Brand and Talent

Kevin Keohane

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780749469252
• eBook ISBN: 9780749469269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Few business strategy books talk about brand management and talent management under the same cover. Brand and Talent shows how high performance organizations are using this philosophy to drive clarity and growth as they bring their purpose, ambition, strategy and proposition to life from the inside out.In a world replete with experts in branding and brand management, mirrored by experts in talent attraction, engagement and development, there is a clear need for far greater alignment of these two overlapping disciplines. This means more than paying lip service to recruitment media campaigns masquerading as so-called "employer brands", which can often cause damage to or dilute an organization's reputation as an enterprise is dependent upon your reputation as an employer - and vice versa.In Brand and Talent, author Kevin Keohane looks at how organizations can better communicate with people before, during and after their association with the enterprise. He presents a "joined up" approach that encompasses the needs of brand, marketing, human resources, corporate communications, internal communications and IT. He integrates academic and commercial evidence, as well as practical advice and includes case studies and interviews.

01

Introduction

Brand and talent

Your brand management and talent management approaches are two of the most powerful levers at your disposal in driving tangible, measurable improvement to the performance of your business.

Brand management helps ensure that people are aware of you, of what you can do for them and why they should consider and purchase from you. It gives you something clear to stand for and to steer by; it guides some of your biggest strategic decisions. Name something more important to a CEO than the reputation of his or her firm.

Talent management helps you make sure you get the right people aboard to help in the first place, and then create an environment where they can contribute more so that your organization can deliver on its promises. Name something more important to a CEO than the talent needed to deliver growth.

Chances are, they are both in the top five; for some, the top three, according to recent surveys by McKinsey, PWC and BCG. But the two are inextricably linked – a fact that seems to be lost on many boards, CEOs and strategists today.

Why do so many organizations manage these distinct drivers of business effectiveness as if they are completely different things? This book seeks to answer that question, and it makes the case for a different (integrated) approach to thinking about the way your organization manages the way it attracts, recruits, develops and motivates the people it needs to thrive, in order to provide a product or service that is authentic, relevant to its customers and differentiated from its competitors – for both business and talent. Does that sound crazy?

It still does to some people. When I set out to create the idea of ‘Brand and Talent’ as a practice area in one of the world’s biggest global communication networks five years ago, I encountered surprising resistance to the very name ‘Brand and Talent’ itself. They just didn’t get it. Brand? That’s about external positioning. Logos. PR and advertising campaigns. Reputation management. Social media. Talent? That’s about recruiting. Employee communications. Human resources. ‘They just don’t go together. It’ll confuse the marketplace.’

One of the most telling challenges in writing a book that sets out to make the case for integrating several related disciplines is how easy or hard it is to research those disciplines. Brand? There is a lot out there about how to define, create, activate, maintain, defend and grow your brand in the marketplace. Talent? There is even more out there about talent acquisition, talent management, employee engagement, motivation and the many human resources techniques to help make the most of talent.

But Brand and Talent? While, to be fair, the world of ‘employer branding’ has grown in profile, as has the idea of ‘living the brand’, these are still generally seen to be separate activities aimed at solving different challenges. While there is evidence of some organizations and service providers connecting employer branding and living the brand/employee brand engagement-type activities, they are far from being integrated and hardwired to the organization – at either communication, operational process or management level. It is virtually impossible to find an actual example of where brand, employer brand, human resources and employee engagement have been genuinely connected and managed as a single integrated process.

But the tide is turning. The now irrational (yet at one time perfectly sensible) functional separation of many of the activities relating to brand management and talent management has reached the end of its usefulness. Smart organizations understand that there is a better way – that one core idea is better than many when it comes to focus and clarity in a dynamic internal and external environment.

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Importantly, the first six chapters of this book cover some fairly traditional approaches to brand management and talent engagement. For most experts, these chapters will probably not tell you much that you don’t already know. It may even feel a bit patronizing. For those readers who are experts, feel free to jump straight to Chapter 8, where the approach we developed at BrandPie is explored and explained. It’s a powerful model, and one that we have successfully used with organizations facing significant repositioning opportunities such as EY (formerly Ernst & Young), Capgemini Applications in North America, and others.

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How this book is structured

Be aware: this book has many short chapters. This is deliberate. I expect that most of my readers are busy business people who probably won’t read this book in a small number of sittings, probably won’t read the whole thing from cover to cover, and prefer to get their information in bite-size chunks between meetings, cab rides and plane journeys. The philosophy is similar to the approach taken in my book The Talent Journey: The 55-minute guide to employee communications. You’ll find some of that thinking represented here. I like short, sharp, and to the point.

Perhaps ironically, the best way to approach this topic is to break up the pieces and address them separately before bringing them together. (Taylor would be proud!) Only then can the case be made for a more integrated approach to managing brand and talent.

So this book will first take you through the principles and theory of brand. While there are many books on brand, we will cover a very pragmatic approach to defining, building and deploying your brand. This is not going to be the approach to branding that dominated the previous generation (a world of brand models, brand values, brand attributes, brand essences) – although it will touch on these. They have their place, but all too often serve to exacerbate efficiency-sapping functional divisions between brand and talent management.

Then, we will go through the principles of talent. We’ll run from talent acquisition and recruiting through to a very high-level look at talent management and a discussion on employee engagement and its links to brand and business performance. This won’t be a deep dive into the minutia of performance management and competency frameworks, although it will touch on these and other issues. Again, the case will be made that often the focus on the ‘means justifying the end’ process-focused approach only deepens functional divides and diminishes your organization’s effectiveness.

Third, we will connect the two and explore how brand and talent are two sides of the same coin. You’ll get a selection of templates, tools and techniques to manage this process for your consideration, adaptation, modification and use. These are many of the tools I actually use in real life with clients. Used effectively, they can make a big difference in getting people aligned to the ‘Brand and Talent’ way of thinking.

Fourth, and in my opinion most importantly, there are interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers in this area – each looking at the challenge from different perspectives: the CEO, the CMO, Corporate Affairs head, the People lead, the Executive Recruiter, and so on. Real-life points of view validate the points made in this book.

It isn’t complicated, it’s just hard

It’s a cliché to say that the soft stuff is the hard stuff. The real challenge lies not in functional expertise in brand management, nor in the disciplines of employee engagement and human resource and talent management. It is in having clarity of purpose, focus, discipline and willpower to take the steps necessary to align these functional activities in a more consolidated and coherent manner. And this means upsetting the traditional functional apple cart. If you don’t have the stomach for it, you might want to stop reading now.

Having been involved in literally dozens of projects with a range of organizations the world over, across industries, cultures, geographies, management styles and economic conditions, over more than 20 years, I don’t want to appear cynical. Yet one thing is certain: the reason most efforts to engage people internally and externally in your organization’s purpose, ambition, strategy and brand fail to deliver is an outmoded, functionally driven way of thinking. The irresistible force of integrated, aligned senior executive thinking will meet the immovable object of functional mindsets with perspectives on what is important – and territory to defend.

The organizational silo is alive and well. It has deep roots and is often protected by long, sharp thorns. Its head is shaped to provide a view that is deeply biased towards one way of looking at – and interpreting – the world it perceives. It feels vulnerable and insecure emerging into the brightly lit (and frighteningly level) playing field that is The Big Picture.

The silo always promises to cooperate with other silos. It assures you that it is collaborating cross-functionally, that it is consulting and sharing information. It nods knowingly when you ask it if it has considered The Big Picture. Don’t believe it.

Whether through gently leading it to water, or forcing it to drink through formal restructuring, this book lays out the case for taking a more integrated approach to brand and talent management that, when taken to its ultimate conclusion, can and should result in changes not only to the way you think about brand and talent, but to the way you manage your organization and its strategy. In so doing, your organization and its people should reap the benefits of a more effective, efficient, cohesive and – perhaps most importantly – vastly simplified approach to connecting your people to the service you deliver.

Part One

Brand

02

What is a brand?

A brand only exists in the minds of your consumers.

(DAVID OGILVY)

Setting the context

Your brand is your reputation. It’s that simple.

What does someone think when they hear or see your name? Do they recognize it? Do they have a positive or negative reaction? Do they have a clear idea of who you are and what you stand for?

This chapter sets out a brief history of branding to help establish some context, and a review of prevailing brand development and management techniques you are likely to encounter. But more importantly, it lays the foundation for later exploring a more integrated approach to managing your brand in a way that is clear, simple, and reduces much of the complexity (and a lot of the cross-silo duplication and redundancy) that traditional branding methods generate.

A brief history of branding

Why did human beings begin the practice of branding in the first place?

To insure honesty, provide quality assurance, identify source or ownership, hold producers responsible, differentiate, as a form of identification and to create emotional bonding. Interestingly, people value brands for many of the same reasons today. Clearly, history provides some insight and perspective on modern day branding (Table 2.1).¹

Table 2.1 A brief history of branding

Date	Event
1300 BC	So, how far back does branding go? At least 5,000 years. Potters’ marks were used on pottery and porcelain in China, Greece, Rome and India. Branding of cattle and livestock go back as far as 2000 BC. Archaeologists have found evidence of advertising among Babylonians dating back to 3000 BC.^1
1800s 1890s	Rise of ‘Pitchmen’, a mixture of sales people and a precursor to Mad Men advertisers.^2 Towards the end of the 19th century a collection of new technology and methods of communication such as the invention of mail order catalogues, the advancement of railroads and the expansion of the postal service drives a massive shift in attitudes to products and purchasing of things.^3 In 1...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• About the author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part One: Brand
• Part two: Talent
• Part three: Brand and talent
• Part four: Insight interviews
• Glossary
• Talent management terms
• Resources and suggested reading
• Index
• Full imprint