John, in contrarian fashion, to your last point first:

What makes Company X the employer of choice for Unix professionals is unlikely to be the dynamic that attracts candidates in accounting.

Isn’t the key here to understand that employer branding and job branding are different things? In the same way that most candidates recognize “employer of choice” rhetoric is more propaganda than anything else, I think they will find an employer’s message more compelling if it can be delivered in real-time, on-demand and where the emphasis is on the job/work. That makes the communication all the more relevant to “me.” That makes a candidate’s positive response more likely, right?

When you say that a brand “is a relationship” it might be helpful to define exactly what that means. The problem, as I see it, is this:

The branding models that we are trying to reinvent remain for the most part one-way communications. Push marketing can never realize the potential of an increasingly social/digital recruiting landscape. The expectation today is increasingly for true and meaningful engagement. Candidates want direct, authentic and interactive exchanges. If our brand/marketing message is to work, surely our best measure of success is the number of people who are motivated to initiate a first move. That requires more “pull” than “push.” It may also require a resetting of our expectations in terms of ROI, and a re-framing of how we measure it.

If you are right about “the tools needed to build very clear, very small niche oriented brands are readily available” can we also agree that there is no smaller niche [or greater circle of influence] than a single qualified candidate and that person’s immediate network of peers? While the means to market even to a clique certainly exits, using our assumed relationship to convey a brand-massage is likely to backfire horribly. Isn’t that, in part, the reason you say, “This ‘downward evolution’ of marketing, covered in our earlier work, creates both expanded opportunity and expanded responsibility at the department and operating unit level?”

It seems to me that most of us are still trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Branding is about sanitizing a message for public consumption. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter if the audience is an entire population of workers or a handful of high-value targets. If talents’ expectations are for greater access, authenticity, transparency, and “I-ccentric” communication, it is hard to see how branding — however you want to tart it up — can deliver that. When the branditeers test the value of the so-called “relationship” they imagine exists they may well find that the love is unrequited, the effort wasted. Branding is, by default, the the truth glossed over and not the real thing. Candidates recognize that and reject it. Employers haven’t worked out yet how to give people the unvarnished truth and leverage a warts-and-all branding to their advantage. When they do they can legitimately describe the relationship as that, and with all of the intimacy and mutual understanding that the word implies.

By way of constructive criticism, perhaps we should think more about how to produce recruiters and hiring managers who are true “brand ambassadors.” If branding is really is about relationships maybe we should demonstrate our sincerity by eating our dog food first.

It’s laughable really. For all the effort brainiacs in high places put into pushing the marketing envelope, it is all for nothing when direct contact with most employers is a rotten experience for the majority of job seekers. Isn’t “candidate experience” supposed to validate our employment brand? I guess the irony is that it always does.

John,

Great and insightful as usual. If I had the brass I’d tattoo “brands are relationships” on my forehead. Or maybe not, actually. Point is, that’s more than correct–it’s exactly correct. It’s also exactly counter to much of the industry’s thinking which sees brands as marketing collateral, when the collateral is, at best, a refresher on the brand’s core values.

I’m also with you on your comments about the generational shift in brands and the drive (in employer branding) toward sub-brands, but here I’m not 100% with you. I think what we’re seeing is the same evolution in employer brands as the marketplace saw in product brands a century ago with the move from master brands to portfolio brands. I don’t see the fragmentation you describe–at least, not quite the way you describe it.

My grandfather was born in 1906. When he was born, Ford was producing the Model F. When he was two, the Model T rolled out. By the time he died in 1999, there were dozens of brands under the Ford umbrella ranging from family members (like the Mustang and Pinto) to distant relatives (like the Lincoln Towncar) and more recently, kissing cousins (or worse) like Jaguar and Volvo. The brand had stretched, diversified, evolved…and nearly died as a result.

Today, Ford, GM, Chrysler and a handful of other portfolio holders are relearning the lessons brand savants like David Aaker have been teaching the better pupils in the class for years: portfolio strategy matters. Which is among the reasons, in my view at least, that companies with really well-managed brand portfolios like Apple and Intel continue to thrive.

In my view, employment’s no different. While it’s tempting to brand the microenvironment, there’s a counter-intuitive reason that doesn’t make sense beyond a fairly limited point: in a well managed company, people need to show up in alignment with a larger direction. This means brands that become *too* diversified in their approach to microenvironments of culture, language, product lines, etc. run the risk of losing or limiting the business benefits of all being under the same roof: aligned behavior.

I once read a news article about sardines that may make this point more sharply. According to this report, a sardine trawler fishing off the coast of Norway managed to net a really nice haul of sardines. Good news for the boys on the boat…until the sardines all started swimming down together–and pulled the trawler under. I don’t know what happened to the crew, but I do know that not a single one of those sardines could have taken on a single one of the fishermen. Tens of thousands together? Another story.

But what’s really interesting, given the benefits to the sardines of organized labor, is that this almost never happens. Perhaps it’s because they’re not very smart, they don’t have experience with nets, and most experiences with nets end badly, at least for the fish. But perhaps there’s also a message here about brand management.

Even if the sardines were smart and organized, even if they’d worked out that breaking out into sub-branded, plankton-eating platoons was the best way to fill their fishy bellies; come net time, the only brand that mattered would be the one that pointed down.

Interesting points, Amitai, but I wouldn’t expect anything less of you!

I’m old fashioned when it comes to social media. I still consider it a medium. Yes, it’s democratic, yes, it’s a headache for marketers. But, with apologies to McLuhan it’s the medium, not the message.

My point is simply that brands need to unify. Let me be even more out there in my example. Imagine an employer decided to make a brand for every single employee. I like the color blue, so I get the blue materials. My colleague’s a late riser, so she gets the “work when you want” brand. What’s left? Essentially, freelancing, because with so many promises in the marketplace there’d be no way for an organization to be…organized. Which is the principle of modern business. And as nice as the democratization of the “we’re all freelancers” model sounds, in practice what we end up with are a bunch of rogue sardines. Which is fine, of course, so long as there are no nets requiring us to move together….