The Employer Brand: Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work

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The Changing Needs and Aspirations of Employees

On the face of it you might believe that employer brand thinking had only become relevant for major employers since McKinsey’s ‘War for Talent’ and many similar papers that have highlighted the difficulty of recruiting and retaining capable people.¹

There are many current pressures today which encourage employers to treat their people with the same care and coherence as they would value customers. However, the demands for good employer brand management have always been with us when expectations of a workforce have been extreme. In seeking examples of those conditions one has only to look at military history. Biographers of Wellington have always highlighted his support for his troops and his determination to move forward only when the necessary logistics were in place. His famous words in the aftermath of Waterloo: ‘The next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gain such a victory as this’, reflects his humanity.² Montgomery in 1943 told his 220,000 men in the desert: ‘When all this is over and they ask you what you did in the war you need only say I was in the Eighth Army.’³ Like Wellington he was trusted not to risk his forces unnecessarily and, on his deathbed, wondered what the 13,000 killed at Alamein were going to think of him. That concern plus his surefooted strategic ability and independence, earned him extraordinary loyalty. This year is the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and the same values, as well as brilliance, ...