At first, this may sound paradox seeing as the internet offers dozens of possible ways for businesses to target and address potential customers, be it end customers (B2C) or business clients (B2B). Nevertheless, this applies to every organisation with a web connection resulting in an abundance of information for consumers to process. As described in the previous paragraph, this circumstance is overwhelming for people, but equally essential to businesses hoping to sell their products and services to consumers. So how do companies initially get to the point of sale with acquired customers? In short: brand awareness. Brand awareness can be defined as the degree to which consumers are able to remember and recognise a specific brand. In this context, the recognition of a brand does not necessarily include the remembrance of a brand name, but rather requires a minimum mental distinction of brand features in comparison to other similar brands. Putting brand awareness into context Brand awareness is a crucial strategic performance indicator for businesses as it plays an important role in the initialisation of a purchasing process. This is where consumer behaviour, the purchase decision funnel and the brand awareness set come into play. Consumer behaviour Consumer behaviour is concerned with studying how consumers, e.g. individuals, groups or organisations, make purchasing decisions based on emotional, behavioural and intellectual influences. Purchase decision funnel The purchase funnel is a model based on consumer behavioural studies which depicts the customer journey through different funnel stages before purchasing goods or services. This decision funnel is subcategorised into four phases: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. The Action phase which represents the actual purchase is strongly impacted by the three preceding phases which lead a consumer from brand awareness to brand desire. These steps are the crucial contact points for businesses to win over customers. Brand awareness set Typically, when the need to purchase a product or service arises, consumers consciously or unconsciously search their memories for any known brands, called the awareness set, which are then subdivided into suitable and unsuitable options depending on the extent to which these options satisfy the respective need at hand. Unsuitable brands move into the consumer's inept set, indifferent brands into the inert set and suitable brands into the evoked set. In cases that an insufficient number of evoked brands are accessible in the memory, external research, e.g. search engine queries, product/service comparison web pages, recommendations from friends and family, can be used to round off the purchasing decision. Brands that are then rejected make way for brands that are finally purchased. The goal for businesses is then to deliver an amazing product or service and provide an extraordinary experience to the customer to confirm his/her assumption that he/she bought the best option with the time and resources available. If this process is successful, companies will be able to complete the purchasing cycle by remaining the top-of-mind awareness brand which awards them the competitive edge needed for the next time the customer goes through the purchase decision funnel. The top-of-mind awareness concept refers to a brand coming to a consumer's mind first when thinking about a certain industry or product/service category. Levels of brand awareness There are different levels of brand awareness. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most desirable state of brand awareness is the top-of-mind awareness. This kind of brand awareness does not require any external impulses to recall a certain brand. One level of brand awareness is the unaided recall. Customers are able to recall a brand without any external inducement. Another level is the aided recall. A consumer will not be able to remember a brand without external help. A concrete stimulus needs to be deployed to prompt a consumer's brand awareness. Brand awareness survey Brand awareness is an important indicator in a world strongly impacted by online shopping as customers can't always test brands before deciding to purchase them unless they have been buying these brands habitually. After all the previous talk of what brand awareness is and how it is majorly important for businesses, it ultimately comes down to one question: how am I supposed to know consumers' brand awareness? The answer is simple: by asking them; and what better way to ask them than by conducting a brand awareness survey. LimeSurvey offers a Brand Awareness Survey Template which contains questions aimed at identifying the levels of brand awareness. Are consumers able to recognize a specific brand when asked to freely list brands based on certain product or service categories (unaided recall)? Are they able to recognize a specific brand when it is placed in a list including other brands (aided recall)? Which sources have lead consumers to specific brands? How familiar are specific brands, what is the consumer's purchasing behaviour and how does the consumer rate specific brands? Brand awareness is oftentimes a decisive factor when a consumer chooses to buy a certain product or service. Maintaining a top-of-mind awareness is crucial to spur growth, especially for online shops as a higher level of positive brand awareness can make up for the lack of being able to physically touch and examine a brand’s products or services. Conducting brand awareness surveys are a good way to start your brand awareness campaign.   If you want to give us feedback, comments or suggestions regarding our brand awareness survey template, feel free to send us an email.  

What is skip logic and branching and how does it work? Skip logic and branching is typically used to customise each respondent’s "journey" through a survey. It is in the nature of surveys to offer participants different answer options to choose from which directly affect the relevance of any subsequent questions. This is where skip logic and branching come in to increase the quality of experience for survey-takers.Broadly speaking, there are two types of survey participants: there are those who are genuinely interested or impacted by the survey topic and there are those who are motivated by incentives offered. Either way, people who decide to take a survey hope to capitalise on it, be it due to the gain of knowledge or a compensatory reward. In order to draw your own profit from conducting a survey, i.e. receiving meaningful and complete information from your respondents, you have to consider the "journey" for your participants to be just as important as the "destination". Essentially, this means that you apply targeting-like logic to determine which questions are displayed to a specific survey participant and which questions aren’t based on previously selected answers. By doing so, you individually eliminate all irrelevant questions and place the greatest importance on the needs and interests of your respondents.The consequence? You will avoid survey fatigue (i.e. any obstacles people face before and during your survey that will lead to bounce behaviour, in this case irrelevant survey content), increase response rates and receive higher data quality. Toggle table of contents Simply put, skip log and branching in LimeSurvey works in the following way: a survey participant selects a specific answer A1 to a question Q1. This answer A1 may logically render the following question Q2 irrelevant and may require skip logic to hide question Q2 and instead move straight on to question Q3. Here’s a simple example: if a participant answers ‘No’ in the first question, thereby making clear that he/she doesn’t own a pet, the second question on which type of pet the respondent owns is automatically rendered moot. If you don’t use skip logic and keep showing irrelevant questions like in the example, you risk exhausting and losing your participant which results in a loss of potentially valuable data.Whenever setting up a questionnaire, bear in mind to act on the maxim that people are always looking for a great experience, as it also applies to the participation process in a survey. Skip logic example survey Condition elements and how are they applied in LimeSurvey The LimeSurvey skip logic consists of specific elements/operators which define the requirements of any condition.The tested value is typically the initial question that triggers the integration of a condition. In the above example, the tested value could be the question ‘Do you own a pet?’ when setting up a condition for displaying the second question ‘What kind of pet do you own?’. Alternatively, you may choose survey participants attributes as the basis for a condition such as first/last name, email address, token, language code.The comparison operator, in our example equal, links the tested value and the comparison value to create an equation/inequation for the condition.Last, the comparison value marks the counterpart of the tested value, in this case the answer options ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, thereby completing the condition equation/inequation. Alternatively, you may select constants, specific questions and token fields as comparison values.Thus, we end up with the condition Only show question ‘What kind of pet do you own?’ if: ‘Do you own a pet?’ equals ‘Yes’. As a result, the question ‘What kind of pet do you own?’ will be skipped if the answer to the question ‘Do you own a pet?’ is ‘No’. Condition edit mask Discover basic and advanced logic-based conditions in LimeSurvey As already covered in the last paragraph, single conditions can be set up quite easily by choosing a previous question as well as the selection of a predefined answer and coupling these with a comparison operator.This method is especially useful for short surveys that have a rather simple structure with maximum two different question paths. Advanced tip: combine multiple conditions, either based on ... a single choice question: in this case you set up two or more conditions the way it was done for a single condition, based on two or more previous questions with their respective predefined answers. For example, if you ask the question ‘What kind of black pet do you own?’, conditions based on two different questions have to be created. This can be achieved by the example as follows: ‘Do you own a pet?’ equals ‘Yes’ and ‘What colour does your pet have?’ equals ‘Black’ or Multiple conditions based on single choice example Multiple conditions based on single choice conditioning a multiple choice question: in this case, within one of the conditions more than one answer option, i.e. multiple choices, can be selected when displaying the subsequent question. For example, if you ask the question ‘What kind of black and white pet do you own?’, conditions based on two different questions with potentially more than one answer option each have to be created. This can be achieved by the example as follows: ‘Do you own a pet?’ equals ‘Yes’ and ‘What colours does your pet have?’ equals ‘Black’ and ‘White’. Multiple conditions based on multiple choice example Multiple conditions based on multiple choice conditioning (1) A modification of the latter would be to re-phrase the initial question to ‘What kind of black or white pet do you own’ and allow for the multiple choice question ‘What colours does your pet have?’ to at least be answered with one of the options ‘Black’ or ‘White’ among other potential colours. Multiple conditions based on multiple choice conditioning (2) Advanced tip: combine multiple conditions, based on multiple questions. Within this constellation, you have to use scenarios. In the aforementioned conditional cases, there was always just one scenario as the default setting.If you have different question paths leading to the same question at a later stage of the survey process, these paths need to be equipped with scenarios. Let’s take the following example: the initial question Q1 is still ‘Do you own a pet?’. If the respondent answers ‘Yes’, it will lead him/her to question Q2 ‘Would you like to have a second pet?’. If the respondent answers ‘No’ instead, it will lead him/her to question Q3 ‘Would you like to have a pet?’. Subsequently, if Q2 and Q3 are each answered ‘Yes’ (for this case we will ignore the answer options ‘No’), respondents end up at the same question Q4 ‘Are you planning on buying a pet soon?’. In order to build this logic structure, Q4 requires the conditional scenario 1 (Q1 = Yes and Q2 = Yes) or scenario 2 (Q1 = No and Q3 = Yes). So, despite respondents taking different paths from the initial question on, they may end up at the same question at a later stage of the survey due to the creation of different scenarios. These scenarios are automatically set up to be mutually applicable to reach Q4, i.e. they are separated by an ‘OR’. Multiple conditions based on multiple branches Advanced tip: simply copy conditions to other questions to save time. This smart function is a great way to reduce laborious and time-consuming condition set-ups by providing the possibility to easily copy existing conditions to other questions that require the same skip logic. Access a question’s condition that you would like to copy, click the button ‘Copy conditions’ at the top of the page, check all (sub-)conditions you are looking to copy and enter the destination question to copy these selected conditions to. Copy conditions Benefits of LimeSurvey skip logic and branching As you can see, LimeSurvey’s skip logic and branching feature offers a complex, yet incredibly powerful set of functionalities to keep your survey lean and interesting for your participants. In this context, you may benefit from a variety of advantages: Reduce the amount of survey questions for the individual participant to answer Skip questions that add no value when presented to certain participants Keep your participants happier by making the survey quicker to answer and saving them precious time Consequently, increase your response rates Only receive completed surveys with relevant results that will benefit your statistics LimeSurvey offers all features to paid subscriptions as well as free users. Skip logic and branching is no exception here and can be used by anyone to add more intelligence to one’s survey structure.Give it a try and set up some basic questions and answers with our skip logic and branching! Simply click here to get started.If you want to learn more about skip logic and branching, simply visit our LimeSurvey manual.  

Employee trainings are programmes with a short-term learning goal to impart new knowledge and skills to staff to enable an immediate impact of the learning efforts. Employee developments are programmes with a long-term learning goal to promote employee growth and performance in future endeavours. The importance of employee training and development Training and developing employees is extremely important for organisations to remain competitive, i.e. to outperform competitor organisations with the help of highly skilled, productive staff. Furthermore, staff is supposed to be retained to avoid losing key employees and consequently valuable knowledge to competitor organisations. In recent decades, the organisational landscape has changed fundamentally due to technology and digitisation. This radical change will continue to shape the business context in the future. Training and development programmes will help keep employees up to date. The importance of training and development programmes manifests itself on two levels, the organizational and the employee level. Importance of training and development on the organizational level: Retaining high-performing key employees by presenting the prospect of promotions as a result of their skill advancement through training programmes Increasing profits and business growth by outperforming competition due to higher talent and productivity of staff Improving internal exchange of newly acquired knowledge due to spill-over effects in employee interaction Importance of training and development on the employee level: Increasing employee satisfaction and motivation by acquiring new knowledge and skills that are beneficial personally and professionally Increasing employee engagement and empowerment which drives better staff dynamics in terms of cooperation and productivity in their jobs Better organisational reputation in the eyes of employees for enabling personal development which in turn leads to better employer reviews and word-of-mouth recommendation If an organisation is able to master its training and development routine, it's looking at a win-win-situation that doesn’t merely improve the organisation's status quo, but also benefits staff. Microlearning as a means to sustainable development Microlearning is an approach that covers micro units, i.e. small amounts, of learning content, usually over a short-term period with regard to knowledge acquisition. This learning approach has been increasingly deployed by organisations as a reaction to a natural paradigmatic shift in learning and attention habits of human beings in a digitised world. Due to stronger mechanisation within the past decades, people have handed off a large amount of tasks to computers as these can handle repetitive tasks with more speed and efficiency. Furthermore, smartphone and tablet devices have made instant access to digital content on virtually any topic at any time of the day possible at the fingertips of the people. Peoples’ neurological systems have adapted to this easily accessible overload of information by an enhancement of the short-term memory and learning at the expense of long-term learning areas of the brain. Effectively, the effort to acquire and retain knowledge long-term exceeds the capabilities necessary to do so in the first place. Microlearning methods counteract this trend by offering short and highly specialised learning topics across all modern devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. This way, employees can learn flexibly whenever and wherever they want as well as more effectively by concentrating on a distinct and concise piece of content each time. Step-by-step guide to creating effective training programmes In order to develop training programmes that will lead to sustainable learning, videos, animations, quizzes or games can be used to trigger emotions in employees such as excitement, curiosity and ambition. In addition, getting employees to actively engage with the training content is important to improve the learning experience. In general, sustainable learning will work better if the motivation to acquire new knowledge and skills is intrinsically based as opposed to being extrinsically led by incentives and perks. Moreover, in order to determine the effectiveness of training and development programmes, accurate performance measurement needs to be ensured, i.e. evaluating the progress of training completion by employees. Software solutions for training and development courses Today’s organisational digital infrastructures make it easier than ever to create and conduct employee training and development programmes and courses with the help of e-learning platforms. Many platforms offer ready-to-use learning units and solutions within paid memberships and subscriptions. The advantage of these offers is the fast accessibility and applicability within an organisation when getting training and development programmes off the ground. Disadvantages of this approach are the large costs involved in such memberships, which often make it difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to afford. Using an online survey software tool such as LimeSurvey is a great alternative to set up and conduct training programmes as it offers flexible implementation of different media formats like videos and animations, images and texts as well as quizzes and tests. This applies to users with our without coding knowledge. Especially small and medium-sized organisations can benefit from the entirety of free features in LimeSurvey without the need for spending big budgets. Furthermore, its open source nature facilitates the setup and customisation of the training programme and its measurement tracking.