syndrome: Do not struggle into the office if you have got a cough or cold or anything contagious. Nobody will applaud your stoicism. 
7. No meeting multitasking: It’s inappropriate to multitask during meetings – for example looking at your phone. It is also very bad form to carry on working while on a call; everybody will realise your mind is elsewhere and hear the incriminating clatter of your keyboard.  
8. Mute your work mates: Noise in the office can be distracting when joining calls. It’s quite acceptable to politely ask your colleagues to keep their voices down and to turn down their radio or music. 

9. Dress for success: People will choose to wear more relaxed, comfortable clothing when working from home, but it’s important to be aware of the psychological impact of truly letting yourself go. Aim to dress as if you are in the room with other meeting attendees.  
10. Embrace long pauses: Don’t be alarmed by long pauses during meetings and scramble to fill them with chatter; they are an invaluable way of giving people space to interject or expound. 

Looking ahead, instead of giving everyone the same equipment, organisations should understand how people like to work and collaborate, and the spaces they use – including their home office setup. This can be used to tailor the equipment provided, allowing employees to look their best, be heard, feel included and avoid distraction, irrespective of where they’re working from.  

To learn more about the new etiquette for hybrid work, please click here. An infographic can also be found here. 

A data-based method for periodically rearranging products enables retailers to optimize new store layouts based on customer familiarity with where their favorite things used to be. 

The Washington State University-led research leverages past customer transactions to provide brick-and-mortar stores with a degree of the personalized shopping experience online retailers such as Netflix and Amazon use to promote impulse buying. 

“What’s new here is that we designed our model so that customers walking down an aisle they normally peruse will notice products they will likely be interested in based off associations with what was there before,” said Chuck Munson, a professor in the WSU Carson College of Business and corresponding author of a study appearing in Expert Systems with Applications. “Our analysis shows that if you are a store that likes to rearrange periodically this would be a smart way to do it.”

Gihan Edirisinghe, study lead author and a former WSU PhD student now at Western Kentucky University, came up with the idea for the research on a Saturday evening trip to Walmart a few years ago. As he and his wife perused the aisles, they quickly realized something strange was afoot. 

“We found ourselves walking the aisles we normally do but all our stuff had moved.” he said. “So, I started wondering if the Walmart folks had put a lot of thought into the rearrangement. When I got home, I checked the literature and it turned out there was a lot of research on one time store rearrangements but literally nothing data-driven on the best way to periodically rearrange products.” 

Edirisinghe discussed his findings with Munson and the two researchers decided to tackle the knowledge gap. They developed and tested a product allocation model that uses data mining techniques to extract profitability and product affinity details from tens of thousands of real customer transactions contained in the Microsoft database ‘Foodmart.’ 

Their model then uses a three-step process to determine ideal product placement for stores that periodically rearrange their wares. 

First, it identifies a store’s most profitable products so they can be placed in highly visible locations. Next, it determines which items tend to be purchased together so they can be placed in a way that customers will notice something interesting next to a planned purchase. Finally, the model utilizes what the researchers call past-aisle impulse to take advantage of customers’ familiarity with where products used to be to determine future store layouts. 

“This last step is designed so that people looking in a familiar place for, say, potato chips will notice something new that our data tells us will interest them,” Edirisinghe said. “Every rearrangement can then be used as the basis for the next. To the best of our knowledge no previous research has considered this effect.” 

Munson and Edirisinghe ran numerical simulations to compare the potential profitability of their new model to previous work on product placement. Their model significantly outperformed allocation methods that rely solely on visual rearrangement as well as other modeling techniques that use data association. 

One important factor they identified that influenced potential profitability was the nature of the retailer’s target market. 

“If it is more like a gas station store next to a freeway where people don’t really have too much familiarity with the layout, we found that a one-time optimization of products was superior to our method of periodic rearrangement because there is no real strong past impulse there,” Edirisinghe said. “However, for a Whole Foods kind of crowd, where there is a higher discretionary income and familiarity with the store layout, our method outperformed one-time optimization.”

Moving forward, the researchers said their hope is that their study will attract enough interest from commercial retailers to put their method to a real-life test. 

“Our allocation method could ultimately be something that store managers could install and use with a little training,” Munson said. “When you take into consideration the fact that 80% of shoppers don’t make a list before visiting a brick-and-mortar retailer, it is easy to see how important something like this could be to maximizing profits and helping physical stores compete with online retailers.” 

Researchers from Oklahoma State University and University of Florida published a new Journal of Marketing article explaining how marketers can capitalize on the power of perception through the structure of visual communications to influence beliefs about brand performance, which ultimately influences product interest and choice.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Marketing by Design: The Influence of Perceptual Structure on Brand Performance” and is authored by Felipe M. Affonso and Chris Janiszewski.

Brands are constantly updating their visual identities. Intel recently went through its third visual brand identity refresh in half a century and its new logo has iconic symmetry, balance, and proportion. The underlying geometry is apparent in the design. Could visual design characteristics influence consumers’ perceptions about the brand?

This new study finds that a sense of order and structure can reinforce claims about a brand’s utilitarian benefits. Intel’s visual marketing not only communicates the company’s vision and positioning, but also reinforces them through specific design properties. The researchers identify a variety of design properties that can influence perceptions of structure in visual elements, including symmetry, balance, geometry, regularity, proximity, and similarity.

It is well known that customers are subliminally influenced by visual marketing tools such as logos, packages, and retail displays; they use them as a basis to make judgments about brands delivering on their promise. We find that for brands that promise utilitarian (functional, instrumental, and useful) benefits, consumers are encouraged by visual designs perceived as more orderly and structured. This suggests marketers can capitalize on the power of perception to influence beliefs about brand performance, which ultimately influences product interest and choice.

Utilitarian vs. Hedonic Brands

At the other end of the spectrum are brands, such as Pepsi, which promise benefits related to enjoyment, pleasure, and experiences—collectively referred to as hedonic benefits. In this case, marketers can benefit from using visual design properties that convey lack of structure. The visual elements of Pepsi’s marketing communications are relatively more asymmetric, free-flowing, unbalanced, and irregular. The research suggests that these characteristics reinforce consumers’ beliefs about the performance of hedonic-positioned brands.

As Affonso explains, “We find that visual design characteristics that encourage structured perceptions of visual communications, such as high proximity, high similarity, and symmetry, can reinforce beliefs about utilitarian-positioned brand performance. On the other hand, visual design characteristics that encourage unstructured perceptions of visual communications, such as low proximity, low similarity, and asymmetry, can reinforce beliefs about hedonic-positioned brand performance. These reinforcements occur because structure and lack of structure have specific associations that consumers use to make inferences.”

These suggestions are supported by a series of carefully designed experiments, both in the lab and in the field, and an analysis of industry data. First, in a large-scale field experiment when a perfume was positioned as utilitarian (“Long-lasting. Great for work and everyday occasions”), consumers were more likely to click on the advertisement depicting the perfume with a visual design perceived as more structured than its unstructured counterpart. When the perfume was positioned as hedonic (“Delightful. Great for special and fun occasions”), consumers were more likely to click on the advertisement depicting the perfume with a visual design perceived as more unstructured than its structured counterpart.

Second, when consumers made choices considering functional goals (such as choosing a restaurant that provides a fast and reliable experience), they were more likely to pick a restaurant perceived as structured. However, when the choice involved hedonic goals (such as choosing a restaurant providing an entertaining and exciting experience) they were likely to pick the option perceived as unstructured. Importantly, the research finds that these effects, across a variety of visual marketing communications, induce a structured versus unstructured perception in different ways.

Finally, for brands perceived as more utilitarian, structured perceptions are associated with greater financial brand valuation and customer-based brand equity than unstructured perceptions. The opposite is true for brands perceived as more hedonic.

“Our research offers actionable insights for marketers and visual design specialists working with design, advertising, social media communications, visual merchandising, and the appearance of retail environments. Specifically, the findings suggest that perceptual structure can be used as an efficient marketing communication tool. And it can encourage consumers at the point of purchase, being a relatively costless way to reinforce brand positioning,” says Janiszewski.

Lessons for Chief Sales Officers

• Brands may want to consider using design elements that encourage structured/unstructured perceptions of logos, products, product packaging, and retail store design if their brand is primarily associated with utilitarian/hedonic benefits.
• The implications extend to many other visual marketing communications, including print advertisements, website layouts, and app user interfaces. Marketers can take advantage of our findings and anticipate the consequences of key visual design decisions.
• Brands could benefit in the long term from shifting the structure of their visual marketing communications to align with their brand positioning.