Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

#strategy
Strategy needs good words
Strategy needs good words
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.
·www-martinweigel-org.cdn.ampproject.org·
Strategy needs good words
10 Strategies For A Brand Turnaround | Branding Strategy Insider
10 Strategies For A Brand Turnaround | Branding Strategy Insider
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.
·brandingstrategyinsider.com·
10 Strategies For A Brand Turnaround | Branding Strategy Insider
Integrating Brand Strategy And Positive Psychology | Branding Strategy Insider
Integrating Brand Strategy And Positive Psychology | Branding Strategy Insider
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.
·brandingstrategyinsider.com·
Integrating Brand Strategy And Positive Psychology | Branding Strategy Insider
Turning Brand Managers into Anthropologists | by dr. aybil göker | Medium
Turning Brand Managers into Anthropologists | by dr. aybil göker | Medium
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.
·aybil-55959.medium.com·
Turning Brand Managers into Anthropologists | by dr. aybil göker | Medium
How to help your employees own your strategy
How to help your employees own your strategy
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.
·strategy-business.com·
How to help your employees own your strategy
Amazon Changes the Way It Recruits M.B.A.s - WSJ
Amazon Changes the Way It Recruits M.B.A.s - WSJ
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.
·wsj.com·
Amazon Changes the Way It Recruits M.B.A.s - WSJ
8 Types Of Brand Extension | Branding Strategy Insider
8 Types Of Brand Extension | Branding Strategy Insider
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.
·brandingstrategyinsider.com·
8 Types Of Brand Extension | Branding Strategy Insider
IT'S TIME TO BUILD - Andreessen Horowitz
IT'S TIME TO BUILD - Andreessen Horowitz
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.
·a16z.com·
IT'S TIME TO BUILD - Andreessen Horowitz
How to Improve Your Corporate Marketing Strategies [+ Examples]
How to Improve Your Corporate Marketing Strategies [+ Examples]
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.
·blog.hubspot.com·
How to Improve Your Corporate Marketing Strategies [+ Examples]
5 Reasons Empathy Drives Business Success | Branding Strategy Insider
5 Reasons Empathy Drives Business Success | Branding Strategy Insider
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?"
·brandingstrategyinsider.com·
5 Reasons Empathy Drives Business Success | Branding Strategy Insider