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?

For those with the budget, there's a huge increase in talk about digital Out Of Home (OOH) ads. Think digital display and geo-targeted ad on mobile. As it provides a measure of trackability, it might be something to get up to speed on.

Here's a nice write-up on what to expect in the next decade of marketing.

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.

Are you ready for experiential marketing? Well, if you define it as VR goggles and pop-up shops, it may feel out of your reach. But what if you defined it as advocacy? Anything that creates a deep and immersive "moment" qualifies.

Here's your big read for the week. From fellow talent nerd Liz Lembke's Transforming Talent, this week's newsletter got my head spinning. Why? Because we don't talk about social contracts much at all and we really should. Over the last 50 years, what we expect from each other, from our governmental institutions, and from our jobs has changed. But the systems that support our relationships with our jobs really haven't. What do you expect from your colleagues? What's worth complaining about (and what isn't)? When is it okay to ask for help and when are you expected to buckle down and figure it out? Liz collects a series of recent articles on the topic, and they are very much worth your time.

Everyone loves the Wendy's social media accounts. How does a square burger chain dance so gloriously on the line of impropriety that other brands can't even get near? They embrace their position as a "challenger" brand. Specifically, they don't shy away from the core idea that you need some kind of conflict in order to create a meaningful narrative.

Is it time to start using Tik Tok for your recruiting? The answer may be yes. The reason? Well, if the off-the-wall creative thinkers over at the Association of Chartered Certified Accounts are seeing results, then I think its time for you to take it seriously.

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.

The concept of "newsjacking" isn't new to my content marketing folk. It's the process of finding a timely (and aligned) way to jump on a current story in the next and ride it's coattails. Doing it right requires speed and guts (see: Oreo and Super Bowl blackout, or pretty much anything Wendy's does), which isn't easy. So here are some great examples of the best instances of newsjacking in 2019 you can learn from.

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.

Branding Mag (rightly) calls "shenanigans" on what feels like every company embracing the concept of "purpose" as a driver in their marketing. To the author's eyes, it is obviously self-serving and has been used to the point of uselessness. That's not good news for us employer brander folks, many of whom rely seriously on the concept of "inspiring purpose" in their EVPs (I mean, now many times in one newsletter am I allowed to use the term 'over-indexed' before this thing gets silly?). But there's some good, news, especially for brands who aren't just slapping a fresh of coat of "purpose" in the brand as the solution d'jour. Defining and proving how your company is trying to create a change in the world is the first step. Get it right, make it real, or just don't both.

The following will systematically assist you in building connected customer relationships. There are three parts. In the first part you need to diagnose The following will systematically assist you in building connected customer relationships.

I love it when a company walks the walk. Regeneron (full disclosure, I do some with with them, which is probably why I was shown this article on LinkedIn) decided it wasn't enough to offer child care allowances or a nice mothers' room when it can to caring about their staffs' families. They went and found a child care facility by the HQ, bought it, and contracted with a third-party to run it just for their own employees' children. How cool is that? When you tell prospects that you care about work life balance, this is where the bar is being set now.

Welp. LinkedIn, the pinstriped social media platform, is taking cues from the cool kids like Snapchat and Instagram and developing a "stories" function on their platform. I look forward to more CEOs dancing in their offices to Carly Rae Jepsen and corporate mandates Ice Bucket Challenges...

Speaking of over-indexing, I'm going to call it right now: we as an industry are over-indexing on employee happiness. So many articles and presentations that assume we all want to attract candidates who will be happy in our roles, and I think we've overshot the mark. You can't offer happiness any more than you can offer someone joy. Those are emotions people make themselves. So I was thrilled to see this piece suggesting we focus on offering professional fulfillment rather than happiness.

This article over at RecruitingDaily hit on one of the reasons why focusing discussions on candidate experience always feels like a lot more promise than outcomes. They argument is that when most people talk candidate experience, they are thinking about "macro events," the big set pieces that occur in every (if not all) interview/hiring process. But when you over-index on macro experiences, you miss the power of the macro experiences and their ability to create an emotional connection with candidates.

In a lot of ways, an EVP is like home improvement: you start watching enough HGTV shows from your couch and you start to think, "how card could that be? Maybe I should tackle my own EVP project..." Which are some of my favorite famous last words. Now, I'm not saying you can't build your own EVP all by yourself, but watching the process from the outside misses the complex and messy things that go on during the commercial breaks where everyone's screaming at each other and that suddenly load-bearing wall has been demoed. Oops. So if you're thinking about taking the job yourself, here is a great article at ERE on some common ways that companies who try to to DIY their EVP get into trouble.

I like to keep one eye on what the consumer and corporate marketers are up to, and it turns out there's a wholesale shift happening where even the CMOs are spending more and more time working on the company's brand. Why does that matter? You know how every time someone asks you what's the ROI of employer branding? You can always say that if branding isn't important, why is the most important marketing person in the company working on it so much?

Tom Peters (one of my professional heroes) once said to a room full of executives, "Benchmarking is stupid. You pick the current industry leader and then launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whomever was best five years ago five years from now." (He once told a room full of American automotive executives that, having spent millions in design and research to launch the Dodge Neon, "Congrats, you invented a 1986 Honda Civic.") So you have a sense of my bias against benchmarks: They care pictures of the past and too many people seek only to recreate someone else's past. That said, SmashFly just launched its own benchmarks for recruitment marketing. (Fair warning: you get to the top of their benchmarks by doing all the things they think you should do, not because you necessarily do it well). Takeaways? Engage with candidates honestly, transparently and deeply and you'll always be ahead of the curve.

Hubspot has an article of six examples of how to better use social media to increase your subscriber list. Lots of lessons for anyone who is integrating social and email communications to expand their brand reach.

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.

Maybe we simply reject the concept of "rejected candidates" and think of it as "talent recycling." Maybe changing the label will get companies to start to realize that the process of enraging a hundred people (who talk VERY LOUDLY to their own communities, I assure you) just to find one person to whom to make the offer (which will be rejected 40% of the time!), is insane. To that end, FireFish has some rudimentary (and yet somehow NOT standard practice in most companies) ways to get more out of your recycled talent.

I have yet to find a professionally satisfying "talent community." Why? Because "community" speaks to two-way conversation and most talent communities are email blasting tools with new labels on the tin. But I have to imagine that we must (by now) be on the precipice of actually getting talent communities right. Why? Because companies around the world are finding the value of building communities of customers and prospects, so that thinking will trickle down to us at some point. Right?

To steal a line from David C. Baker, you can't read your label if you're inside the jar. If you are trying to see and distill your own employer brand, your biggest obstacle is you (and your biases you can't see). By way of example, my colleague Dennis Billgren reminds us that you might "know" that what US tech workers want is more work-life balance and autonomy. So why does Tesla and SpaceX (notorious for NOT having those things) consistently rank at the top of most desired employers? What you think you know isn't the same as objective knowledge, especially in employer branding.

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.

Let me ask you a question: would your overall employer brand be better/stronger if everyone felt like they had a hand in crafting their own jobs, if they were able to shape the tasks, people and purpose of the job to better match who they were? The concept of "job crafting" (new to me) has been studied for the last 20 years and the impacts are very interesting. While the article is geared towards, "you should try to craft your job," what if you started to think how you support and encourage others to craft their jobs to make them feel more satisfied and fulfilled at work? That sounds like an interested employer brand strategy to me.

Some days, it really is this simple. If you want to be a stronger ally, load the dishwasher at work.

A reminder that we all need to be thinking in virtuous cycles to not just make an impact, but to ensure those impacts expand.

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.