How to radically change your brand's relationship with the user: A companion piece to The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy.

Creativity is a valuable and sought-after skill in our ever changing, uncertain and unpredictable world. But I hear so many people telling me they are

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.

Adaptive marketing and psychographic branding?! Yup. It's time to raise your game, folks. As Seth Godin talks about, people don't want a 1/2" drill bit, or even a 1/2" hole to a screw. They want to be able to hang a picture to feel like they've accomplished something. Your employer branding will work if you can better define its meaning, and tailor it to different motivations.

You you content marketers and lovers of narrative-driven employer branding, have I got some gold for you... but I'll tell you more in a minute. That feeling, right there, where the writer yanks the rug out from under you and doesn't immediately satiate your curiosity? That's emotional power, something referred to as an "open loop," a glitch in your own cognition you can leverage to create more engagement and emotional connections with people.

What does it take to build a strong employer brand? Well, you need to know how to execute projects (tactical mind). You also need to be able to select and prioritize your projects (strategic mind), but theres something still missing. If you want your brand work to achieve maximum impact, you need to know how to tap into a third mind: the political mind. The Three Minds of Employer Branding over at ERE.

Here's some advanced brand thinking: Is there an opportunity for you to mix high and low culture ideas to give your message more meaning, more interest? This article over at HBR looks at examples of how super luxury brands co-op super-low status ideas without losing their high-status desirability. Why care? I was struck by the idea that high-status luxury isn't really luxury anymore. I can fabricate or recreate almost anything. Brands like Zara are built on making copies of high-end pieces at affordable prices in weeks. So how to stay high status? Show your high level of taste. Show that you can put a gas station potato chip on four-star meal. Show that you can pull it off. The lesson for you and I might be that we can open up the horizon to all sorts of new ideas for our branding is we have the style and taste to pull it off. Example? If I ran the brand for a fintech brand, I might feel boxed in by who the customer base is. If I provided loans as needed, I might feel weird about providing high end swag to prospects. Maybe we shouldn't exclude these ideas out of hand, but look for ways to mix things up. Because the knock on effect of mixing the two is how... surprising and interesting these hybrids end up appearing. And isn't attracting attention and interest sometimes the point?

You can't convince anyone of anything using only logic (see: reddit political forums, twitter political chats, et al). You need an emotional reaction, after which, the listener will find the logic to justify their new position. I ended up podcasting a bit about this idea, but here's a solid article if this is a subject that interests you.

Big Read of the Week: Employer brand walks a tightrope between reflecting what it and influencing it towards where it should be. To that end, we need to be a little big disruptive all the time. But the word "disruptive" tends to scare people (especially people in HR). Which is why I really enjoyed this article on how love (yes "love") can and should be used to empower your disruption strategy.

Branding Magazine says people see brands as people. For use, our brands ARE people. Which means that we need to be thinking psychologically about how our prospects see us.

You've heard of the five stages of grief, right? As we all do our best to come to terms with the new pandemic reality, these five steps might be a helpful guide to not only understanding our own feelings, but to understand how to position our messaging to employees. If you can tap into this model, you can come out with stronger employee engagement, which powers your own employer brand.