Barrow Simon - Employer brand management: practical lessons from the worlds leading employers

This is not just an eloquent brand management and marketing text, but one of the wisest management books in the past five years.

Independent on Sunday

Building an effective employer brand is increasingly essential to attract scarce talent, provide a focal point during times of change, and support the kind of internal commitment required to genuinely live the brand. If you need to strengthen your employer brand, this book will help you.

Sir Martin Sorrell CEO, WPP

Many large companies recognize that internal marketing is as important as external marketing and that the same disciplines apply. This book is a wake-up call

Tim Ambler Senior Fellow, London Business School

The Employer Brand is a big idea which helps build a much needed bridge between the often divided communities of HR and marketing

Geoff Armstrong President, World Federation of Personnel Management Associations

This edition first published 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mosley, Richard, 1964

Employer brand management : practical lessons from the worlds leading employers / Richard Mosley.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-89852-9 (hardback)

1. Personnel management. 2. EmployeesRecruiting. 3. Corporate culture. 4. Corporate image. 5. Branding (Marketing) I. Title.

HF5549.M6675 2014

658.301dc23

2014020560

ISBN 978-1-118-89852-9 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-118-89851-2 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-118-89850-5 (ebk)

Cover design: AIA Worldwide design team

To my children Loveday and Tom.

Work at its best can be a great adventure. May you find what you love most and do best, live your lives to the full, and leave the world a better place.

I read this book with a mixture of pride and gratitude. Pride that an idea I introduced 25 years ago remains in such good shape. Then gratitude to Richard Mosley for his scholarship and experience over the past 14 years which makes this book a masterclass. Furthermore, there are insights into human behaviour here which make it inspiring and relevant for a much wider audience.

Richard has laid down the gauntlet for executives responsible for employer brand management, since sound words need strong leaders. A good business book like this must be read and implemented by high calibre people if the standards he describes are to result in an effective employer brand. Behind any great brand you'll generally find a leader and team with the following qualities.

Confidence and self-belief. Richard describes Neil McElroy, the 26-year-old Harvard graduate in P&G who, in 1931, disobeying the one page memo rule in the company, wrote five pages on the idea of brand management. At 44 he became P&G's CEO and later President Eisenhower's Defence Secretary at the height of the Cold War. He was a change agent and he started early.

Understanding people. I believe that an employer brand is much harder to develop and manage than the product brands I once looked after, like Colgate toothpaste and Knorr soup. People at work can be magic but they also represent mankind at its most complex and demanding. Understanding and shaping customer behaviour is a lot easier in comparison. Life at work is about life itself and no consumer product, even an expensive one like a car, comes close to that. After all, what you do, who you do it for and how you develop your skills and employability are the most important decisions you will ever take (except perhaps who you decide to share your life with).

Knowing when to take risks. Sometimes the desire for a compelling and distinctive point of difference leads to consumer brand managers taking a risk. Good brand managers demonstrate this kind of courage. Many fail at some point, but most live to tell the tale. A Unilever brand manager once become CEO despite launching a detergent earlier in his career so powerful that it destroyed the clothes it was designed to clean! In comparison, employer brand management is often too risk-adverse, which is why so much employer brand output is often bland and undifferentiated. The HR function seldom has a reputation for bravery, but you're unlikely to establish a strong employer brand unless you're bold enough to challenge the status quo. Likewise, great communication needs emotion and real emotion is never risk-free.

Leadership. Transformation must come from the behaviour of confident leaders who can be themselves keeping their head when all about are losing theirs, owning up to mistakes, using the power of language at its best and being human. The deliverable of employer brand management should be the creation of inspiration, engagement and preparedness to change.

This fine book will show you what you need to do but it is up to you to create the context in which you can do it. Get the board involved and win their approval by demonstrating the significant business benefits that can be gained from a strong employer brand. If your actions demonstrate the focus and coherence, depth of understanding and breadth of imagination at the heart of great brand management, you won't need positional power to get a seat at the table, it will be YOU they want in the room.

Simon Barrow

Simon founded People in Business in 1989 after his time as a brand manager and advertising agency CEO. He retired from PIB in 2012 to focus on other business interests, which include consulting on the people and cultural aspects of mergers and acquisitions and the role of senior management in employer brand development.