At the risk of stating the obvious, employer brands never exist in a vacuum. They exist in parallel with corporate brands and consumer brands – and the challenge, at the organisational level, is to bring them all into alignment.
Which is not quite as simple as it sounds.
One reason for this is a long established tendency within organisations to hive off the employer brand from the corporate brand, the first falling within the remit of the HR team, the other within the remit of the marketing and business strategy teams.
And – perhaps as much for budgetary as ideological reasons – it’s not uncommon for those teams to adopt entirely different methodologies, conceptual frameworks and communication strategies.
Take the use of storytelling, for instance. Marketers have long recognised the wisdom of making a connection with the customer first, and selling second – a feat that takes more than facts, figures and advertising slogans. The key is to share with consumers stories that are worthy of their attention and time. Think of Ridley Scott’s 1984 commercial for Apple. Think of the John Lewis ‘Man on the Moon’ Christmas ads. Think of Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign. These story-based formats set up the situation, chronicle the conflict, show the resolution and – most importantly – give a call to action.
[And in case this gives the impression that storytelling strategies require cinema-quality videos and budgets beyond the wildest dreams of HR departments, remember that some recruiters – KPMG, Southwest Airlines, British Heart Foundation and The Body Shop, for instance – are already demonstrating how to integrate storytelling into everything from their job descriptions and social media engagement to their company presentations and career websites. Indeed, it was the late, great Anita Roddick who famously championed “humanised communication” and believed that “information not passed through the heart is dangerous.”Put simply, story-based marketing strategies that emerge from authentic storytelling corporate cultures are more engaging, more impactful and more emotional than conventional sales pitches – and that’s why they work. As Dan Hill points out inEmotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success, “Emotions process input in only one fifth the time our conscious, cognitive brain takes to assimilate that same point.” And emotions, as Antonio Damasio’s research shows, drive our decision-making process as well.
The bottom line? Glad you asked. A study by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising found that ads with purely emotional content generated twice as much profit as ads based on rational content (31% versus 16%) and according to Psychology Today, fMRI neuro-imagery shows that consumers use emotions rather than information to evaluate a brand.
If this has profound implications for corporate and consumer branding, it surely has equal if not greater relevance to Employer Branding and its allied attraction and recruitment strategies?
You would have thought.
The reality is that a surprising number of Human Resource professionals engaged in recruitment and employer branding have yet to engage with the value of storytelling beyond using employee case studies in their brochures and the occasional talking-head employee testimonial on their websites.
Why should this be so? Let me share my theory with you…
In my experience, a significant proportion of Human Resources professionals are much more comfortable dealing with tables, lists, taxonomies and models than they are engaging with and understanding the power of story. As a result, they typically face the complexities of branding with recourse to comforting methodologies and brand architecture formulas – the pyramids, wheels, onions and other visual (and occasionally pseudo-scientific) simplifications that have found significant traction in the burgeoning Employer Branding industry.
Another factor is the emergence of an insistent ‘Return on Investment’ mindset within the HR community. This perfectly logical development has unfortunately coincided with the eruption of HR metrics, web-based analytics and the notion that recruitment communications – most of it now online – can be parsed, distilled, assessed and judged according to bounce rates, referral URLs, query terms, time on on page, unique visitors, conversion rate, task completion rates and more.
In all this analysis, the role of storytelling tends to get lost or overlooked, resulting in an inability to see its potential to deliver a distinctive, branded, authentic, engaging and persuasive presentation of organisational ‘reality’ both internally and externally. Suggest a story-based communications to some HR professionals and – as if to prove the point – they will ask for proof that it will work before they agree to it.
And here’s the problem: the latest data-driven insight can become a substitute for something distinctive to say about the organisation and the brand. We see a movement away from story and narrative towards what Barbara Czarniawska calls in this context “the logico-scientific mode of knowing”. Such data-confined methodologies always become sterile in the end.
In short, far too much analysis and evaluation, far too little engagement and emotion.
It is no longer enough to refer to meaningless abstractions like “Trust” and “Integrity”: you need to articulate those values in action, and in all their complexity, through story – and, most importantly, ensure that those stories really do reflect what the organisation is offering.
Nor is it enough to give candidates facts and statistic about your company and your offer. George Bernard Shaw said “The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished”, and that will inevitably be the case if you communicate only at the rational and transactional level (starting bonus, anyone?) and deny them an authentic narrative they can relate to, believe in, identify with and, if it is done well, act upon.
People are searching for meaning in a world increasingly swamped by data. It’s not sufficient for candidates and employees to know what you do; they need to know why. As Howard Schultz of Starbucks said, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, trust.”
How does your brand story measure up?