Confluence

Don't dwell on the competition when you build your Talent Brand

Authentic talent brands emerge from honest inside-out discovery. This is rarely a simple and straightforward proposition in established organizations, and not always a painless one.

This collective discovery can emerge from many activities: interviews with leadership and staff, formal or informal focus groups, and online surveys of employees. And while the perspectives of outside segments (for instance, primary research into how outside communities view your organization) should not drive the effort, they can support it. Best practices among similar organizations can provide useful models too. But it’s essential to use these market findings to support, not mold, your organization’s talent brand.

 Here are four rules-of-thumb for branding your organization as a place to work.

 1. A talent brand is not about hard-sell.

The key point to remember here is that the traditional notions of consumer branding are relevant but not central to what we’re aiming to do when we set out to develop a talent brand. Although the needs and preferences of “target audiences”—i.e., potential recruits— have to exert some influence on how we construct the brand platform, our primary motive is to portray what it’s like to work at an organization with accuracy and impact. This is an inside-out approach, not a market-driven one.

2. A talent brand is about much more than attracting recruits.

If we think of a talent brand merely as a recruiting platform, we’re dissipating the value of its breadth and power to inspire. Hiring is only one aspect of human capital strategy. If the brand accurately portrays what it’s like to work at your organization, why shouldn’t we use it to inspire themes for programs like retention, events promotion, team development, and so on?

 3. Authenticity is the key.

Accuracy is step one. The brand should capture with felt authenticity the full experience of working on your extended team in all its dimensions: strategy, mission, process and routine, team interactions, culture, work-life balance, and so on.  In a word, the brand has to ring true to the workplace experience. It can’t be created to meet the presumed preferences of the job-seeking population; it needs to be discovered and shaped based on reality inside the walls.

4. A talent brand can empower you to attract, develop, refine, and retain the talent you need today and tomorrow.

This is a big claim, and it elevates the notion of talent branding into the realm of human capital strategy, where it rightly belongs. By capturing the spirit of the workplace experience, it becomes a touchstone for the team members already on the inside --and a compelling attractor for the outside candidates most likely to succeed in the real-world culture of your workplace.

 

Brand your workplace, not just your marketplace offerings

There’s good reason to apply what we’ve learned about marketplace brands to the workplace. If an organization’s brand can attract a marketplace community that embraces and shapes the values that the brand represents, why shouldn’t we view an organization’s workforce as a parallel brand community in its own right?

Every organization has a brand—a set of perceived qualities and associations that collectively express what the organization means to its key customers and constituents. Your organization may or may not be cultivating the specifics of this ‘image’ consciously, but it’s there just the same—the lingering imprint of all your interactions with stakeholders, buyers, members, observers, and so on.

It shouldn’t surprise you, then, that the way people view your company or organization as a place to work can be a critical element in your overall brand. This is the basis of what our team calls a Talent Brand, a critical tool for organizations of all sizes to refresh and preserve its most valuable assets--the quality and energy of its workforce.

The premise of talent branding: if you demonstrate your workplace’s culture and values authentically and resonantly, the best qualified applicants will self-select. The ideal talent brand finds its power in the organization’s top-line business focus, its workplace culture, and, ultimately, in the shared values it embodies. 

Is there a better way to attract the candidates most qualified and inclined by their own values and temperaments to contribute to an organization’s future? But to succeed in this pursuit organizations have to take responsibility for defining their own distinctive talent brands.

From time to time I’ll fill in the picture of how a talent brand can help your organization communicate your value and your organizational  values to all your stakeholder communities, not just your recruiting targets.

NBC to PETA: No eggplant-licking at this Super Bowl

The provocative new campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) hit a mass media snag last week, when NBC rejected its SuperBowl spot as depicting “a level of sexuality exceeding our standards.”

The Must-See TV folks judged many of the images in the ad, created to promote vegetarianism, as unsuitable for the delicate sensibilities of the NFL audience, so notoriously priggish with regard to glamorous women in suggestive poses. The 30-second spot crosses the line, recounts an NBC standards executive, in depicting a beautiful model caressing various raw vegetables and--brace for impact here--“screwing herself with broccoli…” (NBC`s phrasing, not mine.)

 In case you’re curious about this spot, I’m embedding it below. You can find the text of NBC`s seemingly exasperated rejection e-mail here.

PETA`s outreach--and especially its interaction with its brand communities-- has always fascinated me. The organization`s PR activities, magazine advertising, PSAs, and promotional events seem to straddle two paradoxical poles of brand personality.

On one hand, there`s that in-your-face, contrarian, counter-cultural swagger; on the other, a sexy-glamorous, subtly fragranced, cultural elitist pose. And while you can certainly find a more earnest approach to PETA`s mission priorities at its website (“… Test Michael Vick for Brain Disorder!”), PETA brand advertising tantalizes us with high-flying exemplars from a global in-group of hip, fashion-forward glamoristas. 

The would-be Super Bowl spot certainly draws on the edgy, high-glamour standard of PETA`s brand creative, even as it tries to slap you silly with its tongue-in-cheek high spirits. Give us a break, NBC. Excessive sexuality this is not (although, like most PETA brand creative, it does tend to objectify women).

Still, there’s more than a hint of parody here: the spot lampoons the unearned power of “hot babe” imagery to persuade us through cliché and stereotype. It’s a blue-chip example of one strain of disruptive advertising, where conventional audience expectations are exploded by strident overstatement.

Too pretentious an analysis? Check out the making of video below. It says a lot about PETA`s intent in the ad. Here the models themselves talk about their personal veggie “relationships” (“I love asparagus because I’m kind of into the group thing”). Compare the This is Spinal Tap tone of this piece to the droning and interminable behind-the-scenes Whopper Virgins "documentary" ("And we'd like to welcome you to Munchkin Land") that I grumbled about last month.

Could it be that PETA never expected to make the Super Bowl cut? By courting a rejection, PETA saves two or three million bucks in placement costs while high-jacking enough word-of-mouth and media exposure (including a New York Post “Page Six” item) to compensate for the disappointment.

 

UPDATE: Brand Obama equals brand magic

Follow-up to a previous Confluence post: Brand Obama and the mysterious energy of co-creation

Here are another handful or two of magazine covers and newspaper front pages, all of them international publications, that reflect the upsurge of overseas attention (and attendant brand contagion) that our new President has inspired. (Click on the collage to enlarge it.)

And stateside, it`s interesting to note, even MAD magazine has climbed on the viral bandwagon, albeit with its characteristic irreverent spirit. We're witnesses to a Big Bang here.

 

Worldwide, the expanding Obama brand universe, even at the somewhat superficial level of media fixation, is revealing shared aspirations and values previously submerged and invisible. Again, a case study for anyone interested in social contagion among communities (of any size) that share significant characteristics, especially when these characteristics are forged out of reaction to the status quo mixed with optimism for a new style and approach.

Brand Obama and the mysterious energy of co-creation

 Who can blame us if we harbor dreamy aspirations for our country and its leadership--especially when there’s that inspiring aroma of self-congratulation in the air we breathe?

Yep, that would be brand contagion, folks: the warm buzz of shared enlightenment and group well-being, the persistent urges to link arms (at least metaphorically) with the people who share our feelings. It’s as characteristically infectious today for a nation polling 82% approval for the incoming President as it’s traditionally been--in admittedly narrower cases--for middle-aged Harley riders, Pabst drinkers, and hip Apple-istas.

Wind the way-back machine to five short months ago in Minneapolis, when the “Drill, Baby, Drill” contingent was huffing its own very different variant on this social network glue. For the moment, this latter horde—so histrionically self-assured and cynically dismissive of aspirational change--is struggling to catch a panicky breath in the swells of good will and pat-ourselves-on-the-back euphoria that has overtaken most Americans, even Spiderman.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a little woozy from the Kool-Aid rush myself. Still, let’s not forget that Barack Obama’s brand is a carefully and brilliantly crafted creation—or more accurately a co-creation. For the moment, its volunteer evangelists, including many in the media, are supercharging the brand’s momentum through the mysterious energy of connectedness, visible or otherwise. That’s how co-creation works. And we have had an unprecedented opportunity, these last two months, to witness its workings in action, a cablecast case study, if you will.  

So, even if you’re not buying in, be alert to an awesome demonstration of brand magic on January 20, when two million or more of our citizens, bundled against a cold Washington wind, dance to the Obama brand’s entrancing tune--remixed with their own very American hopes and dreams.

UPDATE: SNL goes to Munchkin Land

Follow-up to previous Confluence post: And we'd like to welcome you to Munchkin Land

The Saturday Night Live team has weighed in with its version of Burger King's Whopper Virgins…

Are some early adopters tiring of Starbucks' self-declared global responsibility?

Some in my circle are grumbling about Starbucks’ “Red” campaign, which allocates five cents of certain beverage purchases to Aids relief in Africa. They’re grousing that the Red program is at best a marketing ploy, and at worst a cynical manipulation of the better instincts of Starbucks’ brand devotees.  

They’re saying that a mere nickel for each cup sold represents so trivial a portion of Starbucks revenue as not to matter much. Others say they’d rather be responsible for their own giving decisions, and not be dragged unwillingly into a corporate giant’s exploitation of a dire situation for its own commercial gain.

I’m not buying either complaint. Millions of nickels scale up pretty quickly. Since November 27, in fact, when the campaign began, Starbucks customer nickels have furnished a million and a half doses of anti-retroviral medicine, enough to supply nearly 4000 AIDS patients with a full year of therapy each. And the campaign will continue on a greatly expanded scale throughout 2009 at least.

As for the ‘marketing ploy’ claim, isn’t it a no-brainer that powerful brands amplify their reach through the good will of their customer communities? That’s how it works in this age of social networks and word-of-mouth transmission. Leading brand maintain their leadership by embodying the values they share with their brand communities. Aren’t smart companies supposed to encourage this brand affinity? In Starbucks’ case, global social responsibility is a big deal, and one of the linchpins of the brand. The company is doing what it should do, given that understanding, to sustain its brand mojo.

But what really fascinates me here is the apparent shift in attitude among folks whom I know to be across-the-board early adopters in both life style and buying habits. These are people who not so long ago were praising Starbucks as a virtuous disrupter, a successful challenger to complacent market habits, not to mention a model of institutional social responsibility. Now, at least for them, Starbucks has faded into just another emblem of corporate opportunism, a Main Street mainstay.

If early adopters like these are jumping ship, this may be a trend worth watching. McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts are currently grabbing share from Starbucks. Does this mean that, for brand trend-setters at least, frequenting Starbucks is losing some of its luster as a personal values statement, and becoming more of a commodity buy, like its two main challengers?

 

And we'd like to welcome you to Munchkin Land

What is up with Burger King’s Whopper Virgins campaign? More to the point, why is the company devoting a Web microsite to a seven-minute documentary about its Whopper v. Big Mac taste testing?

If you don’t know about this exercise, here’s the clever twist. They’re testing in picturesque locations where quaint and colorful denizens, as the on-camera commentators point out, have never even seen a hamburger. (Imagine their response to the modern focus group facilities, complete with one-way glass, where one sequence in the documentary was shot. We don’t get to see the locals’ take on that.)

The impenetrable intent of the campaign aside, all the staged trappings of authenticity—the colorful local garb, the cheerful, open-hearted natives, the earnest commentary on incompatibilities in propane valves--makes me more than a little uncomfortable. For me it embodies the distasteful flip side of globalism, akin to those authentic but sterilized tourist junkets like guided Yak caravans in Mongolia.

I know I should lighten up. I may be missing the point. This could be an ironic send-up of reality TV and mass advertising’s taste test clichés—with the snarky, patronizing title cleverly undercutting the faux-realistic content, and where the globe-probing competition ends in, yes, patient (!) viewers, a virtual dead heat between fast food contenders.

Fortified with a bracing dose of historical perspective, I can handle Hope, Crosby, or Lou Costello steeped in a bubbling cauldron while boot-blacked extras dance around and wave their feathered spears. But this? Not so much.

Big ideas anchor vibrant brand communities

Most small to mid-sized companies (and a surprising number of non-profits) view their outreach exclusively through the lens of traditional marketing. They conceive of branding as a direct selling effort, a straightforward presentation of the purely practical utility of what they have to offer. Fundamentally, they`re not entirely wrong. By answering the question “what practical value will you realize through our offerings?,” an organization effectively establishes a baseline for demonstrating the concrete benefits it can deliver to its publics.

But other organizations see marketing communications and branding less narrowly. For them, crafting a selling proposition anchored in practical benefits is only a single facet in the outreach cycle. They set out to elevate public associations with their brands to levels of perceived value beyond here-and-now satisfaction when the offering delivers on its performance promises.

By linking the inner experience of the brand to more personally meaningful ideals, the brand-conscious organization creates the foundation for a more expansive and deeply felt value proposition. The brand is a success when a critical mass of influencers and customers identify with the spirit behind it. Word-of-mouth (and more subtle, less conscious transmission) builds this brand community. The brand-aware organization sets the thematic baseline for brand contagion, and then reinforces its resonance as the brand takes hold.

Consider Nike’s decades-old Just do it theme, an evergreen clarion call to a level of independence and self-confident achievement well beyond shoe-power. Think vanity brands like Burberry or Neiman Marcus, where the perception of quality and distinction threads together expansive ad hoc communities of adherents who feel “special” through their association with each brand and the values it represents.

Examples of these personally-invested, self-organizing communities of brand loyalists are legion, from Apple Computer, to Disney, to Oprah, to NASCAR, to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. All of these brands are energized by a “big idea” that frames the brand --like creativity, or non-conformity, or the thrill of a shared experience or point of view. The most committed adherents of big idea brands find their satisfaction in the emotional charge behind the brand or brand experience, and—most tellingly--in the community that embraces the brand’s values.

The big idea premise of a brand should certainly support the concrete benefits of the offering, but at the same time it should transcend its purely practical value. It should focus on the power of a central idea(l) to galvanize communities of individuals who share the brand’s values.

This is a lesson that particularly should  not be lost on the not-for-profit institution aspiring to build its brand today.

Value branding calls for a bigger boat

If we go by traditional marketing definitions, it’s not difficult to dismiss brand management as a mainstream strategic tool, especially for smaller companies and organizations. But this is a matter of definition, and traditional categories no longer cover the full spectrum of branding practice.

In the older, traditional view a brand denotes a consumer offering; it can be Skippy Peanut Butter, the Mercury Milan, Hershey bars, Holiday Inn hotels, and so on. No wonder there`s a bit of confusion among the leadership of some not-for-profits and associations when we talk about value branding. As many of them see it, brand management is a discipline practiced by manufacturers and distributors of package goods and consumer-durables companies. If you're supporting a cause or an institution, branding is irrelevant. 

Happily, this outmoded view is fading away today as a broader definition of branding takes hold. Even so, the distinctions between "old" branding and value branding are critical, and enough decision-makers still confuse the two to justify a brief explanation of the older branding model here. In this approach, big companies customarily deploy MBA-educated brand managers to support their package goods and consumer services brands. These executive planners are responsible for keeping tabs on customer satisfaction and loyalty through sophisticated quantitative means. They are also charged with devising continual improvements in distribution, promotion, and formulation for their brands. The goal: hold the company’s most productive and valuable brands on a steady or rising trajectory of usage and popularity.

Similarly, as aging brands fade, commercial brand managers focus on spinning out new products (or services) that their research tells them are more likely to ring the bell as consumer needs and "life styles" evolve. And so we see entirely new brands or new wrinkles on the formulation or distribution of established products.

This latter cycle, sometimes called brand extension, brings us evolution and growth in brand families: Coke begets Tab begets Diet Coke begets Coke Zero, and so on. The Jell-O brand family, dating back a century or so, is another great example. You can click on the illustrations of Jell-O’s extensible brand family above right and below to enlarge them, if you`re interested.

Still--despite its sophistication and importance in the consumer marketing arena--this approach doesn`t convey the whole picture. While its tactical foundations--precision research and assessment--are highly relevant in Brand Vistas` work, it still doesn’t take us quite far enough in strategic terms, notably in two instances:

 + when we set out to brand an institution or workplace, rather than a consumable product

+ when we attempt to understand the way certain brands seem to trigger a powerful (we might say mysterious) loyalty that runs deeper than just the immediate satisfaction of concrete and practical needs by an organization’s offerings.

In both instances, the tools and assumptions of traditional brand management are still relevant and useful, but they somehow prompt us to think, like Chief Brody in Jaws, that we need a bigger boat.