Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Brand revitalization requires finding and satisfying a new, important customer need. Brand success requires being the best at something relevant and

When the workers of the Norsk Hydro PVC plant in Stenungsund on the west coast of Sweden came to work in the early morning one day in 1996, a young man in In a brand crisis, break the pattern of perception in people's minds.

The day he walked into the San Francisco 49ers headquarters in 1979, Bill Walsh sported pressed khaki pants, neatly combed white hair and a professorial Creating a competitive advantage begins with a fundamental shift in brand strategy.

Learn how to create local employee stories that can support your global employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) from the Recruitment Marketing team at Philips.

I've always thought about building an Oblique Strategies deck for EB folks. What, you don't know what the OS cards are? Designed by Brian Eno (the guy who turned "alien" David Bowie into "genius" David Bowie), they are cards you select when you're stuck. Designed for musicians originally, they had instructions designed to spark thinking like "go to an extreme and work your way back" or "change instrument roles." Sometimes they were very... high-minded like "twist the spine" or "question the heroic approach." I love it because it assumes that the right answer is inside you already and you just need to clear out the clutter of your own mind to find it. Anyway, if you're stuck, here are 10 strategies to re-spark your thinking when trying to turn around your employer brand.

"Ryanair’s success is remarkably simple. It understands people, and what drives their decision making, better than almost any other company on the planet."

There's a whole movement on "positive psychology" (meaning: psychology focused less on "fixing" you and more on making you feel better) that branders can learn from. For example, people feel better when they have a reason for doing what they are doing (see: the old joke about two stone masons building walls, one of which sees themself building a cathedral). This doesn't mean you should over-index on "purpose," but rather on the work that is serving your purpose. That is, don't just shout about the mission-driven purpose, but remind people that the work itself has purpose.

Why should you think more like an anthropologist? Well, no brand can survive without feeling, sensing, and talking to their people. The anthropologist understands the development of humans in societies or cultures, which is what happens when people come together. That sounds like the sort of thing every employer brand pro should aspire to be.

"We have put together this curated collection of the best, most insightful articles of 2019, that focus on mastering branding as a strategic business tool."

Stronger businesses and brands – that’s our hope for every marketing oriented leader and professional that reads our insights on Branding Strategy

The phrase "recruiting through the op-ed pages" may becomes shorthand in my head for finding unique ways of getting your employer brand story out into the wild without using the "usual" channels.

Consumer brand folks spend a lot of time thinking about brand extension, taking a success in one product and extending it to more. There are eight defined ways of extending the brand, and while some of them don't obviously apply to EB'ers, there are some that will turn your gears quite a bit.

You might assume that HR is in the "people" business. That's partially true. They are on the rules side of people: what the staff can expect from leadership, what staff are allowed to do, arbitrating disagreements, etc. But HR isn't often in the "empathy business." And I would suggest that that's exactly what you do: understand why people like (and don't like working somewhere, extracting it, distilling it, reflecting it and amplifying it. So when I see articles about how businesses need to embrace empathy to succeed, I think, "How can EB'ers use this idea to make a bigger impact on the business?"

In a similar vein, here are the 16 rules for brand strategy. Yes, they are about consumer brand strategy, but you should be able to take rules like, Lead with the Story, Look for the Subtext, and Empathize with your [Candidate]. These are not the typical "rules" you've seen before. For example, I adore rules like Speak Your Secret Language and Create Tension. Author Jasmine Bina also runs one of my favorite podcasts, Unseen Unknown. All of her stuff is amazing.

I've talked before about how much I love Oblique Strategies and how I would one day write my own deck for employer brand (tangent: the above article, which you should read all the way through because it talks about the weird shit Brian Eno came up with while recording Bowie's "Heroes," starts with a quote that should be tattooed on our collective hands, "Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences." Anyway...), but this article does a pretty solid job listing 61 ways to differentiate a given brand. A great exercise would be to list all 61 (or maybe just 30) and then list all the ways you could differentiate your own employer brand with that strategy. Congrats, you now have a LOT of good ideas you didn't have before.

Connecting with consumers is the key skill essential for building stronger brand bridges. It requires an end-consumer orientation for evaluating14 considerations and questions that will help in building a successful strategy for your brand.

Brooks Brothers a brand that has lasted for two hundred and two years, and was floundering well before coronavirus hit may be finished. The pandemic gave The main reason for Brooks Brothers' demise is that the brand lost relevance. It lost touch with customers, their changing needs and changing tastes. What could they do to restore brand relevance?

Brands take time to fine-tune their position, to develop enough validating and confirming evidence to even be taken seriously. But all too often, employer branders have built something more flimsy than a true “brand,” find an “issue” and try to re-brand. So ask yourself: why are you re-branding?

I admit that when I read this article on “brand collaboration,” I couldn’t conceive of two employer brands collaborating and sharing ideas and identities. But then it hit me: Many of us have staff who have their own brands. Call them thought leaders or influencers, they are resources that you can use and support to drive your own brand. Like Michael Jordan and Nike, how are you going to collaborate your brands to mutual success?

Before I go any further, I must make an important distinction. This article concerns driving a brand's growth within an existing category. As such, it is Brands fighting for market share should keep these ten actions in mind.

There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?

What do doughnuts and tacos have to do with employer branding? You may be applying the wrong marketing and sales techniques to recruitment.

We always like to talk about engaging candidates, but… what constitutes “engagement?” An impression? A like? A click? Watching a video? Signing up for your newsletter (I won’t call it a talent “community” until you let members talk to each other)? How long does it take to become engaged in your brand? Perhaps we’re measuring the wrong thing. Rather than focus on an action, maybe engagement is a function of time and intensity.

Bryan Adams kicks his article off by saying, “talent acquisition professionals and employer brand leaders can often fall victim to an over-reliance on conventional thinking” so you knew I was going to mention this one. His call is to go beyond “typical employer branding” is music to my ears. It’s a call to stop being passive, to stop just focusing on polishing up and providing the “nicest” face on the company and taking a more active role in shaping the brand. Don’t tell stories, make stories. Love it.

Metrics, anyone? EB Rock star Shaunda Zilich writes up a nice piece on EB metrics. I was going to quibble with it until I realized that the best part of the article is unstated: Metrics are gibberish until you decide what your strategy is first. You can measure oodles of things and easily get batted around like a leaf on the wind unless you have clearly defined what you are trying to do and deciding the metrics on that. Once I saw that, I realized how great the article was.

I point this out not because you need to know it, but employer branders always need to have a full quiver of ways to explain what employer brand is (and isn’t), so here’s a solid article from South America on demystifying employer branding.

Building your EVP? While there’s no right way to go about it, if you are doing it quickly, simply and without any doubts, I promise that you’re doing it wrong. So how do you make better decisions in that kind of situation? Combine data with doubt.

Please ignore the ATROCIOUS acrostic used, but here’s a nice article to meditate on in terms of thinking about the trends we all face and how to leverage them to strengthen your brand next year.