Employer Brand Management: Practical Lessons from the World's Leading Employers

Chapter 11EVP Development

‘Character is the tree, reputation is the shadow.’

Abraham Lincoln

Isaac Newton ushered in the rational enlightenment. He also believed in the philosopher's stone. He's best known for his science. He gave us laws of light and motion. He showed us how to predict the course of heavenly bodies, and explained the steady pull of gravity. As one biographer put it: ‘He made knowledge a thing of substance, quantitative and exact’.¹ It was not until over 200 years after his death that a prominent economist, collecting and deciphering the apparently impenetrable trunks of manuscripts, also discovered Newton harboured a secret passion for alchemy. In complete contrast to his mechanistic theories and legacy, he also believed in the magical transformation of base metal into gold. As my previous boss and mentor, Mark Sherrington, pointed out, brand development is like alchemy.² You need hard data and evidence, but you also need some magic to transform this base material into something that lifts the spirit and fires the imagination.

The principal role of the employee value proposition (EVP) is to provide a consistent platform for brand communication and experience management. In some cases an organization may choose to use an EVP to underpin a single communication campaign, but increasingly EVPs are designed to play a much wider role in providing brand integrity across all forms of brand communication and people management activities. In the global employer brand ...