When, why, and how do consumers cope with a status threat by choosing to “pivot” to alternative domains?

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.

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.)

"We can train ourselves to alter the self-organizing patterning systems by learning how to coerce our minds into taking alternative routes."

We’ve been telling candidates to develop their personal brand to make it easier for recruiters to understand who they are and what they bring to the table. The problem is, personal brands seem to be the domain of the loudmouth (hi, how are you!). What about introverts? And if we flip the concept around, does your employer brand only cater to the boisterous, obvious extroverts? How can you make sure you’re not repelling introverts in order to stand out in the crowd?

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?

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.

Since organized brands were first introduced over 100 years ago alongside industrialism, they have changed their nature and role in society. Brands have When our favorite brands exceed the expectation we have of them, by giving us a surprise, we get more excited and our interest in and loyalty to the brand increases.