We have already got Employer Branding – isn’t that enough?

I did get the concept of employment marketing into print before employer branding came along, though only in letters to professional journals. It was not until 1996 that I had full articles on employment marketing published, and by then employer branding was catching on.(These articles are reproduced below, see blog for 3 January and 26 December.)  So I view the rise in popularity of employer branding with mixed feelings. It is applying a marketing technique to some of what HR does, which makes it an ally. My antagonism to employer branding is that by applying some of marketing to some of HR, it blinds HR people from seeing the possibilities of using all of marketing across everything that HR does.

One obstacle that both approaches share is the general ignorance of marketing amongst HR practitioners (at least in the UK). Most see the terms “marketing” and “branding” as synonyms for each other, and both meaning “advertising and promoting.”  I am not going to attempt authoritative, detailed definitions here – if you are an HR person who has never read a marketing textbook, go and read one right now.  

The current Wikipedia definition of employer branding is good enough. “Employer branding has been defined as the sum of a company’s efforts to communicate to existing and prospective staff what makes it a desirable place to work, and the active management of a company’s image as seen through the eyes of its associates and potential hires. “

There’s nothing wrong in that. It’s a good idea to have a positive brand image rather than a bad one. We would all like to be perceived as good places to work. It then gets seen as the concern primarily of the recruitment function and, for big organisations, also the concern of corporate affairs. For many HR practitioners, the mechanisms by which you manage employer branding are the recruitment channels you use, the look and feel of the recruitment website, the organisation’s mission statement and code of company values, and the PR efforts of the organisation. Some HR people put too much emphasis on the visual aspects of company logos, advert layout, etc. – reflecting the kind of branding relevant to fast-moving consumer goods. ( In a later blog, I’ll discuss the relative contribution of the visuals; branding in the sense of trade marks, logos and packaging, to employment.)  

So what does employer branding not pick out of the marketing toolkit? Quite a lot, I think.

In many cases, HR practitioners do not have a target section of the labour market in mind – “we want the brand to appeal to people”. Great – you’ve narrowed it down to a species.  Just applicants from homo sapiens need apply!  For companies like national supermarket chains, they might justify appealing to “the general public” as their product brand does, and their recruits come from a very broad range of the labour market. For many organisations, there are particular groups that you want to attract because they are key to your business.

Once you have identified those sectors of the labour market, you can do some competitor analysis, and research how your product offering (all aspects of the careers and jobs you offer) are perceived by the relevant employment consumers. This can bring in the marketing approach to pricing to ensure that your remuneration is competitive for the employment consumers you need to attract and retain. The marketing discipline of product development can identify if certain aspects of the work you offer appeals or discourages the employment consumers you need to attract. For example, does it involve using leading-edge technology that will have an additional appeal? Perhaps the work you have to offer involves using legacy technology that is a negative factor that you will have to compensate for in offer aspects of your offering. 

The brand reality exists in the minds of potential and current consumers. Their perception can be influenced by things you do to the product, its pricing or promotion. The brand is not something unilaterally decided by the organisation and then transmitted one-way to the consumer.

It seems for most HR people who want to do employer branding, the idea of a never-ending interaction between employment product offering and consumers’ expectations is a bit too complicated. Let’s just start the process in the middle and invent a brand.  For example, here is a quote from a 2007 CIPD paper on employer branding:-

“Employer branding begins with the creation of an employer brand image, what an organisation’s senior managers want to communicate about its package of functional, economic and psychological benefits..”  

 The CIPD’s other employer branding publication in 2007 “Employer Branding: A no-nonsense approach” saw developing your employer brand as basically a project. Get buy-in for the project, get a budget for research, choose an agency to help you, within a few weeks you will have a new web site and a smart logo, and that’s employer branding done – simples!

A further limitation of the employer branding approach is that even when done very thoroughly, it assumes there is only one branding strategy within marketing. The assumption is that employer brand must be an example of multi-product branding. This is where all products of a company sit within one brand; BMW cars is a good example. Other companies go for the approach of multi-brand products, where individual products have their particular brand. The diverse products of Procter and Gamble epitomise this approach. Could there be circumstances where an employer should opt for a  multi-brand strategy?  If an organisation has acquired a subsidiary with a very different ethos and profile of workforce, keeping separate identities might be the best option.  To offer an example from personal experience, I worked for the UK subsidiary of a Far East corporate. In its home country, the corporation was a household name, a major employer able to offer long-term careers, and was strong on in-house training. Within the UK market, our subsidiary was small, unknown and rapidly growing. In the UK we attracted people who saw their career as something they managed by moving through different companies.  Trying to impose the parent company’s brand and employment products would not only be inappropriate, it would actually deter the kind of people we needed – entrepreneurial and comfortable with risk. The parent company brand might appeal to those who wanted a risk-averse corporate career, but we could not deliver that in the UK subsidiary. Different employment products pitched to different target market segments cannot be the same brand.  

The role of the marketing function is not to manage the brand. Their role is to get people to buy the product. Brand is only an intermediate step in the process. Applying marketing to employment means every change HR makes is making a marketing decision.