Employer_ment Branding
Let me suggest a small but effective ploy for stirring up trouble among a group of talent management professionals. When discussing branding in the human capital space, ask which terms are most appropriate: (a) Employer brand/ing or (b) Employment brand/ing? A quick search of both sets of terms at Google.com shows a respectable 296,000 hits for the terms employment brand/ing but a whopping 2.7 million hits for the terms employer brand/ing. Despite a near internet consensus of using the employer branding term, I’d like to suggest that talent professionals have it all wrong – the proper term is employment branding. And the difference is critical.
The problem, in my mind, is that the people that started the conversation about branding to influence talent were psychologists and human resource professionals, not marketers. Let’s start with a quick definition. According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or design or combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller and to differentiate them from the goods and services of competitors. In other words, product and service branding, what we typically call “branding” is the process of creating awareness and positive associations about specific products and services in the minds of consumers. Corporate branding is the process of creating awareness and positive associations about an entire corporation in the minds of consumers, shareholders, government regulators, and other stakeholders. In the employment context, the “goods and services” about which companies want to create awareness and positive associations would be employment – what the employer offers in exchange to prospective and current employees for their physical, emotional, and mental energies. In other words, the difference between employment and employer branding is the same as the difference between product and corporate branding. Employment branding helps companies distinguish their employment offering from labor market competitors while employer branding simply tries to add the positive trait of “good place to work” to the very large set of associations current and prospective employees hold about an entire corporation.
Allow me to illustrate. First, watch this commercial for British Petroleum (BP) aired in the summer of 2012 one year after the 2011 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Notice that the purpose of the commercial is to improve consumer’s impressions of the entire British Petroleum Corporation for one single attribute (reparations for the oil spill) among a multitude of possible associations about BP. Now watch this commercial for the Audi A3 TDI automobile. The purpose of this hilarious “Green Police” advertisement was to create in the mind of the consumer a small number of positive associations (environmentally safety, hipness) about a single product. To improve recruiting outcomes, talent managers want to create positive associations and awareness about a focused set of attributes for categories of employment offerings. While important, I do not believe talent managers want to simply add “good place to work” to the cacophony of associations current and prospective employees hold about an entire corporation.
The difference between employment and employer branding is more than semantics. Just as individual companies offer a wide range of products each with a different value proposition, price point, and managed brand associations, they also offer a wide range of employment offerings with different employee value propositions, market pay rates, and employment brand associations. A company offering a simple message providing a consolidated description of all employment offerings would be akin to companies like 3M or Coca-Cola branding all of their products simply as “good,” “reliable,” and “effective.” Employment branding allows companies to create awareness and specific associations about a wide range of employment offerings to targeted prospective and current employees.
Tim Gardner PhD is Associate Professor of Management at the Jon Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. He completed his PhD at Cornell University and was previously on the faculty of the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Prior to graduate school, he worked as an Employee Relations Manager at the Big Lots corporate offices and held the role of Compensation Administrator at The Longaberger Company. He consults and conducts research with regional and global companies. His primary expertise is helping firms use unconventional methods to acquire and retain talent.
Contact Tim at: