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.

Empathy is the new marketing.

What can employer brands learn from "luxury brands?" To understand their own truth. Beyond this article, I think there are a lot of interesting parallels between EB and luxe brands. Exclusivity: There's only one open role so only one person can have it. Identity-signaling: People judge you on where you work and you derive self-work from where you work. Cost: No one's ever had an easy job search, no matter how good they are. Just something to consider.

I’m not pointing fingers, but let’s be honest: its easy to define an employer brand when we treat work as a place to go and not as a thing you do. (This article on the future of working kind of made me realize how much we define the issues we solve to make the answers easier to accomplish. Turns out people are messy, and when you can’t just focus on the place, it gets messy to try and explain why people do what they do.)

How valuable is your brand from the consumer's point of view? Brand equity influences ROI and can give you a market edge — let's find out how.

There’s a lot of assumptions around the intersection of brand value and brand quality. That is, if a company does a great job supporting its people, the quality of the brand establishes the value of the brand. But it isn’t always so cut-and-dried. Take SpaceX, a company known for its horrible work-life balance and overly-aggressive management, two thinks engineers say they hate. And yet, SpaceX is the top company engineers want to work for. How can you leverage the disconnect between quality and value?

Trying to grow your brand without emotion (I mean, we are in the people business, right?) is a mistake. But leveraging emotion isn’t necessarily obvious or simple. It helps to understand your talent targets’ needs and desires.

Look, this is something I am grappling with because I really want employer branders to think… deeper. It’s not just putting out little videos and polishing up career sites, but helping leadership think better about their brand. One of the ideas I haven’t gotten my arms around but think is special is the concept of cognitive dissonance. We want what we want, but what we want might not align with our stated values. A company who can help its customers overcome that cognitive dissonance is one who can win a long time customer. Like i said, I’m not sure how we can use this idea, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Weren’t we just talking about branding as a means of solving for cognitive dissonance? Here’s another article on building brands on conflicting desires.

Building your EVP? While there’s no right way to go about it, if you are doing it quickly, simply and without any doubts, I promise that you’re doing it wrong. So how do you make better decisions in that kind of situation? Combine data with doubt.