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Employee Experience and Engagement
  • Customer Experience, Employee Experience

A 5-Star Employee Experience Will Build Customer Loyalty

Five insights for building a purpose-driven, engaged workforce that delivers exceptional brand culture and employee engagement.
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Managing your customer experience
  • Customer Experience

Managing Your Customer Experience: The 7 Deadly Sins

Caffeine's guide to managing your customer experience and the CX mistakes that hold the greatest potential to derail all other customer experience efforts.
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  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Brands

John Lewis – the future of brand strategy starts now

John Lewis boss Peter Ruis has made headlines by announcing that ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ is back – this time with AI helping to match its prices to those at 25 major retailers – including, for the
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Holiday reading
  • General

Holiday Reading – a tale of the unexpected

From business insights to captivating novels, five books worth packing this summer for your holiday reading.
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brand purpose and brand strategy
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Why you exist is important but what you do is vital – getting brand purpose right

Brand purpose drives companies beyond profit. Patagonia focuses on environmental action, and LEGO fosters creativity, leading both to lasting success and positive impact.
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AI Chatbots
  • Customer Experience

AI chatbots have a customer experience problem

What are the critical elements missing from the AI chatbot experience? And how are companies like Lemonade setting the standard?
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image showing retaining employees
  • Employee Experience

Retaining Employees In The Era Of Well-Being

“Retaining employees is more cost-effective than recruiting.” A message we consistently see, and rightly so. But this is nothing new...
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  • Leadership

Hate presenting? Get over yourself

Hate presenting? Learn how to deliver impactful presentations without anxiety or sleepless nights.
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Employee Experience - Young people interviewing for job
  • Employee Experience

The employee experience starts with recruitment – and it needs a revamp.

A positive recruitment experience here can turn candidates into advocates, even if they don’t get the job. Anonymous applications, rigorous entry tests, and lack of feedback? Is it time for a change?
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Luxury Brands
  • Brands, Customer Experience

Luxury Brands: Combating the ‘Fast Experience’

As luxury brands reinvent retail in the age of fast fashion, here are strategies to combat the fast experience & create unforgettable in-store experiences.
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Customer Experience
  • Customer Experience

Customer Experience – it’s not worth the effort…is it?

Is poor Customer Experience costing your business? Learn why prioritising CX is a business imperative and how to stand out from the competition.
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employee experience - people at work clapping and smiling
  • Employee Experience

Five strategies to enhance the employee experience and accelerate organisational success

Just because something is common sense, doesn’t mean its common practice. Five key strategies that can accelerate your employee experience.
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Customer Experience image
  • Customer Experience

The Invisible Cost of Spam: Eroding Brand Reputation and Customer Experience

Shaun Smith explores how spam undermines customer experience, highlighting its detrimental impact on brand reputation in today’s digital environment. Spam, in its many forms, from unsolicited emails to intrusive ads, not only disrupts the customer’s digital

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hotel christmas animation
  • Customer Experience

No room at the inn? A festive look at some hotel horrors

Ahead of 'frantic Friday', Louisa Clarke shares her top 5 hotel horrors to avoid this Christmas
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employee - 'what matters most to UK employees today'
  • Employee Experience, In the News

Caffeine/Savanta 2023 Employee Pride Survey: The Key Findings

Uncover the stark realities of the UK employment landscape in our second annual Employee Pride survey. With only 21% of employees willing to recommend their workplace, a drastic drop from 30% a year ago, it's time
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Employee Experience Amazon Strike - sign saying 'we deserve fair play'
  • Brands, Employee Experience, In the News

Amazon’s Employee Experience: Navigating Tricky Waters 

Amazon staff have announced strike action over pay next month, hitting Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
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customer experience
  • Customer Experience

New Energy: The rise of the distinctive customer experience

Customers are expecting more of energy companies today than ever before. What does it take to create the building blocks of a great customer experience?
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Positive Employee Experience
  • Employee Experience

The power of a distinctive employee experience: Stand out and stand firm

An employee experience should be built on what matters most to employees, align with the business purpose, and support the delivery of the desired customer experience. But to truly bring it to life, there’s another key
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Employee Experience image
  • Customer Experience

The Magic Ingredient: Harnessing effort to create a Memorable Customer Experience

Shaun Smith looks at how the principle 'Effort Heuristic' can help your customer experience stand out from the crowd.
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Robots working on laptops showing the Impact of AI on Customer Service
  • Customer Experience

The Transformative Impact of AI on Customer Service

With the announcement that BT plans to replace 10,000 jobs with AI, Shaun Smith looks at how brands can embrace AI technology and still enhance their customer service.
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Waves coming over the word entrepreneurship to interpret Lessons Learned the Hard Way
  • Inspiration

10 Lessons Learned the Hard Way

When starting a new business, there's a thin line between success and failure. Erik Bergman gives his 10 mistakes to avoid.
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Paphos, Cyprus - December 19, 2013 Heap of Mars, Snickers, Milky Way, Galaxy, Bounty and Maltesers Teasers chocolate candies. All candies manufactured by Mars Incorporated. Studio shot - Brand-led Business Strategy
  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Brands, In the News

The purpose of chocolate: Why laughing at purpose misses the point

The idea that purpose and profit are entirely unrelated is nonsense. Your brand purpose is an articulation of what your brand is here to do.
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Your Twitter is not your Brand. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brands

Your Twitter is not your Brand

Brand loyalty is real. It always has been and always will be. Every time you receive your monthly social messaging plan from your social media manager, ask yourself if the messages going out will incentivise, maintain
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John Lewis' Brand: Back to the future? Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brands, In the News

John Lewis’ Brand: Back to the future?

The retail landscape has changed dramatically, and John Lewis has faced increasing challenges to remain competitive. In our new blog, Shaun Smith outlines his recommendations for the brand.
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The myth: branding is just about the logo and advertising. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brands

The myth: branding is just about the logo and advertising

For the modern brand builder in a multichannel world in which people are craving authentic and engaging experiences and not just entertaining advertising, remembering to build your brand on everything you say and everything you do
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The secret to ensuring your customer experience strategy becomes a reality. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Customer Experience

The secret to ensuring your customer experience strategy becomes a reality

When implementing a CX strategy, it often requires the culture to become customer-centric and able to ‘Stand Firm’ in the face of competing pressures and agendas. Without the full sponsorship of the CEO and the board,
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The Myth: A strong brand can be used to prop up a bad business. Post, by The Caffeine partnership.
  • Brands, Customer Experience, Employee Experience

The myth: A strong brand can be used to prop up a bad business

Brands are often credited with powers they simply don’t have. Chief among them is the idea that, a strong brand (or strong advertising) could mask the deficiencies of a bad business, acting as a sticking plaster
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  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Fourth year in a row: The UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2023 by the FT

Caffeine has been awarded The UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2023 by the FT for the fourth year in a row.
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Purpose, Pay or Perks? What Matters Most to UK Employees? Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Employee Experience

Purpose, Pay or Perks? What Matters Most to UK Employees

With hundreds of thousands of workers striking over disputes in pay and conditions across the UK, Caffeine discusses the need for businesses to refocus.
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Good News in Bad Times. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brands

Good News in Bad Times

Brand Trust: Brands, just like people, get things wrong. Yet mistakes can actually increase brand loyalty if the brand humanizes itself and takes steps to correct them.
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  • Customer Experience

How to beat a bear market? Invest in your customers.

We see many examples of companies panicking and cutting costs haphazardly, so here are our top tips for managing in a recession and emerging even stronger.
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What's in a name? Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brands, Customer Experience

What’s in a name?

If you want to change your fortunes then you need to change your behaviour, not your brand name. Understand what your customers expect and invest in creating a great customer experience.
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This Christmas, be a Muppet. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Inspiration

This Christmas, be a Muppet

It’s perhaps overlooked that Kermit is a businessman – or businessfrog. He leads a team which is as about as diverse as you could imagine. What’s more, he’s constantly fighting crises on every front, to keep
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Brands Behave or Beware. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Customer Experience

Brands Behave or Beware

Brands seem to struggle with striking a balance between bad behaviour and virtue-signalling. You don't need to be a saint, just have a moral compass.
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We need to talk about the 'C' word. Post by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Customer Experience

We Need to Talk About the ‘C’ Word

The word ‘customer’ has moved from the fringes of the housing sector to the forefront of its marketing communications.
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two people speaking to an audience at a CAFFE!NE event.
  • Employee Experience, Leadership

What Matters Most to UK Employees? Survey Launch

With a ‘war for talent’ in almost every sector in the UK, businesses should be doing everything they can to attract, develop and retain people.
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Getting the measurement right. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Customer Experience

Getting the measurement right

As customer experience consultants it is great to see leading companies, SMEs and start-ups making CX a non-negotiable foundation of their business operations.
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Do you deserve to be followed? Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Employee Experience, Leadership

Do you deserve to be followed?

“Why should anyone be led by you?” was the chilling headline of a McKinsey award-winning Harvard Business Review article (subsequently becoming a book) in 2000. Fast forward two decades and perhaps that headline should now be,
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Being The Brand. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brands, Customer Experience, Employee Experience

Being The Brand

When the strain upon the operations of a company is too much for the system itself, what hope is there for a brand to inspire or maintain customer loyalty? The last line of defence for the
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Richer Experiences Make Richer Brands. Post by, The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Customer Experience, Employee Experience

Richer Experiences Make Richer Brands

There’s no such thing as the perfect brand. However, our decades working with leading brands to help them with their brand experience, have shown us that there are clear winners across every market and in every
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The Employer Brand. Post by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Employee Experience

The Employer Brand

Work culture is a vital ingredient to sustaining success, but how does a brand create and then sustain that culture? The answer is through creating an employee experience that mirrors the customer experience. Ronan Dunne, former
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Employee Loyalty = Customer Loyalty. Post by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Employee Experience

Employee Loyalty = Customer Loyalty

It is a common myth across the business community that brands have a lot to do with what happens on the outside of a business and not very much to do with what goes on inside.
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Good PR for your HR won't compensate for a poor Customer Experience. Post, by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Good PR for your HR won’t compensate for a poor Customer Experience

This month, telecoms giant Virgin Media O2, announced that it would offer staff free gender transition therapy in order to provide “support and allyship to people from marginalised communities”. Unfortunately for the customers of Virgin Media
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Four questions to ask your agency in the pitch, post by The Caffeine Partnership.
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Four questions to ask your agency in the pitch

Earlier this month the extraordinary case of a fake marketing agency was the feature of a BBC expose. Mad Bird was created entirely online, the people hired were not salaried, had never worked with each other
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Thomas J. Williams Radio Station, a component in his brand
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

What are the Key Components of a Brand?

This year is the 100th anniversary of the first radio commercial. In the succeeding century, business marketing has evolved to almost unrecognizable levels and brands, in particular, have transformed their role and importance. But though there
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FT UK's Leading Management Consultants 2022 - The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Customer Experience

What Matters Most

Our work to help clients to identify and deliver what matters most has led to Caffeine partner Smith+Co being awarded The UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2022 by the FT. This is the 3rd year in a
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Brand purpose, BS detector from The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

The purpose of brands

“Brand purpose truly is a bunch of crap, because it’s disingenuous. You’re saying, ‘My purpose is to make the world a better place’. No, your purpose is to make money". So said YUM! brands CMO Ken
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Benefits of talking to strangers post by The Caffeine Partnership
  • Customer Experience, Employee Experience

‘There are no customers in the office’ – the benefits of talking to strangers.

Fear of rejection stops us from making the first move. It stops us from speaking to people we don’t know. But think about the first time you met your best friend, your life partner, your long-standing
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The time is now to grow your business with The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

The time is NOW

Learn how 175 year old law firm William Fry acted like a start up to launch two brand new propositions in ten weeks.
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Delivering great results for your business growth with The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

How to act like a start-up and deliver a GREAT! result

Over the past few months, we’ve been working with a group of highly successful entrepreneurs and investors, on the creation of a new channel brand to support the launch of the UK’s most exciting free movie

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Brand purpose by The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Great brand stories have one purpose

This week The Story Museum opened in Oxford. A wonderful and inventive experience for all ages, it especially focuses on young people, encouraging them to explore the joy of storytelling. Oxford is a city of stories.

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abrdn logo on The Caffeine Partnership website
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Abrdn stands out but will it stand up?

This week an eye-catching new brand identity was launched - eye-catching both because it changed the name of an organisation that had existed for over 100 years, and because it happened in the normally conservative sector
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Man by van showing brand purpose
  • Customer Experience, Employee Experience

Being human will be at the heart of brand purpose

We are entering a new era, one that will require new approaches to marketing and customer experience, but it will go way beyond that. It will challenge the very way we think about brands and corporations.

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It pays to be bold – how investing in brand purpose creates rapid returns, brand-led business strategy
  • Brand-led Business Strategy, Employee Experience

It pays to be bold – how investing in brand purpose creates rapid returns

We help companies build a brand and customer experience that reflects the scale and ambitions of the business and helps simplify increasing complexity as they grow. These are companies that have a logo and a ‘look’

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“The Biden brand is suited to the moment”: The Power of the Personal Brand post by The Caffeine partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

“The Biden brand is suited to the moment”: The Power of the Personal Brand

More than any previous political event, the 2020 US Presidential Election was a battle between two brands. Trump and Biden offered very different visions of the future, represented by two distinct personalities making succinct promises. Each

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Congratulations to Rita Clifton CBE post by The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Congratulations to Rita Clifton CBE

We are delighted that Rita Clifton CBE has been appointed the Deputy Chair of John Lewis Partnership. It’s a perfect match. Rita is a great believer in purpose-led, values-driven brands which empower their people to deliver

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Depp & Dior: A Savage Arrangement blog by The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Depp & Dior: A Savage Arrangement

Last weekend, Caffeine’s Managing Partner Simon Bailey contributed to a Sky News piece on Dior’s decision to continue to employ Johnny Depp as celebrity endorser of its Sauvage fragrance, despite a UK court finding it ‘substantially

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Covid notice at The Caffeine Partnership, London, UK
  • Customer Experience

Why COVID is not a valid excuse (and other musings from a crazy year) Part Two

In my last blog I reflected on how customer experience has been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis and which brands are succeeding in spite of it. One of the hardest hit sectors in the is the

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“We’re just about delivering happiness” Tony Hsieh Partnership with The Caffeine Partnership
  • Customer Experience

“We’re just about delivering happiness” Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh, 46, the former CEO of Zappos, died on Friday from head injuries sustained during a house fire whilst he was visiting friends in Connecticut. He was an inspirational thinker who will be sadly missed.

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Covid notice at The Caffeine Partnership, London, UK
  • Customer Experience

Why COVID is not a valid excuse (and other musings from a crazy year) Part One

It has been a crazy year. Smith+Co were honoured by being awarded ‘UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2020’ following independent research by Statista. That was a great start! We followed it up by merging with Caffeine, the

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On Purpose Book Mock Up, Business book
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

On Purpose Interactive Assessment Tool

Welcome to the On Purpose Interactive Assessment Tool. You can use this tool to measure how purposeful your business is. It’s also a chance to find out how your brand compares to the brands featured in
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Employee Experience Survey Image for The Caffeine Partnership
  • Employee Experience

The Employee Experience Measurement Survey

The Employee Experience Measurement Survey is a simple, quick tool to help you identify what helps or hinders your organisation in delivering a distinctive customer experience.
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Jim Henson Memorial, be a muppet by The Caffeine partnership, brand-led business strategy
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

This Christmas, be a Muppet

The Muppet Christmas Carol is one of my favourite films. It’s a wonderful, irreverent, but faithful adaptation, in turns funny, moving and uplifting with some great songs along the way. The special guest star (Michael Caine)

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What’s the purpose of housing? post by The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

What’s the purpose of housing?

I recently attended the UK’s biggest conference on housing. Government, local governments, housing associations, developers, construction companies, outsourcing consultancies, mortgagers, homeless charities – they were all there. The Grenfell Tower disaster provided a tragic backdrop to

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Mankind is our business, brand-led business strategy by The Caffeine Partnership
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Mankind is our business – a lesson not just for Scrooge but for everyone

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and

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coffee beans
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

If the cap fits – the role of the trusted advisor

We see the year out – and what a year – in a fog of unreason and contrary forces: more rejection this week of the liberal establishment with the defeat by Italian voters of Matteo Renzi’s

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coffee beans
  • Brand-led Business Strategy

Dinner Party Shame: A story of Brand Pride

This week I’ve been a Dragon. It’s been fun. I’ve been part of a judging panel on a ‘Going Further’ competition where students from the 157 Group of Further Education Colleges pitch to redesign their brand

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Stimulating business.

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Purpose, Pay or Perks?
What Matters Most to Employees.

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