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

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Employer Brand Communication

While we have made it clear that there is far more to employer branding than ‘sexing up’ your recruitment materials or running a series of ‘brandwash’ events, brand communication clearly plays a vital role in helping to improve people’s understanding and perceptions of what the organisation has to offer.

IDENTITY

The first subject to tackle is employer brand identity. Do you need to create a new name for the employer brand? We suggest that the answer to this question in most cases should be ‘no’. The integrity of the brand is vitally important to its credibility. While the brand may offer different propositions and benefits to a range of different internal and external audiences, there should always be a common core. By developing a separate employer brand name there is a danger of it being seen as an artificial gloss on the current reality, or a short-term initiative, rather than something of enduring meaning and substance.

There are some circumstances in which a new brand name may appear to represent the most workable solution. In 2003, Allied-Domecq launched an employer brand called ‘Real Players’. The rationale for this new brand was that Allied-Domecq, with 500 subsidiaries in 50 countries, was essentially a holding company financial brand. While people in the head office work directly for Allied-Domecq, most employees around the world work for other organisational brands, such as Hiram Walker in the USA. The purpose of launching ‘Real Players’ ...