About seven years ago, I was approached by an employer brand agency in need of extra strategic support. It was really interesting work, getting right into the weeds of organisations and helping address real problems, for big brands and businesses. More recently, Iโve worked with a bigger employer brand agency as a fill-in Strategy Director across their London and NYC offices, all from my home in Yorkshire.
It has, undoubtedly, made me a better all-round strategist. And not just because of how much more I learnt about how organisations quite literally work.
A brand doesnโt just exist in the mind of target audiences, or target retailers, corporate partners, or any other entity that might fall under โother stakeholdersโ. A brand exists because the people who work there deliver it through a product or service. So, itโs pretty important that the people delivering the brand experience, however indirectly, are, quite literally, on brand. And you need to recruit and retain the best possible talent to make that happen. Which is where Employer Brand comes in.
Positioning and differentiating a business to current and potential employees as a preferred place to work needs to be in tune with the business and its brand(s). And likewise, any brand or business realignment might have implications for the employer brand. But employer brand is usually closely owned by the People team in an organisation, especially in siloed orgs, to the extent that the Brand team sometimes, in my experience, donโt think itโs their concern.
But itโs so important. Brand and Employer Brand both come from the organisationโs Mission. They both impact the target audienceโs experience of the organisation. They both build advocates and manage reputations. So they really need to be aligned. It just wasnโt on my radar properly before.
[ ๐ท by Alan Aprilio on Unsplash]