Employer Branding Is the New Marketing Imperative

Brands are now knee-deep in social and political issues that, until recently, they wouldn’t have touched with a barge pole. Conventional wisdom has it that the increasing number of consumers motivated by social values is goading brands to support the greater social good. While there is some merit to that claim, there is arguably another equally powerful vector of change: the employee. For instance, after much waffling, Disney’s position against the state of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law was spurred on by pressure from its employees.

Employees are not only empowered and agitated; they are restless. More than a third of all employees (41%, according to Forrester’s 2021 Future of Work Survey) expect to look for other opportunities in the next 12 months. As companies face an employee exodus, talent acquisition and retention concerns have burst into the C-suite from the confines of human resources.

Building a brand that attracts and retains talent — employer branding — is at the top of the C-suite agenda and is the most critical priority among CMOs, according to a 2022 Forrester CMO Pulse Survey. “Now is the time,” the CMO at a $28 billion commercial real estate company told us, when “talent is the No. 1 priority among our leaders.”

Marketing’s Next Frontier

Given marketers’ inherent expertise in building brands, there is no group better suited to contribute significantly to employer branding efforts. The evolution from traditional customer-oriented branding to employer branding is a natural one, for three primary reasons.

The right mindset. A well-rounded marketer has an end-to-end life cycle mindset throughout which they engage with their audience: Entice and convert a prospect; grow the relationship over its life cycle; drive advocacy. The fundamentals are similar: Swap out “prospect” for “candidate” and “customer” for “employee,” and you’ve transformed a traditional brand strategy approach into an employer branding one.

The right skill set. The day-to-day activities of good employer branding map closely to what marketers do. Marketers zero in on a target audience, understand their motivations, find the right media channels and experiences to grab their attention, and then deliver a compelling message to reel them in. The talent acquisition process mirrors what marketers do every day, albeit to a different audience — prospective employees. The same muscles that make a brand salient and attractive to consumers are those that target, message, and entice candidates.

The right narrative. Because marketers own the overarching brand narrative and experience, they are uniquely situated to connect the dots, ensuring that a company’s “inside” and “outside” brands are in harmony. By narratively shaping both the employee experience and customer experience, marketers can provide the crucial alignment that connects their people to their customers. The need for alignment is why Southwest Airlines (LUV on the New York Stock Exchange) instills in its employees a warrior spirit, a servant’s heart, and a fun-“LUVing” attitude, and why Ritz-Carlton exhorts its employees to be “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”

Three Best Practices Fuel Employer Branding

For our research, we spoke with practitioners in the trenches and with leaders at consultancies that guide companies on their employer brand strategies. We talked to some who were shepherding steady employer brands and others who were giving shape to nascent ones. From their successes and failures, we distilled these three best practices to help navigate employer branding.

1. Elevate marketing beyond its traditional mandate. For marketing to shape employer branding, the discipline must transcend its traditional customer-only orientation and embrace a broader role in the business. This emboldened marketer must view the brand as a thread that runs through the business, from candidate, employee, and customer experiences all the way to brand perception. When deciding the best use of budget, for example, this emboldened marketer must consider brand investments in talent acquisition and retention as much as their spending on traditional awareness and advertising programs.

At financial services technology company MarketAxess, the CMO’s mandate includes traditional marketing responsibilities as well as employer brand, talent, and culture functions, allowing her to harmonize the customer-facing brand with the employee experience. With this elevated remit, marketing is empowered to build a strong, connected brand that works as well inside as it does outside.

2. Nurture the marketing-HR symbiosis. When Jim Beam launched its employer branding initiative, the project had both HR and marketing participation from day one. Every success story in employer branding recounted to us, such as Jim Beam’s, featured dual protagonists. Marketing brought an outside-in perspective and a distinct skill set that traditional HR functions lacked. The HR team brought unique insight into employee motivators to inform the front-end strategy, and also the ability to implement the strategy through the employee life cycle. Marketing and HR are better together — a symbiotic relationship built on unique and complementary skills.

At GDIT, an IT business unit of General Dynamics, the leadership and budget for employer branding sits with the vice president of marketing, but daily operations are performed in tight internal alignment with numerous stakeholders in talent and HR. These collaborations are a vital engine for transforming the messaging and positioning of marketing into the “lived” employee experience through programs such as onboarding, training, career development, and community building.

3. Amplify authenticity. The idea of authenticity has gained traction in traditional consumer branding, but authentically representing the brand is even more important in employer branding. Manufactured messages ring hollow with employees who have a front-row seat to the goings-on within a company, and they also lack credibility among job candidates. Successfully hiring and retaining talent requires an ongoing conversation through programs and campaigns that express the brand in an honest, transparent, and relatable manner, creating appeal for candidates and fostering loyalty among employees.

When Heineken launched a campaign where employees recounted candid (and humorous) on-the-job experiences, it wove employees into the fabric of the brand story, creating a sense of engagement and belonging. At the same time, the company offered potential candidates an unfiltered, relatable, first-person glimpse into what it might feel like to work at Heineken. Copenhagen-based Danske Bank achieved the same end by giving different employees unfettered “ownership” of its careers account on Instagram every month. Employees felt trusted and engaged, and candidates got an unvarnished look into the employee experience.

When General Electric debuted its “Owen” national advertising campaign during the 2016 Oscars, it made history as the first brand to launch a campaign that targeted employees, not customers — in this case, software developers who the company was hoping to hire. Today, employer branding considerations are making deeper inroads into business strategy. In 2022, the 118-year-old Ford Motor Co. split its auto business into two groups, one of which focuses solely on electric vehicles. A major impetus behind this change was the urgency to attract engineering and software talent that was otherwise flocking to the likes of Tesla.

The focus on acquiring and retaining top talent has moved from HR cubicles to the corner office as employer branding has leapfrogged into the top strategic imperatives at most organizations. As companies’ need to build a robust brand that works both for customers and employees intensifies, marketing leaders will be ideally positioned to parlay their traditional brand-building skills into the emerging area of employer branding.