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.

WEB 2.0: a new paradigm for branding and engagement--but look before you take the plunge

If, like many regular readers of this web log, you’re a decision-maker in a services company, national association, or government agency, up to now you have probably relied on tried-and-true channels for engaging stakeholders and inspiring your internal teams. For the most part this means print, events, fundamental web approaches, and maybe a few video and Flash! experiments. But a handful of potentially game-changing tools are emerging from Web 2.0 practices. Think seriously about integrating them judiciously into your communication programs as these approaches mature.

1. Social Media. Our current take on these tools may sound dated and ill-informed to many of today’s confirmed blog-trekkies. But the fact is, few mid-market enterprises—not to mention institutional players—have put web logs, social networking sites, and Wikis to widespread strategic use for branding and engagement. Eloquent champions of social media like Geoff Livingston are certainly rallying the troops, but so far MySpace and FaceBook, the dominant “mass-market” social network sites, have yet to frame a persuasive business case as outreach and marketing channels. While user privacy concerns are presently checkmating these big sites’ exploration on this score, smaller niche soc-net destinations like Ski Space and Infield Parking (NASCAR) are refining promising new approaches to brand building (both for themselves and for paying advertisers/sponsors).

2. Virtual Worlds. Immersive 3D environments, while not yet a breakout phenomenon in the online mainstream, offer significant ROI potential for brand strategists. Second Life is the best known of these “metaverse” environments, but others, like Disney’s pay-to-belong kid site Club Penguin--which, by the way, attracts seven times the traffic of Second Life--and pre-teen mecca There.com are courting affinity participants. Here’s There.com’s three-minute promotional animation; watch it here for five seconds and you’ll have no doubt about the site’s demographic-of-choice.

[In a future post, I’ll discuss several of the corporate and government(!!) education-and-inspiration venues that are cropping up on Second Life and other virtual worlds. Practitioners of value branding, like our Brand Vistas team, find this trend particularly exciting.]

3. Narrative branding. Many organizations today are linking their value propositions to stories that their team members recount about their work…as well as to recollections submitted voluntarily by customers and stakeholders (“Tell us your story.”) The flexibility of the Web makes this eminently possible for textual contributions (for starters), and now TV campaigns are adopting this approach as well. Check out Giant Food and Home Depot for examples.

4. “Amateur” video. This trend has sprung from the success of YouTube, and fueled many a recent consumer campaign, including efforts from Dove, Crowne Plaza hotels, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Dunkin’ Donuts. Look for this phenomenon to grow impressively in volume (if not in quality of submissions) in the months to come. Here's the winner in KFC's recent "Show Us Your Hot Wings" contest.

TWO INNOVATIONS AROUND THE NEXT BEND : market engagement through mobile phones…and “circular entertainment”, i.e., the serial enhancement/modification (“mash-ups”) of rich media and digital video as it passes from user to user.

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.