The word "brand" can mean many distinct things. In the retail industry, a brand frequently links a product to its maker, giving it a feeling of identity and frequently adding value. It can contain observable components like a logo, colours, typefaces, materials, and slogans, all of which help the brand stand out and become easily recognisable.
Consistent & Recognisable
The most successful brands are consistent and recognisable. A wide range of consumer goods can still be easily recognised by their brands even without their logos and text, thanks to other characteristics like colour and design.
A fantastic brand inspires a tonne of client loyalty. Any successful brand wants to create such a strong psychological bond with its audience that they won't even consider using a competitor's product. For example, a lot of consumers wouldn't look at any alternatives to Apple in terms of tech hardware.
Apple products become ingrained in many people’s daily life, making it hard to switch to another brand. Apple is loved for a variety of reasons, including usability, design, marketing, and of course the founder vision established by the late Steve Jobs.
Brands encourage consumer loyalty. With such loyalty, your clients stay with you and continue to make purchases. How does this brand loyalty affect your workers, though?
Employer Branding
HR teams must develop a compelling "employer brand" that they can use across the whole employee lifecycle. This is the same way that marketers establish a compelling "customer brand" to drive consumer loyalty.
Every company has a unique employment brand. It is a strategy used by companies to stand out from the competition in the labour market to attract, keep, and engage employees. It aids companies in gaining a competitive edge in the hiring of excellent personnel and building higher credibility.
Employer brand is described as "...a set of attributes and qualities, often intangible, that makes an organisation distinctive, promises a particular kind of employment experience, and appeals to those people who will thrive and perform best in its culture" in the CIPD 2008 guide "Employer Branding - A no nonsense approach."
A strong employer brand should be connected to a company's values, policies, people strategy, and external brand in the larger context of the organisation. If not, there may be a significant disconnect between the people the company selects and their capacity to fulfil the brand promise provided by the marketing team.
Why is this important?
An organisation can gain from building a high-value "employer brand" in many ways.
A strong "consumer brand" helps marketers acquire, engage, and keep customers while fostering intense loyalty. The customer lifecycle is what is meant by this. For HR professionals, using the same strategy fosters extraordinary employee loyalty throughout the "employee lifecycle."
An employee's relationship with their company is referred to as their "employee lifetime." It can begin long before they ever start working for the company, but it has to do with how they are approached, brought on board, managed, rewarded, informed of developments, and ultimately let go.
An engaged workforce that feels appreciated and respected by their company will be created as a result of positive experiences in these areas. The benefit is that people typically desire to work harder to incorporate the mission, vision, and values of the organisation in their working behaviours.
Even if a highly engaged employee decides to leave the company, chances are they'll continue to generate value by serving as a "promoter" of that company and sharing their excellent employee experience with everyone they know!
On the other hand, a bad experience in any one of these areas could have the opposite effect.
Creating a great Employer Brand
This has a documented process that is very similar to the marketing technique centred on client branding. This entails:
- Discovery - Learn more about your staff, your management, and your current situation
- Creation - Analyse the data obtained during the discovery phase and use it to produce an employee value proposition
- Application - Sharing the employee value proposition and ingraining it into the culture
- Maintenance - Careful evaluation and optimisation to make sure the business truly embodies the employer brand.
This effort is ongoing and is a strategic one; it is not a one-time event. It is crucial that developing an employer brand be viewed as a process of continuous improvement since, just like a consumer brand, an employer brand can lose value over night.
Start the discovery today
You run the danger of making the incorrect choices or perhaps undoing some of the good you've managed to accomplish without a solid discovery (or good research).
It helps to make a remarkable discovery by using great methods and technology. Conducting focus groups with your staff, holding workshops with top management, and performing employee engagement surveys are excellent places to start.
You're taking the initial steps in the right approach if you have a fantastic means to gather this data, monitor improvement, and, most importantly, understand "what good looks like."
Don't get too hooked up on the results; they are frequently vanity metrics. Instead, focus your efforts on the detailed feedback that you receive from your staff. That's where the brilliant concepts appear that enable you to create a brand that your staff members genuinely believe in.
We can help you by providing the employee engagement platform to start your discovery process. Talk to us by visiting www.tenspace.co.uk/contact
