Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

They’re goals.

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

People often limit their creativity by continually adding new features to a design rather than removing existing ones

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.

Using a six-point “hexagon action” model to deal with a complex world helps leaders focus and prioritize their work.

Corporate marketing doesn't give LI enough love - here are some tips to up your game

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.

Here’s an activation you can deploy that has been proven successful in-market, with single and double-digit sales increases for billion-dollar brands.

Digital business transformation is akin to permanent disruption, a self-imposed regimen that recognizes transformation not as a one-and-done endeavor but

Avoiding bad decisions is just as important as making good ones. Knowing the warning signs and having a set of rules for your decision-making process limits the amount of luck you need to get good outcomes.

In Making Great Strategy, Stanford b-school professors Jesper Sørensen and Glenn Carroll bridge the gap between abstract strategic visions and executable plans.

Many of us are reading more than usual these days – perhaps one of the scarce positive aspects of the COVID crisis. For business readers seeking Profound and actionable business advice for Covid-driven challenges.

Use this step-by-step guide and internal communication strategy template to take the stress out of your next internal communications project.

Want people to share your idea or products? Then make sure it pushes one of these emotional buttons.

Researchers ran 60 billion simulations to identify when the risk pays off.

At the end of the day, strategy is the art of getting other people to do something. In the pursuit of that, narrative (call it ‘storytelling’ if you really must) is the strategist’s tool. Strategy is narrative.

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.

It took me a minute to realize that this article on how to help your employees to own your corporate strategy is actually an employer brand article in reverse. That is, rather than explaining what employer brand is, it focuses on the fact that a strategy that isn't embraced and implemented by engaged staff is really just a good idea and little more. The article suggests making strategy communication a two-way street and asking for staff to commit to the strategy. Sounds great but if you have two identical companies differentiated by the first having a strong employer brand, you can connect your corporate strategy more easily to understanding what your staff expects to get out of working there far more than the company without a strongly held brand. In a company with different micro-cultures, how do you connect a single strategy to all of them? You'll have to go team to team, culture to culture, doing the hard retail sales work to make a connection. In a company with a strong brand, all those micro-cultures have already found a way to localize your core brand. It's like all those disparate audience are already hard-wired to understand the strategy because they are all aligned to a common set of concepts.

Amazon, the 80-ton six-armed gorilla in any conversation, has been quietly shifting it's MBA recruiting strategy away from "pick a few schools and camp there" to "use digital to cherry-pick talent from more schools," according to the WSJ. Two takeaways to consider. First is the obvious one: the world has been pushing students to be more open to digital-first relationships rather than face-to-face ones that students respond more strongly to. Students have been pushing back, but it looks like Amazon is going to be the one to change the conversation again and make digital recruiting more "normal." The second takeaway is that we may be seeing the end of the "top school" hegemony. There is simply too much competition from too many companies to recruit from top schools, so unless you're a FB/G/A/Amazon, you can't expect to get anything but table scraps. So maybe it's time to target top talent at second and third-tier schools rather than spend huge amounts of cash to attract also-rans at top schools.

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.

A lot of very smart people I read were talking about an article that came out from Marc Andreessen (co-writer of Mosaic browser, and all-around smart VC guy) saying that now was the time to build. The argument is obvious: when things are down, smart money takes the opportunity to surf the new wave of change, and the only way to be ready for that wave is to have the idea/business/product/model/function started before the water swells.

We don't talk about corporate comms much (well... we complain about it sometimes, but that doesn't count). Hubspot has a nice writeup on how to level-up your corporate comms strategies. What? You didn't know you were in the corporate comms business? You think someone else does that? Yeah, you're going to be far more effective at building internal allies and advocates once you learn to lean into the corp comms stuff.

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?"