The Employer Brand

Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work

Simon Barrow, Richard Mosley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781119995548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Ventes

Levels of 'employer brand awareness' are rising fast across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, as leading companies realise that skilled, motivated employees are as vital to their commercial success as profitable customers and apply the principles of branding to their own organization. Starting with a review of the pressures which have generated current interest in employer branding, this definitive book goes on to look at the historical roots of brand management and the practical steps necessary to achieve employer brand management success - including the business case, research, positioning, implementation, management and measurement. Case studies of big-name employer brand stories include Tesco, Wal-Mart, British Airways and Prêt a Manger.

Part I

The Rationale for Change

Simon Barrow

1

Birth of an Idea

When I first thought of the idea of the Employer Brand it struck me as utterly obvious. There I was in a new HR-facing job and searching for the templates that had helped me to be a consumer goods brand manager and then CEO of an advertising agency in London. Good ideas often strike their creators as obvious probably because there is an urgent need to go about doing something in a better way.

In this case it was my arrival as CEO of a personnel business. In those days it was known as Charles Barker Human Resources, and it was part of the same group as the advertising agency I’d been running, which had recently been sold to our US partners NWAyer. I found myself in charge of an efficient factory producing 100,000 job ads a year, working for over 2000 clients and producing 5 million copies of house newspapers, dozens of graduate recruitment brochures and internal communications artefacts. Demand was driven by HR people within client organisations who themselves were under pressure from line managers seeking to fill jobs fast. Where, I wondered, was the agency planning and the research necessary to create a strategy that could pull together the organisation’s efforts and guide not only the creative work but also the overall approach to the employment experience? If this was a consumer brand you wouldn’t run it this way, but of course it isn’t one, it’s something else: it’s an Employer Brand. That was the moment I saw things differently and have been trying to apply this perspective ever since in the 18 years that I have been involved in helping organisations to succeed by bringing out the best in their people.

I was lucky to have had the consumer goods experience that Colgate – Palmolive and Best Foods (now part of Unilever) had given me. The Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said that it helped just once in a life to be associated with something that was absolutely first class, and that’s how I felt about the eight years I spent in brand management. I was given responsibility and influence, though not power, on everything that was likely to have an effect on the health and strength of a brand. This included being expected to know the facts and have an opinion on the formula, packaging, identity, distribution, pricing, promotion, costs, margin improvement, advertising creative work, media selection, consumer and trade research. I was also expected to have the same information for each competitive brand. Brand management was created by Procter & Gamble in 1931 and has been taken up as a fundamental discipline ever since. It seemed reasonable to see what could be done to apply this thinking to the employer brand experience.

One of the factors that attracted me to Colgate as an employer was the location. Back in the 1970s it was just about the only top-ranking consumer goods business still based in Central London. Most were elsewhere: General Foods to Banbury, Mars to Slough and P&G to Newcastle. When I arrived there I found a remarkable group of fellow brand managers who found London life good for them both corporately and personally. They have all achieved something special since - Barrie Spelling, David Enfield, Tim Chappell, John Plackett, Patrick Bowden, and Martin Forde among others. I have sometimes wondered if the company ever considered the location aspect and whether the culture has changed markedly since moving to Guildford. They also paid better. When I moved there from Best Foods my basic salary rose 40%. There was no apparent career planning and I don’t recall contact with anyone with an HR title. You were expected to make your own luck and, if you were any good, were to be ready and able to move to another Colgate location anywhere. That happened to me when I was 33 with an offer to move to Benelux as Marketing Director. The offer was made on a Thursday with a decision expected the following Monday. It was time to find a more independent life and after a few months I moved to the embryo consumer advertising business of the Charles Barker Group.

In terms of Employer Brand thinking, Colgate gave me the theory and practice in managing all the elements that make up a brand. Charles Barker provided the people management aspects, which ultimately are the key success factors, as Charles Barker was later to find out to their cost. After four years as an account director I became Managing Director and later Chief Executive of the consumer advertising business under the Ayer Barker name, reflecting a partnership with the long-established US agency NWAyer in New York. Ayer were famous for creating ads like ‘Diamonds are forever’ for De Beers, ‘Reach out and touch somebody’ for AT&T and the highly influential employer brand campaign for the US Army ‘Be all that you can be’.

While people think that running an agency is solely about creativity and salesmanship, the reality is that your ultimate success is determined by recruiting, engaging and retaining good people. When Anita Roddick said, in her moving biography Body and Soul, ‘My people are my first line of customers’, that was entirely what I felt.¹ The great value of winning Sharp Electronics, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, Barclaycard and Save the Children Fund among others was not just the income and the opportunity it provided to demonstrate our creative skills but the fact that it made the agency easier to sell to good people. The argument for joining was that this was an agency on the move. It wasn’t staked out and therefore had plenty of opportunity and yet it had the backing of what was then the most prosperous communications group in the UK whose Chairman, Kyrle Simond, was by far the best paid boss of any agency group.

Some remarkable people came on board: Charles Channon as Head of Planning from J. Walter Thompson, Keith Ravenscroft from Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter, shortly to be followed by Salman Rushdie who stayed five years and could be relied upon to understand the strategy and produce saleable if not brilliant work. When Midnight’s Children² was accepted by Jonathon Cape, Salman told me that he wanted to leave the ad business. It was 1981 and we had been paying him £15,000 for a threeday week. Cape had told him that the minimum he could expect from the book in the first year was £22,000 and he felt confident enough to quit the business. When the book came out he sent me a copy with the somewhat double-edged inscription ‘to Simon, who helped me write Midnight’s Children three days a week’.

Looking back on those years in the consumer advertising business, there was one client for whom every step was the enhancement of the employment experience. That client was Avon for whom we were working, thanks to NWAyer in the US. I recall the UK MD Alan Daniels saying that the real purpose of the apparently customer-facing advertising ‘Avon you make me smile’ campaign of the time, was to get 40,000 representatives out of their homes and round to their neighbours selling Avon’s products. They did not call it the Employer Brand back in the 1980s but Avon remain past masters in understanding and enthusing thousands of people round the world to spend time with their friends looking at what Avon have to offer.

After 10 years of running the agency it was time for a change. The Charles Barker Group was starting to build its already substantial HR stance and as part of the flotation had bought the executive recruiter Norman Broadbent, then approaching the height of its powers. My job as CEO was to develop Barker’s HR business. If the Employer Brand concept was going to be taken seriously it had to impact senior management. I started to see the Human Resource Directors and, if possible, the CEO/MDs of the most significant clients. I would establish what they had spent with us in the last year and then explain that, in the UK in general, they were spending perhaps over £1m across numerous sites and from different budgets. Given that kind of money did they not deserve better research, and better coordination and discipline? It got us noticed and it established bridgeheads with senior clients through which the head of any agency can help, in the words of Martin Boase, founder of BMP, ‘to prevent unfairness’. It also helped to get the cause of better planning noticed, though it would take many years even for the best to really take this on board.

The employer brand perspective made for a strong point of view and impressed many clients. Even if the reality did not change much, it led to a string of high-profile wins that gave us confidence and attracted a new Managing Director for the recruitment advertising business - Simon Howard, then 32, who in time would become a serial recruitment entrepreneur. We won a competitive repitch for Tesco, then under the leadership of Ian McLaurin, his commercial director John Gildersleeve and a courageous HR Director, Leslie James, who together realised that Tesco’s reputation needed to be built on the basis of its employees. That would not be done if, as a consultant’s report had told them, the dominant culture was that of fear. Tesco’s radical and positive change to its people management strategy started about 1987 and has been consistently followed ever since (see Tesco case study, Appendix 2).

What could I do to develop the vision? The problem was that the mass of clients we served were not at a level to buy anything more than immediate recruitment solutions, so the small consulting business in the division had to fend for itself. However, here was an area that should be able to lead the change to an upgraded, better researched and planned employment experience in place of a system that simply drummed up new cannon fodder to replace those who had left. As a result I recruited Bill Quirke, who after a 1st in English at Oxford and later business experience had joined the PR Company Burson Marstellar where he had been building an internal communications consulting practice. His problem there was that of being an add-on to the big PR fee earners who didn’t then understand the importance of people at work. Our second need was to change the name of the consultancy to distinguish it from the mass recruitment and communications business and be better able to win its own work.

The name People in Business (PiB) was launched in January 1989. Despite some early successes, including a global assignment for Price Waterhouse and Project 2000 for the NHS, the new venture came under increasing pressure from a new group chairman, David Norman. David was a brisk, self-confident, warrior type leader focused on results rather than vision, and uncomfortable with the creative businesses he had taken on. He regarded my commitment to a soft issue business like PiB as an incorrect use of time and argued that we would make more money if I concentrated on the recruitment businesses. In May 1992 he suggested that we close PiB to achieve this, and we started a brief conversation that would set the course of my life from then on. I said that if he didn’t believe in PiB why didn’t I take it on, and we quickly agreed a deal in the next few days.

I had spoken on the subject of employer branding publicly for the first time at the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference at Harrogate in 1990 and again in 1991 at another CIPD event entitled Building your Employer Brand. In 1995 we decided to do some initial research on awareness and understanding and Tim Ambler, Research Fellow at London Business School, took on the project working with MBA students Christian Ingerslev and Andrew Wiseman. They talked to 27 leading employers and their HR, Marketing and communications people and the results were published in the Journal of Brand Management in 1996.³ The results highlighted the following.

Language was an issue. The concept of the employer brand had not yet entered the lexicon of most HR and communications professionals, and there was some resistance to introducing marketing language to the HR discipline. Many of the respondents felt that the concept risked having some negative overtones, given their perception of marketing as artificial and manipulative. These comments demonstrated the gap that too often exists in the mutual understanding between HR and the marketing function.

While many of the respondents recognised the implicit existence of the concept, there was some resistance to recognising the employer brand as a separate and distinct approach. There was certainly some resistance to adding a further thought process to an already quite big schedule.

• ‘We are doing very little to promote an employer brand within the firm. It is something we need to work on but I have more pressing issues.’

• ‘Frankly we have so much to do at the moment that we just want to get the basics right. The employer brand concept is not essential.’

The above thought reminds me of the old line: ‘I’ll get on to marketing when sales pick up.’

Corporate performance was identified by several respondents as a key prerequisite for a strong employer brand:

• ‘Reputation is important but you must be successful as a business in order to have a good employer brand. You have to perform.’

• ‘It is difficult for us to build our employer brand because we have not had good performance during the past two years.’

There was a theme in this research that the employer brand was part of communications, something you could talk about when you were in good shape. At that time respondents did not necessarily extend the concept to recognise that they were talking about the employment experience as a whole. This defining feature of employer brand thinking would only emerge later.

There was widespread support for the idea that an effective employer brand approach required senior management commitment and close cooperation between top management, marketing and HR.

• ‘The biggest obstacle for a successful employer brand is the lack of funding and buy-in from top management.’

Finally, many people recognised the value of bringing some of the disciplines of marketing into the HR functions. This included an emphasis on getting the product right (i.e. the whole employment experience), making use of segmentation and umbrella branding, using compensation within the context of other functional or psychological benefits, realising the importance of professional communications and developing the techniques of relationship marketing. The above represented advanced thinking for 1996 and nine years later there is still much to be done to make this a reality.

How did the employer brand concept, and the work Andrew Lambert, Sue Clemenson and others had put into it, impact on our new venture, People in Business? Buyers of consulting are generally focused on the solution of an immediate problem. In most cases we used the concept to provide a robust framework for tackling a wide range of more immediate issues to do with communications and relationships at work. One of the earliest tools we used in this context was the employer brand ‘wheel’, an early prototype of our employer brand mix tool (see Chapter 11), which lays out the key factors influencing employees’ experience of the employer brand (Figure 1.1). This provided an excellent framework for facilitating workshops, prompting debate about the sort of organisation people currently experienced and, in turn, the kind of organisation they wanted to be. I recall a British Airways/British Airline Pilots Association session in 1999 at BALPA’s office at Heathrow where the longstanding suspicion that can characterise management, union and flight crew relationships the world over, was put aside to debate what really matters if the flight crew employment experience is to be effective. The discussion brought out the reality of flying for BA and has always given me confidence flying behind a BA crew. The key elements were: trus...