Audiobooks by Mike Parson

BRANDING PSYCHOLOGY: How brand provides intangible benefits overshadowing its tangible benefits

Numerous studies have shown that people buy feelings and experiences, not things. When you see a cute puppy, certain hormones fill your brain, becoming loving and affectionate. You don't care about the exact hormone process in your brain, but the puppy certainly makes you feel good. An intense psychological component exists in marketing a business or creating a successful brand. In essence, branding is designing a campaign to induce customer popularity and loyalty. To do this, one must understand the audience's psychology, allowing you to entice consumers who will mentally connect and relate to your brand's identity. Every consumer has an entirely separate and possibly stressful life outside your market. Busy lives mean that consumers do not have the mental bandwidth to consider every product on the market. To establish a long-lasting relationship, the brand provides intangible benefits that sometimes overshadow tangible ones. It is getting tougher with the explosion of communication technology, where people stay connected to update information. The emergence of branding topics has been witnessed with the blast of branding categories that apply to manufacturing and service industries. A brand is a logo, symbol, name, or design that creates a trademark or signature that distinguishes goods or services. Building a strong provides additional value that looks simple from the customer's point of view but is a great deal for a firm to survive the stiff competition in the market. The brand is a critical element to superior quality products, especially in the saturated market; hence, a trusted brand must satisfy customer needs and deliver excellent quality on attributes that matter to customers, low cost of quality, overall cost leadership, and effective positioning.

Mike Parson (Author), Hadi Hajjar (Narrator)

Audiobook

Brand Strategies

A brand strategy is a long-term plan for developing a successful brand to achieve specific goals. A well-defined and executed brand strategy affects all aspects of a business. It is directly connected to consumer needs, emotions, and competitive environments. Brand strategy defines rules and guidelines on how, what, where, when, and to whom you communicate your brand messages. A well-defined brand strategy leads to a consistent brand message, a solid emotional connection with customers, and higher brand equity. We live in a world driven by perception. Brands represent customers’ opinions of a company’s credibility, products, reputation, and customer experience. A brand strategy is essential because it clarifies the competitive landscape, market position, and customer expectations. This information is critical to developing effective marketing strategies and fine-tuning marketing messages to maximize your competitiveness and build strong brands. Branding significantly enhances the brand’s market performance and profitability by improving name recognition and building credibility and trust. As branding becomes ubiquitous in the 21st century, companies strive to transcend their brands into higher economic offerings that provide renewed sources of differentiation. This has resulted in brand-based experiences.

Mike Parson (Author), Don T Buy (Narrator)

Audiobook

George Washington And The American Revolutionary War

Despite having little practical experience in managing large, conventional armies, Washington proved to be a capable and resilient leader of the American military forces during the Revolutionary War. While he lost more battles than he won, Washington employed a winning strategy. One element of Washington’s strength was his sternness as a disciplinarian. The army was continually dwindling and refilling, politics largely governed the selection of officers by Congress and the states, and the ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-paid forces were often half-prostrated by sickness and ripe for mutiny. At the same time, the commander-in-chief won the devotion of many of his men through his earnestness in demanding better treatment for them from Congress. He complained of their short rations, declaring once that they were forced to “eat every kind of horse food but hay.” He built on the reputation he had garnered during the War for Independence as the personification of American virtue and liberty, providing a potent national symbol with which newly unified peoples of different states could identify.

Mike Parson (Author), Don T Buy (Narrator)

Audiobook

Jfk

Fifty years after the assassination, JFK continues to be the “most popular past president,” with nearly 85 percent of all Americans polled saying that they approved of Kennedy’s job performance. Kennedy, despite his quirks, remains one of America’s best-known and well-liked leaders. Many Americans responded to Kennedy, whose idealized image seemed to reflect their hopes and dreams. He won the presidency by a narrow margin, showing that nearly half the voters were unmoved by Kennedy’s idealism, youth, and promise. Television accentuated Kennedy. His image was often exaggerated but was broadly representative of his many attributes. Kennedy was the nation’s first president to understand the power of imagery. He harnessed the power of media and television to cultivate clear images and sustain popular appeal. Kennedy and others in the White House consciously worked to create positive ideas that portrayed the President’s youthful appearance and his wholesome appeal as a faithful husband and loving father. Many people identified with idealized images of Kennedy, who seemed like a picture of robust health and an ideal family man. Behind the scenes, though, a different idea has emerged over time of an enigmatic, complex man—a human capable of both selfless and selfish motives and actions. This book assesses both the positive and negative dimensions of the Kennedy legacy to provide a fresh perspective. This book will survey John F. Kennedy’s life and highlight some images associated with his rise to the presidency. It will summarize Kennedy’s famous vision to understand why some Americans embraced or rejected the President’s idea. The final chapter will discuss the impact of the assassination and emergence of the Camelot myth and the legacy of the Kennedy presidency.

Mike Parson (Author), Chloe Jacobson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Viking Myth

Vikings are a part of everyday life. Their omnipresence is remarkable for people who lived around a thousand years ago. They are a marketing device, a tourist attraction, and a subject on the national curriculum. They appear at museums, Viking festivals, comic strips, films, novels, and children's history books. They are a focus of academic controversy, with scholars waging an ongoing war over the proper interpretations of the Viking past. They lend themselves readily to use in constructing various national and regional identities. Vikings are a vibrant part of modern popular culture. Although the Viking Age ended nearly a millennium ago, Viking images are everywhere today, functioning as marketing devices, role models, and sources of regional/national pride and identity. This audiobook examines the causes of the Vikings' adoption as popular cultural icons and how Vikings are used. The book also turns to a chronological overview of political, literary, and archaeological developments that have influenced the evolution of Viking images.

Mike Parson (Author), Hadi Hajjar (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Montessori Toddlers

Maria Montessori, considered 'a citizen of the world,' as indicated on a commemorative plaque in Rome, is one of the most outstanding educators of the twentieth century. She was born in Chiaravalle, Italy, in 1870. In 1896, she became the first woman in Italy to become a physician. For many years, she worked with children with developmental disorders as part of her duties stemming from her appointment to the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Rome. Basing her approach to the education of the child's senses on the work of Froebel, Itard, and Seguin, Montessori developed unique materials for the children to use. She came to believe that their learning could be immensely ameliorated with a particular educational program, and, indeed, it was. During the ten years after her graduation, Montessori was also involved in her private practice with hospitals around Rome, her lectureships at different women's colleges, and eventually, her Professorship in Anthropology. Later years, Montessori would comment on how her life, in its entirety, was an example of her principle that 'the preparations of life are indirect' and that one must be 'obedient to events.' As her biographer, Standing became acquainted with Maria Montessori in 1921 and continued contacting her until her passing in 1952, collaborating with her in writing articles, teaching in schools, and assisting her in teacher training. He reflected on how Montessori's first part of her career built her later work with children. Following is a classic example of her life's mission. Montessori's interventions, at that time, were 'anything but scientific'; however, what someone else may have considered insignificant, Montessori deemed necessary. For example, she noticed that the children would repeat an exercise many times over, for no apparent external reason, before they would be finished working with the material, at an age when adults expected children to have a brief attention span. During this time, they demonstrated

Mike Parson (Author), Ashton Haugen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Successful Aging

The substantial increases in life expectancy at birth achieved over the previous century, combined with medical advances, escalating health and social care costs, and higher expectations for older age, have led to international interest in promoting a healthier old age and how to age 'successfully.' Changing patterns of illness in old age, with morbidity being compressed into fewer years and effective interventions to reduce disability and health risks in later life, make the goal of aging successfully more realistic. Most health care provided in the developed world goes to those aged 65 years or above. The medical model is so dominant that few health professionals are aware of psychosocial aging. The result focuses on the burden of old age, the decline, and the body's failure. This negative perspective inevitably dominates consultations between doctors and patients. However, there is ample evidence that many older adults regard themselves as happy and well, even with a disease or disability.

Mike Parson (Author), Mary Johnson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Spanish Influenza Of 1918

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic moved worldwide in three waves, infecting up to 500 million people and causing over 40 million deaths. Several things tended to be present in areas that ended the pandemic with lower mortality rates than average. These include low rates of poverty, widespread access to healthcare, well-funded and general public health measures, and well-managed record keeping. Areas that ended the pandemic with high mortality rates tended to lack the above – they had high rates of poverty, limited access to healthcare, public health measures were unfunded or ineffective, and recordkeeping and communication were unreliable or unclear. It is essential to learn from the success and mistakes of nations passed so that we as a planet are better prepared for any pandemics that should arise in the future. Preparing involves high vaccination rates, fighting drug-resistant pathogens, and working to lower global poverty.

Mike Parson (Author), Ashton Haugen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Branding Psychology

Numerous studies have shown that people buy feelings and experiences, not things. When you see a cute puppy, certain hormones fill your brain, becoming loving and affectionate. You don't care about the exact hormone process in your brain, but the puppy certainly makes you feel good. There is an intense psychological component to marketing a business or creating a successful brand. In essence, branding is designing a campaign to induce popularity and loyalty among customers. To do this, one must understand the audience's psychology, giving you the ability to entice consumers who will mentally connect and relate to your brand's identity. Every individual consumer has an entirely separate and possibly stressful life outside your market. Busy lives mean that consumers do not have the mental bandwidth to consider every product on the market. To establish a long-lasting relationship, the brand provides intangible benefits that sometimes overshadow the tangible benefits. It is getting tougher with the explosion of communication technology, where people stay connected to update information. The emergence of branding topics has been witnessed with the blast of branding categories that apply to manufacturing and service industries. The brand is a logo, symbol, name, or design that creates a trademark or signature that distinguishes goods or services. Building a strong provides additional value that looks simple from the customer's point of view but is a great deal for a firm to survive the stiff competition in the market. The brand is a critical element to superior quality products, especially in the saturated market; hence, a trusted brand must satisfy customer needs and deliver excellent quality on attributes that matter to customers, low cost of quality, overall cost leadership, and effective positioning.

Mike Parson (Author), Hadi Hajjar (Narrator)

Audiobook