How the Cookie Crumbles
Mark Ury thinks your employer brand is a bag of cookies. Question is, are you chewy or extra chunk?
Employer branding, like the term branding itself, is like a Bob Dylan song. Everyone's heard it, some of us can sing the chorus, but very few actually understand it.
To clarify the employer brand liner notes, we sat down with Mark Ury, branding expert and Director of User Experience at Blast Radius. We quickly got to talking about names, ideas and cookies.
Q. Let's start with an easy one. What's a brand?
[Laughs] That's the easy one? OK. First and foremost, a brand is a name. A name that, over time, has burrowed its way into a consumer's brain. Pepsi, Volvo, Herman Miller. These are brand names.
It's also a word-association. As it enters the brain, it carries with it a theme that's reinforced by advertising: Pepsi is young, Volvo is safe, Herman Miller is stylish.
Q. Is that it?
A. For the consumer, that's it. It's a name and a theme. But on the corporate side, if the management and staff really have it together, then a brand can encompass just about everything they do. It can become their family values and guide how they buy things, treat their employees, develop new ideas. Everything.
Q. What about branding, as in the verb?
A. Branding is what marketing used to be called. It's the energy required to burrow that name and theme into a consumer's head. From the look of the Harley-Davidson magalogue to the sound of their engine to the texture of their leather goods, branding ensures that the Harley theme is consistent and tangible.
Q. How does this fit into employer branding?
A. To answer that, you first have to think of a job as a product. Like a box of cookies. A job is on a shelf beside fifty other products, each begging for the consumer's attention.
Employer branding is designing your box of cookies to give the consumer some kind of idea of the taste and texture of your offer.
Q. Chewy or chocolate chunks.
A. Yeah. It's no different than that. You use marketing tactics to drive home a theme about your job. Clear and simple, so it sticks.
Q. So do you just adopt the company's consumer or business brand?
A. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Apple, for instance, is a design culture. Translating their slavish attention to product design and software to the talent market isn't too hard. Pepsi, on the other hand, isn't as easy. The product is well known, like Apple, but there's no legendary Steve Jobs hovering over the staff. Is Pepsi Co. a laid-back atmosphere? Hard driving? There's some work to be done here. You can't just port over ads about youth culture.
Q. These are well known companies.
A. That's right. Many companies are unknown in the talent market. Menu Foods, a white-label cat and dog-food manufacturer, makes the food found in 60 percent of the big brands. Have you heard of them? No. Would you want to work for them? Who knows? Here you're talking about building an employer brand since there's no consumer brand to work from.
Q. And how, exactly, does one go about building a brand?
A. Well, most ad firms would say advertising. But I agree with Al Ries and his book The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR. He holds that brands are built by PR and maintained by advertising.
This bears out. With a young, unknown company, the celebrity of your CEO will have more of an impact on hiring (and hiring right) than any other element of your marketing. Early on, you need the credibility of the media to get attention. Once you're old news, though, you switch to advertising to maintain your position and your theme.
The key, though, is to hone in on something that separates you from the pack and amplify it, over and over. That's the basics of branding. Find something that's different about your product (more locations, better benefits, design culture) and think of many inventive ways to keep reminding candidates.
Sooner or later they'll reach for your bag of cookies.
Mark Ury, formerly of Bernard Hodes Group, now directs user experience at Blast Radius. His clients have included Accenture, Cracker Barrel Restaurants, IKEA, Peabody Energy, American Express, and GlaxoSmithKline.
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