Michelle M. Smith From ANA: Organizations Must Elevate Employer Branding To Its Rightful Place

Michelle M. Smith, VP of Research for the ANA’s Business Marketing Association and VP of Marketing at O.C. Tanner wrote an article at ANA’s web site entitled How to Create a Unified Brand Experience, where she highlights that successful brand management requires fuller and more consistent engagement among those who experience the brand and those who represent it, including employees. “Organizations must elevate employer branding to its rightful place among the other major pillars of corporate, product, and service brand management” she said. To succeed in this, she recommended five guiding principles. First, credible positioning starts with a well-defined process, where she explained that at the heart of employer branding is a convincing employer value proposition (EVP) that should emphasize the uniqueness of the company. Second, employee motivations guide employer branding, where she said that for this to be effective you must use the dual perspective of internal and external views to discover the elements of the brand experience that drive engagement among existing and prospective employees. Third, employees are the best brand ambassadors “the most authentic sources of employer branding are employees who can communicate credibly about the company and make its culture tangible” she explained. Smith also included as a guide principle to succeed in delivering a unified experience across all the brand dimensions, that social media is only one tool to receive customer reactions about what’s important and what’s not “but every social media channel must be closely analyzed for its benefits and risks” she noted.