Confluence

Why ‘employer branding’ falls short

If you’ve been reading my commentary, you know that I stand for branding that authentically maps the cultures of organizations to their engagement strategies. This applies in both marketplace and human capital arenas, and it’s a key reason why we summarize our work in the latter realm as talent branding. We focus first on the native culture of a workforce as its most authentic and compelling basis for attracting and cultivating talent. Call it an inside-out approach.

Is it also important to discover how potential recruits and other stakeholders view a company from the outside in? Of course it is, but in our view refining a talent brand has to start with discovering the authentic points of value that inspire members of the existing workforce, the factors that keep them on the job, whatever their tenure and degree of experience.

This underscores what we see as a game-changing flaw in ‘employer branding’ formulas that home in on direct recruiting as the primary expression of the brand. An exclusive preoccupation with reaching out to recruits here can unfairly skew what should be a thorough and empathetic discovery initiative in all segments of the culture.

Talent brands should be inclusive of all workplace values through all stages of the employee life cycle. They should certainly inspire creative recruiting, but still supply the theme and creative energy for all human capital initiatives, from retention to staff development to inclusive leadership and so on.

This focus on culture as brand driver is not a perspective unique to Brand Vistas. Several commentators and consultants, notably Nicolas Ind and Mary Jo Hatch, have embraced this view for years, and made it the touchstone for a wider-gauge emphasis on corporate branding. It’s interesting that most of their case work is European.

Are practitioners of ‘employer branding’ in this country too enamored of the market-centered metrics of packaged goods branding to see the strategic role that human capital branding can play in the cultural health and talent environment of an organization?  

Six keys to value branding

Brand practice is an evolving discipline, and many of its dominant approaches today diverge significantly from those of traditional branding, which had more to do with features and metrics than the intrinsic value (and values) of a company or institution.

Here are six of the guiding principles behind the increasingly prevalent approach of value branding.

1. Compelling brands are anchored in living brand communities.

Call them stakeholders, brand evangelists, or whatever, but opt-in communities of real people inspire a value brand’s power and reach. These folks feel proud to incorporate the brand’s attitude into their own public identities. Consider Apple Computer (a no-brainer) but also NASCAR, which in itself has become a magnet for scores of consumer brands [Coke, KFC, Lowe’s, Sprint Nextel, Office Depot, Harlequin Publishing(!), Best Western, and Nationwide Insurance, among others], all determined to thrive in its social orbit.

2. Value brand communities co-create brand value (and the brand experience).

The ad hoc social networks formed by NASCAR enthusiasts are  powerful forces for brand contagion. Fueled by collective energies like these, successful value brands seem to take on lives of their own, beyond the control of their corporate birth parents. Disney--considered in the full range of its offerings, from theme parks to Hannah Montana--is a telling case in point. So are Girl Scout Cookies, a co-created brand phenomenon that we’ve discussed here before (“You can’t hide from this Cookie Monster”).

[For insights from the business theorist who defined the concept of value co-creation, check out C.K. Prahalad.]

3. Themes and narratives, not “messages”, spur the growth of value brand communities.

Political strategists may soil themselves when their candidates wander “off message”, but this manipulative approach has no place in value branding. By framing themes (often expansive big-idea extensions of the brand’s values), organizations invite their brand communities to move in imaginative and/or inspiring directions beyond the strictly practical scope of the brand’s offerings. Take Nike, with its seemingly ageless Just Do It theme. Johnson & Johnson’s Campaign for Nursing’s Future is another great example. A related technique incorporates concrete narrative energy through case studies and user-submitted stories.

4. The authenticity of the brand experience is a key driver, with reasoned, logical persuasion playing a supporting role.

Small- to mid-sized organizations often limit their reach by striding down the left-brain path, i.e., by framing rigid value propositions that embody only the practical advantages of their offerings. This tack may seem to them to work well enough, but it ignores the communal dimension, meaning their stakeholders’ collective inclination to respond to imaginative appeals and concrete cases of real people in action. Narrative engagement is one approach that can help here. See Hitachi’s brilliantly evocative video True Stories (now happily supported by a full-scale print media campaign), Cadillac’s celebrity recollections, and Canadian Club’s nostalgic and funny re-branding campaign.

5.  Value brands build communities through word-of-mouth (WOM) transmission.

Two words: Starbucks and Oprah. The Starbucks phenomenon has largely spread through WOM boosted by the ubiquity of Starbucks outlets. Oprah’s mindshare empire has sprung from the same communal co-creative impulse, though seeded arguably by her daytime TV exposure. Viral video, if originated within a brand community, can be another vector of brand contagion.

6. If a corporate brand is the yin, its corresponding Talent Brand is the yang.

I want to address this widely under-appreciated point in my next post, but for now let’s leave it at this: an enterprise today rises and falls on the strengths and enthusiasms of its workforce. Calling this approach “employer branding” misses the point by minimizing the marketplace value of an organization’s human capital resource, which should be a fully-engaged brand community in all the respects we’ve enumerated above.

We will fight them in the job-fairs; we will fight them at Starbucks

For nearly a decade now, it seems, we’ve been at war. No, I don’t mean the ones in the Balkans, or the Middle East, or even the one against terror.

I mean that smash-mouth struggle against the axis of evil next door, those dirty bastards who would nab our really smart people and strap them into Aeron chairs behind PCs and calculators, armed to the teeth with Blackberries and mocha grandes.

Yes, I mean the War for Talent. Is there anyone out there who, with me, sees this metaphor as tastelessly inaccurate in today’s world, not to mention downright silly and pretentious? What does it say about us that we invoke it so mechanically and reflexively? Sure, it was once clever marketing hyperbole, a resonant title formula for research articles and books. But let’s move on.

Will you join me in dragging out the big guns, pulling out all the stops, going for broke, the whole nine yards, in nudging this blow-hard, self-aggrandizing cliche out of popular use?

What if I were to assert, with a wink, that the only real war for talent was that long ago tussle over Helen of Troy, that smokin’ hot little Spartan honey?

Would it set some of you off? So what’s more insensitive in today’s business climate: testosterone that smells like Old Spice, or testosterone that smells like cordite?

Hail Freedonia.

Retail noir

It’s vital for a retail brand to fine-tune the customer experience for optimal effect. But should this stewardship of customer touch points extend to regulating the in-store wardrobes of sales associates? The leadership cadres at Macy’s and Bloomingdales evidently feel that it should. Salespeople at both chains are required to wear basic black on the job (shirts and blouses, of course, are excepted).

The stated rationale, at least at Macy’s, is to ensure that customer service personnel stand out on the sales floor, making their presence more immediately evident to customers. One associate tells me that even suppliers’ reps visiting the stores are also expected to abide by the all-black dress code. In his view, this is a ploy to inflate the perceived associate-to-customer ratio in the eyes of shoppers.

You can guess that many employees are grumbling about this rule, and not only because it means extra out-of-pocket wardrobe expenses for (non-Goth) staffers. Some Macy’s associates suggest that the dress code is really an attempt to rein in potential fashion ‘statements’ of younger associates that, presumably, wouldn’t play well with the ideal target demographic. We have to say that we’ve observed a trend that suggests this motive at some blue-chip law firms here in the Washington area, where female receptionists are issued two identical, and usually black, pantsuits when they are hired.

This is juicy case study material. The customer experience is certainly a critical component in all value brands, but is this really what dress codes like this are about? Some might say that in these instances going all black, or all anything, is an arbitrary stab at non-specific conformity, a policy that’s entirely at odds with striving for earned authenticity in the brand experience. In a more extreme interpretation, some might question if the ‘suits’ are enforcing fashion conformity to suppress one means through which cultural or demographic diversity in the workforce finds expression.

Your thoughts?

What are the hallmarks of a culture of inclusion?

I want to follow up on last week’s posts on the role of inclusion and other inside-out values in how Brand Vistas builds resonant and authentic brands. Over the years, we’ve developed a few benchmarks to help decision-makers get a handle on what we mean by an authentically inclusive culture, and also to help them assess the progress their organizations are making toward this admirable goal.

In a nutshell, building an inclusion culture means creating a workplace where all individual perspectives and contributions are treated with respect and honesty. This seems straightforward enough as an uplifting objective, but getting there in the real world? Maybe not so simple.

So how do you know when you’re getting close?

…when talent and initiative are prized and rewarded without regard to gender, ethnicity, lifestyle, physical ability, or religious preference

… when all members of your workforce, top to bottom, share a felt sense of personal inclusion in shaping the organization’s future.

... when all your team members are encouraged to share in –and help refine—company-wide inclusion efforts.

… when the collective cultural know-how of your workforce aligns productively with all aspects of corporate strategy AND your organization’s marketplace or outreach initiatives.

… when everyone in the company, institution, or agency is invited to help recruit and retain outstanding talent among the diversity and disability segments from which you have not historically drawn a high proportion of team members.

This is not rocket science. But don’t doubt for a moment that it demands unsparing, and often painful, self-assessment on both a corporate and personal level.

One path to inside-out brand resonance: start with diversity, work towards a culture of inclusion

Yesterday’s post is a natural segue to a related topic, the power of team diversity and inclusive leadership to supercharge organizational performance.

In our view, an inclusive culture—i.e., one that collectively rejects xenophobic habits-of-mind—enriches both the workplace and the brand of an organization. What’s more, building a corporate culture that thrives on inclusion results in real operational advantages. At the most obvious level, the first step toward a culture of inclusion means aligning your team to meet the demands of an evolving national and international community. For U.S. organizations, ‘looking like America’ is a top-level (and arguably superficial) expression of this alignment. But make no mistake: it pays off across the board, not just at the front counter or on sales calls. In itself it’s a powerful knowledge asset, a hard-to-match source of market-cultural insight.

An equally potent advantage of authentic inclusion emerges from a concept we invoke frequently at Brand Vistas: TALENT.  This is arguably the most vital requirement for any organization’s continued health in the 21^st century. No company, institution, or government agency today can afford to let any potential pool of talent go untapped, under-recruited, or undeveloped. Yet so many organizations go through the motions of diversity recruiting, play by the numbers only, and fail to see the deep talent resources of diversity segments in business-strategic (or brand-strategic) terms.

The bottom line: if your diversity efforts, however nobly framed, are reactive and geared to satisfying external standards only, you may feel like you’re doing the right thing. But you’re missing out on a big opportunity.

Are we brand strategists or wannabe ‘OD’ consultants?

At Brand Vistas we follow a methodology that others in the marketing communications business have characterized as far removed from traditional branding practice. Rather than focus obsessively on ‘push’ messaging or the generalized ‘propensities’ of segmented targets, our team emphasizes stakeholders’ shared experience of a given brand.

The way we see it, the social network contagion that your organization inspires depends not just on the value that you co-create with your customers and stakeholders, but on the values that your organization embodies for these communities. If you’ve been reading our Confluence posts, visiting our site, or are acquainted with our work, you know that this inside-out perspective looms large in our practice.

So, while this angle on branding is certainly not the only creative trajectory we employ to inspire affinity, we seldom hesitate to wade in and help organizations refine elements like operating  processes, knowledge resources, empowering attitudes, and Talent Brands. For many, messing with what they insist are exclusively internal elements disqualifies us as either organizational development consultants OR brand strategists. As they see it, we’re like a mixed metaphor... and we’re performing a dual role that somehow dilutes our creative mojo.

Still, a growing community of partner-clients appear to see substantial advantages in our inside-out approach. Tell us what you think about our perspective on the challenge of creating resonant and authentic brands based on shared value. 

 

Branding the workplace experience

Sometimes, when an author introduces a particularly descriptive and on-the-money term for a familiar reality, you just know it’s going to stick. Researchers Tamara J. Erickson and Lynda Gratton do just that in the March Harvard Business Review when they describe the special feel of a given organization’s working culture as the signature experience of that workplace (and workforce).

If you’re interested in human capital branding and organizational communications, "What It Means to Work Here" deserves a close reading. Erikson and Gratton have added a resonant and precise term to the lexicon of organizational development, branding, and human capital communications. You’ll hear it frequently from now on.

While you’re at it, you might also check out an article of mine on a closely related topic: “Leveraging Talent Branding for Innovation." You'll find it at the web site of The Intervista Institute.

The vessel with the pestle holds the brew that is true

Starbucks’ Chairman Howard Schultz’ leaked memo on the “Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience” vividly illustrates the rift that can arise between operational performance and brand values in a growing corporation. Certainly Starbucks has to strive for scale and efficiency as it expands, but Shultz and a growing number of Starbucks devotees are questioning if operational improvements should be allowed to undercut the signature user experience that inspired so much of Starbucks’ success in the first place.

Chairman Howard’s cri de coeur has been applauded by the network of dissident Starbucks employees named, with George Lucas-like verve, the "Starbucks Rebel Alliance". The SRA, like Mr. Schultz, is standing up for brand values, and that’s a remarkable testament to the power of the Starbucks experience to enlist passionate adherents on both sides of the front counter.

You don’t have to be professionally interested in how marketplace or talent brands take root and spread to find this little controversy fascinating. Can you see Disney or McDonalds—both hyper-alert enforcers of their respective brand experiences—embroiled in a dust-up like this? Or that their employees would care enough about brand values to bring their case forward through internet-based social networks?