Branding: the most important tool for creating value in a company's employees

Branding allows organizations to meet their goals and be attractive in an increasingly demanding, changing, and complex labor market.

For a long time, we have understood branding as the way to present and position a brand to an external audience in a coherent, organized, differential, and transversal way. However, increasingly, different companies have realized the importance of looking inward, towards their most important brand assets: their employees and collaborators.

Companies realize that branding is no longer just about showing outwardly what they represent but can also be a tool to ensure habits, rituals, and behaviors of the organizational culture allow employees to understand the vision of the company.

We are living in times where the talk about brand purpose and how companies should align themselves with the expectations of society. The new generation of employees wants to work for more than just a paycheck, ping pong tables, or snack bars. They look forward to working for companies that share their values and their personal life purpose. Organizations that succeed in linking purpose to their employer brand strategy will attract and retain the best talent, which nowaday is the best asset.

Increasingly, the employees are also becoming brand assets, as they are the ones who truly represent the brand to the world and live it. The main difference from the competition is the human resources, their talents, and contributions to the company.

A company's employees and workforce end up being the true brand experience and they want a place where they feel they can belong, have their voice heard, and where they can express their personal essence through their work. Increasingly, culture is what companies sell and culture is based entirely on the workforce. Companies need to invest in how employees work and how they feel in order to be successful in such rapidly changing times.

One example is the actions companies can take for their employees or even, as Airbnb demonstrated in 2020, with their former employees. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Airbnb was forced to lay off about 25% of its staff. To help them Airbnb launched a talent directory and its internal recruitment department became a recruitment team for other companies. At the same time, these people were also allowed to keep their work laptops and health insurance for a year.

The process of building a strong employer brand requires effort, time, and investment. It is a time of internal discovery to find the purpose of the brand and translate it into an EVP (Employee Value Proposition).

With Panorama Branding Consultancy we carried out a strategic consulting project with Cervecería Nacional. We worked together with the human resources and marketing teams to create a strong EVP (Employee Value Proposition) to communicate internally and externally the purpose and north of the employer brand. We also create an entire employee experience so that each employee can understand the company's vision and can live it on a daily basis to meet the company's goals.

A joint work of the marketing and HR departments

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is believing that the sales and marketing department is in charge of the outside world and the HR department of the inside. However, it requires a strong integration of these teams so that corporate brand management does not become an isolated exercise.

Currently, the human resources department is being asked to step forward and become a co-pilot. A clear example is companies such as Dell and Cisco, where marketing teams work in conjunction with the HR department to execute branding programs. This has become a success.

Not an impossible process, which José Manuel Afanador explains with the example of the work done for one of the most important companies in Ecuador, "with Panorama Branding Consultancy.

With Panorama Branding Consultancy we carried out a strategic consulting project with Cervecería Nacional. We worked together with the human resources and marketing teams to create a strong EVP (Employee Value Proposition) to communicate internally and externally the purpose and north of the employer brand. We also create an entire employee experience so that each employee can understand the company's vision and can live it on a daily basis to meet the company's goals.

While the examples I mention are from large companies, it is important for all brands, regardless of their history, size or industry, to create employer brands that attract the best talent and take it to the next level. Where HR teams embrace fundamental principles of brand thinking and create employer brands that appeal to the next generation.

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By Jose M. Afanador, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Panorama Agency.