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The Brand Is Everything You Do Besides Marketing

In a recent presentation by a marketing manager on how a particular consumer brand stacks up, I heard the following.

“We’ve got brand recognition that’s 18 points above the market, which menas 95% of people who purchase the type of product we make know who we are. We’ve got some negatives, such as a perception that we’re not timely with our delivery, we’re not particularly innovative and our people aren’t proactive, but overall the brand is strong. “

The Marketing manager was very proud of his 18 points of brand recognition.

Along with this message came a graph, marking areas against the industry standard. “Brand” was up 18 points above average, where things like “Timely delivery”, “Competitive price” and “Great service” were all under average, by between 5 and 7 points a piece.

Added up, the negatives overwhelmed the positive “Brand” message. So by industry standard, the graph makes this statement: “People know who we are, but they think we’re expensive, sloppy and boring by comparison to the market.”

This is not good brand recognition. In fact it’s terrible.

If you’re going to push a campaign out there so widely that the whole market knows what you’re doing, you should probably be doing it well. It’s going to take more work to change negative opinions than it would have to fix the problem in the first place.And it’s going to require an under-the-microscope evolution, as opposed to a quiet one in the background.

Your brand isn’t your marketing. It’s how people view every single thing you do.

Love Letters And Internal Communications

I was having a discussion yesterday with Adam Shay about internal communications and employer reputation management. Specifically, we were talking about companies where the employer brand is principally an external impression, a recruitment tool. This is actually pretty common – there’s no shortage of companies who use the brand to find talent, get them into the business, and then the brand is never seen again.

I compare the process to love letters. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve received love letters, you know there’s a tremendous personality that’s part of them. Hand-written, full of protestations of affection, written to make you feel valuable and loved. You can put fifty of them from the same author side by side, and see a pattern.

Your Employer Brand Is A Commercial Asset

Since the early days of employer brand development, there’s been a hurdle that every HR department has come up against. While the employer brand’s effectiveness as a tool can be measured in lots of intangible ways, there’s very little hard science in determining just how it contributes to the bottom line.

Over the past year as an internal employer brand manager, I’ve worked on a model to define and attach a dollar value to the employer brand. While the numbers in this example are fictitious, they show just how valuable a strong employer brand can be to an organisation.

This model looks at the three key benefits of an employer brand – attraction, retention and engagement.

Attraction

Assume that industry recruitment placement fee is 16% of salary, and the average salary of a 4000 person business is $100k. Company A hires 1000 staff a year, at 60% hires through recruitment agencies. So they’re paying $9,600,000 a year.

Company B hires 1000 staff, but only 22% through recruiters. At the same rate, their recruitment cost is only $3,520,000.

Engagement

Company A conducts a survey which demonstrates that its employees are 110% engaged. This means that employees are returning the investment that the company puts into their salary and training, in terms of discretionary effort. At 100% a company breaks even – the staff are producing work exactly in line with their combined salary. So Company A is recouping 10% more in discretionary effort than the company is paying them. This means their engagement ‘bonus’ is $40,000,000 – the commercial bonus of higher employee engagement.

Company B has workers engaged at 140% – they love the brand and they work harder. On the same salary model, this increased discretionary effort constitutes a commercial bonus of $120,000,000. Company B’s brand delivers substantially higher discretionary effort, leading to more profits.

Retention.

Company A has a standard attrition of 20% annually. As a result, it experiences a dip in productivity with new hires, which amounts to 50% of the first year salary (due to training costs, time to fill and lost productivity). So the cost of 20% attrition works out as 800 staff x $50,000 (Based on average salary of $100K, this is lost commercial benefit) = $40,000,000.

Company B has an attrition of only 14% annually. The same lost commercial benefit cost is $28,000,000.

In comparison with Company A (the industry standard), Company B’s employer brand delivers;

Recruitment savings of $6,080,000.
Commercial benefit of higher engagement of $80,000,000.
Key staff retetnion benefit of $14,000,000.
A total commercial benefit of $100,080,000.

Naturally, some of these areas are difficult to define. How do you measure engagement vs productivity? In professional services, charge-out rates make this easier than in owner-operator businesses. Using your own benchmarks, you can determine the commercial result of your employee engagement, and translate this into the engagemnt part of this equation.

This is only an example, and gathering the data to create your own employer brand equity is a difficult and onerous task. However, once you can, the employer brand doesn’t become a nice-to-have. It becomes an intangible asset, part of your overall business strategy.

Of course, there’s the other side of the equation. By comparison with the industry standard, it’s entirely likely your employer brand is a commercial liability, based on the three markers above. What better argument for fixing it than the fact that it’s literally putting you at a disadvantage?

Selling Your Own Employment Experience

It’s part of a recruitment function’s job to sell an organisation to potential hires. Whether your employment brand is linked to a strong retail brand or not, the genuine workplace experience is rarely understood by your market. It’s the recruiter’s job, by using the brand and their own understanding of the market, to create an accurate picture of that experience.

This creates a snare for businesses with young recruitment functions and young brands.

The trap comes from the desire to demonstrate positives by contrast. In any market, it’s not unusual for competitors to differentiate themselves from competitors by pointing out the things they do better. We’re cheaper or make a better product or always deliver on time. It’s how, from a sales perspective, we stand apart.

Being employed is a different experience to buying a product. Employment is about subjective criteria, and is measures on a personal scale. You cannot quantify that your managers listen more than your nearest competitor, or that you do more to develop careers. It’s unprovable, and draws you into a symbiotic comparison.

When this happens, recruitment functions become trapped by their own mechanism. Ensuring you’re beating a competitor in key areas becomes more important than improving the growth areas in your own business. Developing a convincing argument based on its own merits, not on key contrasts to another business, is essential to a healthy brand.

Understanding the weakness of a competitor is important. Using it as a sales/recruitment tool is not only lazy, but dangerous long-term.

Is your brand built to attract, retain or both?

Many companies who began the process of defining and employment value proposition and creating an employer brand did so as a means of attracting staff. The brand became important as a means of talking to the market, of building an external reputation. It was a vehicle for communicating promise to a market that had no exposure to the reality of working for you.

As the market switches from recruiting to redeployment, many experts are saying that your brand still needs to be a fundamental part of your argument. This is absolutely true – you don’t stop having a brand just because you aren’t actively promoting it. Your brand is who you are, your fundamental personality. There is a scramble within market to turn brands inward, to focus on key staff retention and keeping talent, rather than attracting it.

If your brand is built on an honest reflection of the actual employee experience, this shouldn’t be too hard. Brands which attracted by overselling the company and building an idealistic view will struggle.Companies guilty of ‘oversell’ will start to see real problems when the false retention that the current crisis has induced begins to wear off.

When the recruitment requirements of companies begin to thaw, the employment brand of a copany will be a strong determinant in attracting key staff. More importantly, it will play a huge part in your ability as a business to hold onto the key performers you need, when the downturn ends. Your brand needs to be robust enough to attract and retain with equal measure – getting them in the door is only a small aprt of finding and engaging the staff you need to succeed.

Promoting Your Employer Brand In A Recession

There’s a lot of talk about what to do with your employer brand in a recessionary environment. As companies become introspective and gear their HR teams towards redeployment, redundancies and realignment with the business’ new strategic objectives, it’s an interesting challenge.

Discussions today suggested that, based on product/service marketing historical models, companies which don’t advertise during an economic downturn can be perceived as cowardly and unreliable. The data suggests that brands who do not advertise in a recession aren’t remembered when the market picks up again.

The problem with drawing a parallel with product/service advertising during previous economic downturns is that there was still a product/service to sell. With many companies instituting a recruitment freeze, you may be promoting a product that doesn’t exist.

If you’re running public messaging telling people how wonderful it is to work for you, and yet they have no chance to find out because you aren’t opening the doors, how are they going to feel? What are you saying to the market by asking them to fall in love with you, then telling them you’re not ready for a relationship right now? And what does it say to your current staff, who are already worried about potential layoffs, when you are continually advertising in the paper?

I’m not against promoting your employment brand – on the contrary, your brand needs regular exercise and a considered approach. The ‘business as usual’ approach being suggested won’t achieve the short, or long, terms goals of your brain. Your strategy needs to be reviewed now that conditions have changed, and an approach that covers your current needs, and prepares for the inevitable change in market conditions, needs to be implemented.

Your Brand Doesn’t Need Social Media ‘Arguments’

There is no doubt that, somewhere out there, someone thinks you’re not a great employer. Someone thinks you don’t pay enough, or give enough reward for hard work, or offer enough training. Someone thinks your company is stingy, or unethical, of full of nepotism and favouritism. Someone thinks they wouldn’t work for you ever again. And that someone has a voice.

Employer Of Choice – But For Who?

When you’re crafting an employer brand, it’s common for someone around the table to talk about having a brand that reaches the greatest audience. They want an employer brand that everyone’s comfortable with, that ensures you don’t offend anyone. A brand that gains mass appeal with the public. A brand that everyone can love. It’s a reasonable argument – more readers, more candidates. And who doesn’t want more candidates? Who doesn’t want to be an employer of choice?

You don’t.

Being the place that everyone wants to work is the surest way to burning out recruiters, hiring managers, and destroy your brand. Being an employer of choice will grind you into the ground quicker than being the place that no one wants to work. Your popularity will become a curse, and will reduce your brand to a litany of disappointed candidates. You don’t want everyone to want to work for you.

Part of a successful employer brand is the appeal to an archetypal person in the market. It’s about creating a personality that certain people will fall in love with. A personality that appeals to everyone makes you lovable to no one. Being lovable is about being individual, aligned and appealing to a particular taste. It’s about finding the people who are like you. Who share your values, your vision, your ethics and your style.

If you try appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. You can’t align yourself to someone by being bland or neutral.  Personality’s don’t work like that.You have to stand for something to get people to stand beside you.

For your employer brand to be really effective, you need a thorough understanding of what your ideal employees want from an employer. Saying you’re family friendly doesn’t appeal to young, upwardly mobile entrepreneurs. Saying you’re a company that pushes hard and rewards extra effort doesn’t appeal to those looking for more work/family balance. Saying you’re anything that you’re not, just for the sake of getting talent through the door, is going to backfire totally. As demonstrated beautifully in this post by Maren Hogan.

Your brand needs to be relevant, targeted and honest. Otherwise, you end up having to manage a lot of expectations,  and you create promises so meaningless and vague that it’s impossible to meet them to the satisfaction of your staff. You brand can’t be open to interpretation. It must be specific about the kind of people it is geared to attract, and the kind of people it wants to repel.

An employer brand isn’t just about finding the right people – it’s a cultural blueprint for your organisation. It should make it clear to people who are skilled enough to work for you that there are cultural parameters to being your employee. It should also tell them what those parameters are quickly, succinctly and in a way which encourages engagement or disengagement.

Your brand is a message. You don’t just have to craft what you’re saying – you need to define who you want to receive it too.

Speaking The Right Language For Your Employees

Finding the right match means using the right language

Imagine you’re at a coffee shop on your own on Saturday morning. You’re in a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. You don’t feel that you’re ready to break up and leave the relationship yet, but you’re keeping a weather eye out, just in case. You’re enjoying some alone time.

While reading the paper, you see an ad that describes you as the person who is perfect for the author. The ad makes them sound attractive, rewarding and fun. Like your partner used to be. You’re intrigued. You want to know more.

You recognize the name from somewhere. Maybe someone you know has had a relationship with them before. Maybe one of your friends knows them. You know there’s a connection somewhere.

Do you:

1. Call the number on the ad and talk to them, knowing that they’re on the market and possibly desperate?
2. Look them up on Facebook, Twitter, wikipedia, or the web, to try and find out about them quietly?
3. Ask your friends if anyone knows them and whether it’s a good opportunity?
4. Wait and hope that one of your friends will introduce the two of you out of the blue?
5. Call a dating agency to see if they can introduce you?

The way you address this is no different to the ways you can look at engaging a company to find a job. There’s no right way – there are only different levels of directness. When you identify an opportunity, you have the control over how you approach the company. And in fact, a company that is closely aligned with you spiritually will have made itself contactable in your preferred method deliberately. They’ll have done this for two reasons – to put you at ease, and prove they can speak your language.

If you’re an employer, part of your employer brand includes where you choose to be seen, and how to be contacted. Your brand isn’t just about broadcasting a message. It’s also about designing mechanisms for conversation that make your target market feel comfortable to engage in. Understanding how your employees want to get in contact with you, and preparing a response or strategy for enhancing this first contact is crucial to beginning engagement.

Five questions worth asking of your brand conversation strategy are;

1. How do the bulk of candidates respond to an advertised opportunity?
2. Can your current contact plan ensure a consistent, brand-rich experience across all your contact mediums?
3. Where could your brand currently be that candidates would be looking for you? Note – this isn’t an excuse to leap onto Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social platforms. Research first, action second.
4. What isn’t working? Where are the holes in the process? What could you re-engineer to make more representative of your brand?
5. What is in place to ensure consistency? What guidelines are there about brand-rich communication for new staff, external recruitment agencies and your successors?

Just like the phone call after a first date, the immediate contact you have with someone who is interested in you as an employer is key. Make it brand-rich, honest and meaningful, and you drastically improve your chances of getting the right people on board.