Employer Brand Headlines Newsletter

We have to face it: all "employee experience" conversations HAVE to start with a conversation around "are we doing enough to make our people feel safe?" That's why I thought this article was better than most of the "we need to make people feel valued and appreciated" conversations you get here (Maslow was right with that hierarchy stuff).

Let's talk Tik Tok! Or maybe we shouldn't! Just as the all-dancing, all-singing social platform starts to gain traction as a legitimate branding platform, it gets branded as a state agency intelligence operation. But when has a little espionage stopped "the kids" from singing? (That's the entire plot of Val Kilmer's Top Secret, btw.) So if you're ready to ignore potential Trump/Bezos bans of the social channel, here are so suggestions on how to do it right. My favorite? Think of it as an education platform first.

I really believe that the biggest mistake in company's employer brands is that they skimp on doing their competitive analysis. Sure, you can say that you're innovative, but if you're competing against SpaceX (Mars!) and Boston Dynamics (creepy robots!), the bar is a little different than if you're competing against governmental agencies or deeply regulated industry sectors. Just saying. So here's a good primer on doing your own competitive audit.

Allison Kruse has really carved out her own space on how to effectively use content marketing in employer brand communications. So when she writes a big ol' article on how to use content marketing thinking to address and overcome employee advocacy challenges, I have to share it.

Friend of the newsletter Alex Her pulled together some good examples of how companies are pivoting their employer brand communications now that it seems the “new normal” is here to stay.

If you don’t have time to read Robert Greene’s book on the 48 laws of power, here are the seven kinds of power one can have in the workplace. Know where you as the EB pro have power, and when you need to lean on a different kind of power from somewhere else.

This was a pretty solid list of resources around understanding, audits, and showcasing your brand. Aside some usual suspects, there are a few new ideas here.

More and more businesses are looking to their own brand purpose to create a stronger brand foundation as everything seems to change every second around it. If your company is thinking about purpose (or you’re starting to spark those conversations), it might help to understand how purpose works and how businesses can leverage purpose strategically (also, companies don’t have purpose, people have purpose, and you’re in the people business, remember?).

Is your brand memorable? Do you know how to make it more memorable? Here’s an interesting article suggesting focused visuals to command attention and create those brand memories that last.

What you reward is who your company is. But how do you reward people in a remote work situation? Stories Incorporated has some ideas on the subject.

Speaking of remote work, I admit I started reading this article on building a long-term remote work plan to see how we EBers could influence the process, but I was struck by their process. They start with an ideal end in mind and think backwards on how to achieve it. Have any of you considered what your ideal EB situation would be and worked backwards from there? I might be trying this soon.

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.)

One of the challenges EB is grappling with in the face of mandated remote work is how to collaborate, brain-storm or just workshop an idea together. EB, because it connects all the parts of the company, is inherently collaborative, and Zoom (et al) doesn’t really get many people’s creative juices flowing. So here are some ideas on how to brainstorm when no one can share a room with a white board and those massive post-it notes.

The danger of building your brand around your stated values is that what you say your values are and how you live them are often very different. Proof? MIT Sloan’s study of 700 large companies found ZERO correlation between what a company says its values are and what it’s work culture actually is.

When I was younger, I looked forward to my weekend family visits to Blockbuster to pick out a movie rental. In 2005, as a freshman at…

I get a lot of gruff when I say this, but. firmly believe it. When you’re posting to Facebook and Instagram, you aren’t competing with their employer brands, but with Ryan Gosling and 90 Day Fiancé memes. So if you want to stand out, you have to raise your sights higher. So here are 10 (non-EB) Instagram accounts who are killing it. These brands are telling compelling stories in a single image, and that’s what you’re up against. Suddenly, that pick of 20 employees standing next to each other in two rows like it’s 2nd grade picture day doesn’t cut it.

Brands are things humans build feelings around. Are you thinking about what emotions you want to encourage and when?

Connecting with consumers is the key skill essential for building stronger brand bridges. It requires an end-consumer orientation for evaluating14 considerations and questions that will help in building a successful strategy for your brand.

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

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.

A quick list of talent brand tech that its users would marry, boff or kill.

We don’t talk much about “business model” here on the newsletter, and really, it’s because we aren’t treating brand management as a business. But business model thinking and brand architecture have a lot of similarities, and the fact that you need to sell your brand to business leaders who think in business models suggests that there might be something interesting in the intersection here. It’s not just how you make money, it’s how you use everything in your ecosystem and how you differentiate yourself (sound familiar?). Anyway, here’s the formula for business model innovation.

Too many employer branding CRM strategies and campaigns feel like extensions of boring job postings. But outside of the EB world, the industry is learning how to optimize conversion rates by providing compelling micro-experiences. A big part of that is personalization, which means a lot more than “Dear [First_Name],”.

Sure, working from home, and the increasing likelihood that is it here to stay, might be great (for some of you). As many candidates want remote work, and remote work allows you to hire the best matching candidate from pretty much anyway, its a chance to really level-up your talent. But there’s a downside: management isn’t always comfortable with remote workers and are distrusting of their productivity. When one company proclaims its love of remote work, many people will see that as a red flag, an excuse to install spyware and implement “always on” expectations for remote. So how will you talk about your remote work brand when there isn’t always a lot of trust in the room?

As a perpetual “outsider,” I struggle with the power of belonging when it comes to brand building (and advocacy, retention et al), but I have to assume there are many companies who actively want to create more sense of belonging as well as telling stories about what that means at that company.

Brooks Brothers a brand that has lasted for two hundred and two years, and was floundering well before coronavirus hit may be finished. The pandemic gave The main reason for Brooks Brothers' demise is that the brand lost relevance. It lost touch with customers, their changing needs and changing tastes. What could they do to restore brand relevance?

Hung Lee dug up this oldish article about better job postings, but I’d never seen it and I thought it was amazing. Remember: job postings are your #1 channel for creating first impressions (and they are all but free). Doing them right really makes a difference in setting the frame on your employer brand. What’s the secret? The article suggests it’s the word “if.” I’d suggest the real change agent here is knowing what a good job posting even looks like.

Further evidence that you and your marketing team should be spending more time together and occasionally taking long walks on the beach: employee advocates are the new “influencer.” In a lot of ways, influencers made a kind of sense in a world with a million options (or products, services, lifestyles, etc) because they acted as a kind of “native guide” to these things. A Kardashian can point to weight loss products and fashion because it’s something they know about. But as influencers as a celebrity become stale, the new advocate is the insider, someone with the inside view on things. They have a more credible voice and are seen as more real than marketing and can change people’s minds about your company (both as an employer, and as a vendor).

A good list of companies doing D&I videos well.