Maybe I'm biased, but I love case studies and articles that show perfectionism actually limits the power of your brand. So embrace your flaws to maximize your brand's influence.

How can you start to spark a stronger brand culture (that you will eventually learn to tap into and take advantage of)? Here are some tips from the brand side.

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.

Myself, I don't get too wrapped up in scripting the brand experience, mostly because I don't know how much you can really script the brand experience. But if you need to get a handle on the idea, here's a nice write-up on how to script your own.

"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."

The assumption is that culture creates the brand, and I think that's true to an extent. Your brand is the intentional and judicious selection of traits and ideas that highlight your culture. But can you go the other way? That is, can you use the brand to change the culture? Great article on the chicken/egg situation and some great ideas on how you can make an impact on the culture.

Finally, if you're looking for a list of great brand articles to help you think bigger and bolder when you get the year kicked off right, here's a great one.

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

You know that my feeling is that the platonic ideal of employer brand isn't to be a silo, but rather a single perspective through a shared brand for the entire company. Ignoring how surprised I was that a marketing/branding magazine even know what employer brand was, here's a great article geared towards marketers on how to leverage a stronger employer brand.

The article itself sighs at yet another list of employer branding stats that you and I might find incredibly pedestrian, but having these kinds of things handy might help move that roadblock at work. Example: 91% of candidates seek out at least one online or offline resource to evaluate an employer’s brand before applying for a job.

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.

For the 1,142nd time: employer branding is in every aspect of your business, even offer letters. Indeed has some great ideas on how to make those offer letters better.

Branding Magazine takes a few steps back and asks, "what does brand success look like in 2020?" It's an interesting question for us employer branders, as many of us still have to explain our job and occasionally justify our existence (ugh). It's not a complex article, but might help you simplify your approach to what matters.

This one came out too late for my summery of brand trends, but here are five emerging brand trends for 2020. I heartily endorse their first trend that as more and more "authentic reviews" turn out to be fake, candidates will stop relying on review sites as much. At the very least, candidates will change how they interpret those reviews, which should impact your own review site strategy. (And here's early examples from the Washington Post: companies that sell fake people.) Also see the fifth prediction: People will pay more for brands with a human side. As the de facto owner of the human side of your corporate brand, this is where you can make a real impact.

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.

There are a lot of reasons you might communicate as to why someone should work for your company. But have you considered that they'd want to work here because you're a thought leader? Here are some guidelines to consider when building out your thought leadership connected to your brand.

Joel Cheesman of Ratedly has a nice write-up on employer brand that leans heavily on developing a framework with which to see the problem first. It does my systems-driven heart good to see more and more people realizing that just jumping into employer branding without validated frameworks is kind of like buying a used car in a language you don't understand.

Have you heard that joke that every item in an employee manual should be named for the person who necessitated that rule? The drinking at work social engagements is the Chad Rule, for example (he knows what he did)? Yeah. Employee manuals are kind of the worst. Don't take my work for it. Fistful of Talent agrees with me, calling it the "worst HR document ever." I bring this up because anything that sucks that people see is an opportunity to support your employer brand.

Over at Branding Mag, there's an interesting conversation about how to create a sense of brand without a visual identity. The idea being that the experience itself is the brand. Can the experience of working somewhere be a clear brand? It's an interesting thought.

Do yourself a favor and sit down before you read this (very contrarian but not "wrong") article on how brand loyalty is really just laziness and inertia in action. This might sting a little.

Our jobs often feel lonely in a sea of people (because we're the only ones who understand what we do). So essays that discuss what someone has learned in their job and journey are so valuable. Jazmyn Mijuskovic talks about her first year at Publix.

Our jobs often feel lonely in a sea of people (because we're the only ones who understand what we do). So essays that discuss what someone has learned in their job and journey are so valuable. Here are two: Lilian Mahoukou talks about his work at Mondelez,

What happens when your employees get politically active? This week, more than 360 Amazon employees signed a public petition demanding the corporation take action on climate change. The company responded by threatening to fire them. Last year, Google saw a mass walkout. Between Greta, a US presidential election and Brexit, the political and social landscape is getting very tricky. And yes, your employer brand plays a role. If you've established values and pillars around being green or being socially responsible, what happens when staff act on that? And do you know how leadership will respond?

The big conversation this week (ignoring the global news stories, that is) is about Apple's new employer brand video. The animated video features about a hundred different variations of the famous Apple logo morphing from one to another while a female voiceover tells "constant beginners who sing off key" that "all are welcome." Visually, it is gorgeous (but really, Apply making an amazing commercial is no surprise). But the question is: is it effective?

Here's a nice short article reminding us that employer brand folks are there to help manage perceptions in other people's minds. It seems obvious, but it feels like we forget very quickly when things get busy.

What's the future of brand storytelling? Google collected some smart thinkers and posed that question. And while there was a lot of talk of "digital-first," I wonder if their own recruiters and employer branders would 100% agree.

Great employer branding isn't just ratings and career sites. It is about the power of the experience as a whole, either at the interview, at the open house, at the career event, and event when someone asks you what it's like to work there. But experiences aren't the easiest to measure, os here are some ideas on how to show leadership the impact of intentional experiences.

Want more evidence that ignoring your employer brand's impact on corporate sentiment is costing your business sales? I thought you might. It's good stuff to keep in your back pocket when someone forces you to justify your existence.

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?

I'm glad I finally get to link to an article on "how to enhance your candidate experience" without having to complain that there's more to candidate experience than "white glove." In this piece listing three ways to support your CX, the overarching theme is to provide and deliver more useful information to the candidate. Be it social signals, formal messaging and relationship-building.