HR Meets Marketing Part 7: Employer Branding meets Emotional Branding
If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words. Marcus Tullius Cicero
By now, any smart Talent acquisition team has acknowledged the need to invest in employer branding in this 21st century as the only reliable way to attract & retain top-quality talent. 75% of active job seekers are likely to apply for a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand. We’re also witnessing companies struggle to retain their key staff as the war for talent intensifies. This challenge calls for HR professionals and in particular Recruiters to hone in on storytelling as their no. 1 top skill this decade. As we explained in this earlier article on job advertising, the modern recruiter has to look at the job application process as a buying cycle.
This diagram presents a typical buying cycle for a customer i.e the stages a customer goes through before purchasing your product. In our case, you’re the sales agent trying to sell a job opportunity in your company. The customer is the job seeker who has to decide whether they will apply & eventually ACCEPT your job offer.
A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is. It is what consumers tell each other it is.-Scott Cook
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one- Albert Einstein
“A brand is not a product or a feeling. Its the sum of all the experiences you have with a company.”-Amir Kassaei
If you just sit back, post your job ad, and think, “Of course, people will apply. We have so many jobseekers people out there,”, don’t be shocked when you have to go over a thousand unqualified applicants. Remember that only 16% of candidates who apply to your job are active candidates. How are you engaging the 74% of the talent community being left out when you’re casting your net? So how do you attract the candidate who won’t also be applying to 50 other similar jobs besides yours this week? What about creating a strong brand such that our employees(former & present), customers, and all stakeholders become our brand ambassadors? We already know referral recruiting is the most effective form of hiring and employee advocacy reduces marketing costs significantly. But apart from a cash bonus, how can you create a cult-like following for your brand? Think Game of Thrones, Manchester United, Beyonce, or Apple. In 2012 someone lined up for almost 250 hours to be the first person to buy the iPhone 4S !250 HOURS. Decades later even after the passing of Steve Jobs the marketing genius behind the global brand, Apple still remains the best earner financially as well as being the top employer of choice for many professionals across the world. How do we keep our brand top of mind for our very diverse customer base? How do we get people excited about working for us even before we post jobs? Below are 3 ways to achieve this;
✴️Be shareable
The recent case of China Square in Kenya is a prime example of social proofing and why OTHER PEOPLE are your best marketers. In this case, your own employees. Carrefour App campaign has also gotten so much traction this week online from just one OFFLINE billboard that people engaged with & chose to share across their networks freely. Almost all the IWD posts I saw on LinkedIn this month were from HR directors or company posts. I rarely come across such posts from employee accounts.
As Jess Von Bank says, “Your employees are powerful megaphones for your employer brand. They’re natural storytellers with authentic voices, and they’re living personifications of your culture and mission.”
Employees have 5x MORE reach than corporate accounts. Users also respond more to messages from employees. Think about the last time you learned about something from a company page. I’ve worked with many HR Managers who tried all kinds of manners to get staff involved in campaigns including offering rewards. So how do we get staff involved in our HR marketing campaigns in a way that feels authentic and not forced? Read our article on employee advocacy for tips on the same.
✴️Be different
Every social media platform is different. As I wrote years back about the changing face of professional networking, you will fail if you treat every platform the same. Most brands will just share the same exact post on each platform. The best brands CUSTOMISE their strategies to the uniqueness of the channel.
✴️Be relatable
Know why brands like KCB, NIKE, KRA, and others have crazy engagement on socials? It’s because they choose to communicate to users as humans first. They choose to take risks, try, learn, and modify till they get the right tune for their strategies. A good demonstration of this is popular worldwide campaigns like this month’s Women’s Day or Customer Service week. I saw several text, graphic & video messages on LinkedIn all week but they all looked, sounded, and felt the same! Year after year. Users tend to just scroll down after the first one. It’s all corporate speak unless you choose to use emotional branding & marketing psychology.
“Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human.”- Seth Godin, Linchpin
As neuroscience professor by the name of Antonio Damasio published in the book titled, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, decisions and social behavior are often emotional, not rational. A brand is worthless if it doesn’t connect with the right audiences in an authentically human way. A lasting brand also works on communicating both the business value and personal value it offers. Emotional branding is the practice of building brands that appeal directly to a consumer’s emotional state, needs, and aspirations with a view to leveraging those features of their consumer psyche to convert them into engaged (which often means paying) customers and, better yet, long-term loyalists.
And no brands do this better than Coca-Cola & Apple. So how have they been getting it right for decades and different generations? As Bill Bernback said “It’s fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man.” Stories connect ALL humans through emotions. They touch both heart & mind. This is a fact that will remain unchanged forever. Your messaging can spark both emotion and action. By applying the Rule of 7(Perception + Reality), we can craft messages that amplify our brand values and leave a lasting impression on the user ie capturing the essence of what people think will happen. EB allows us to reach users’ Rational-Emotional-Societal expectations.
How to get started;
- DRAW ON BASIC EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS. The most common are trends, a sense of belonging, competition, instant gratification, guilt, fear, pride, love, greed, family values, self-achievement, fun etc.
- Exemplify your brand values through your fans or employees eg you can highlight the positive stories of people living the values you wish to highlight. You can move from storytelling to story-living ie low-fi intimate content filmed in real-time.
- Design it luxuriously- A good design captures the mind faster. Take time to make your graphics captivating to the eye.
- Provide a different perspective- Nike never really focussed on selling sports attire. Instead, it’s spent billions of dollars on endorsement deals and marketing campaigns with the world’s biggest sports stars, selling the idea that everyone can be an elite athlete if they had elite equipment. Our own local Kenya Revenue Authority brand transformed itself during Covid to become one of Kenya’s most engaging brands by turning around the citizens' perception of the big tax man. Now they do creative copy across all their channels using humor & trending stories to educate & communicate.
- Give something back to your users. Which global campaign did this better than Coke? Millions of customers around the world flocked to shops to get a soda with their name or that of a friend or family member. What’s in a name you might ask? Well, everything! What’s more intimate and personal to every human than their name?
- Immerse your consumers visually and mentally
- Use color and character to trigger emotions. Read color psychology to understand the different ways the brain perceives different emotions. For instance, Cocacola uses bright orange to advertise Fanta which is associated with a more fun youthful vibe while red is for Coke which is mostly consumed with food hence driving hunger & thirst feeling.
- Pair engaging quotes with complementary images. This is one of the easiest ways to motivate people. Everyone likes to feel inspired. Post positive uplifting messages to your users.
- Collaborate with your followers. As was the case with the Coke campaign, they also asked users to enter their names on the website for a more inclusive process.
- Create emotional bonds between consumers and your product
Sell the emotion your brand is associated with.
2. DESIGN FOR HOLIDAYS AND SEASONS
This is probably the easiest way to connect with consumers! From the global traditional celebrations eg Christmas or Women’s Day to the smaller everyday recognitions eg World Boss Day or International Thank you day, there’s almost always a holiday for all 365 days of the calendar which means you can’t run out of ideas. Check out https://www.daysoftheyear.com/ for a list of these. So how do you optimize this? Channel the emotional values of the holiday eg love for Valentine's or Sharing for Chrismas, use social media to intertwine with the holidays, create a seasonal tradition between your brand & consumers, crowdsource holiday snapshots from your fans, celebrate all year round as with Coke below, and collaborate with your followers.
3. DESIGN ONLY FOR YOUR AUDIENCE
The best brands define who they are, which means defining who they’re not. A Lamborghini will never sell the same way a Toyota Premio does. Both are automobiles that get you to point A to B. However they have different capabilities because their target customers are very different. Having clarity of focus will make everything else easier to accomplish and help avoid marketing distractions. As we wrote earlier on job advertising, there are startups that are doing a phenomenal job writing job descriptions that go out of their way to speak to who they’re exactly looking for. Doing this clearly means you get less of mass applicants and save time & energy.
4. USE A POWERFUL COMBINATION OF IMAGERY AND LANGUAGE
Ditch the old boring copy and image for something inspiring and thought-provoking. A picture does speak a thousand words. Keep your copy & image simple but powerful. You can let consumers fill in the blanks, use confronting imagery to get your messaging across, use iconic symbols to make an impact, apply to common cultural anxieties, contrast type & image in an emotionally jarring way, pose a question to consumers, address the consumer, not the product. This works for all types of media including videos, PowerPoint, or social media animations. For instance, if you’re advertising for your annual graduate recruiting program, why not go from the boring young professional in a suit graphic to something that truly captures what it’s like working for your company as a fresh graduate? How can you use one image to show fun, mentorship, skill gain, or team spirit?
All in all, there’s much room for us to improve on HR storytelling. Whether it is to communicate, entertain, educate, or engage, we can do better and create better engagement & results for our businesses. We can also apply these techniques to all communication formats & for both internal & external use ie written, paper, slides, or verbal.
Craft marketing messages that skillfully trigger the emotions in your target audience in a way that aligns them with your brand. And for you to do this you need to be clear on what you’re serving the world and then engage with your users often so you understand their needs well. New technology such as ChatGPT AI & Insights forms the opportunity for maintaining authenticity at scale and the opportunity for custom brand experiences. In conclusion, find their motivation, sell emotion, and stretch their imagination.
George Bernard Shaw- The greatest illusion in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
For more on this, see Coca-Cola's dedicated page on the power of EB-https://cocacolabranding.wordpress.com/emotional-branding-strategy-how-to-apply/
Still looking for more? Check out our follow-up article on applying key marketing principles https://medium.com/jobonics/is-your-job-ad-the-weakest-link-in-your-hiring-process-part-3-cffd57aca588
All the best!
