Could branding help industries solve employee shortages?

In 2024, 70 percent of nursing homes report low staff levels, according to Statista. Two-thirds of nursing home providers express worry about potential shutdowns. Associated Builders and Contractors reported that the construction industry must maintain regular hiring, and then add an additional 454,000 new workers in 2025. The problem affects multiple countries. Last year, more than 44 percent of French construction managers said people shortages were an obstacle to production.

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 By Dave Zelnio SHRM-CP, Customer Success Manager at BinMaster Level Controls

Vocational Branding, a field introduced through a University of Nebraska-Kearney study, implied branding may boost career paths like nursing, construction, and manufacturing.  Vocational branding would define value, purpose, and career rewards. The study found informal vocational advocates are plentiful (ie career fairs and classroom presentations) but very little branding efforts to define careers.

Two international branding experts discussed ways traditional branding activities could help to boost the number of people choosing specific vocations:

GOT MILK CAMPAIGN INSTRUCTIVE FOR VOCATIONAL BRANDING

Jon Steel, a renowned expert in branding, helped to advance the famous 'got milk?'  campaign introduced in 1993 by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. The campaign, created for the California Milk Processors, set out to succeed where the national milk mustache campaign had failed. While very popular, that campaign had failed to reach commercial objectives.

Steel’s team dug into human connections with milk, visiting homes to understand the role that milk played in peoples' lives. The resulting campaign showed regular consumers experiencing the trauma of running out of milk (in humorous ways), e.g., when it's time to eat foods like cereal, PBJ sandwiches, and brownies.

“While milk sales declined nationally during the mustache campaign, we were able to increase sales in California,” Steel said. “We were so successful that the National Dairy Board licensed our entire campaign and the mustache idea was killed.”Steel points to three pillars of branding that may prove handy when branding a vocation.

Brand Promise: A Strong Foundation

To embark on a branding journey, it's crucial to understand the brand itself or the vocation being promoted. This involves deep exploration to uncover unique features, benefits, and qualities that set it apart from others. By grasping the brand promise, you can communicate its essence effectively.

Human Connection: Touching Lives

Establish a deep connection between people and the career being promoted. This connection should resonate on a human level, touching emotions, aspirations, and the desire for personal fulfillment. Finding the timeless human truths that relate to the career can strengthen this connection.

Cultural Context: Adapting to the Times

While brand promise and human connection are timeless, the cultural context represents the present moment. The way a career is positioned and promoted must align with the prevailing cultural attitudes, political environment, and societal dynamics. Adapting the messaging to suit the current context ensures relevance and resonates with the target audience.

WITHOUT COMPETITION ASSOCIATIONS PERFECT VOCATIONAL BRANDERS

Branding a vocation is similar to branding and marketing a commodity, according to Kevin Lane Keller, E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

“I like the commodity analogy,” Keller said, "because when you think about branding milk, for example, people may not appreciate that it can be seen as a brand with an existing name and perceptions that actually competes with all other beverages. As a marketer, you can try to give milk more meaning and differentiate it, as Jon Steel and his team so brilliantly did. What does it stand for? How do I try to change people’s perceptions? Vocations have much of the same challenge.

"Keller said associations and trade organizations can easily adopt a commodity brand mentality. "Trade organizations can seek to transcend a lot of existing or potential competition to find the common cause that unites all,” he said.

"When you think about branding, it's about changing the way people think, feel and act," Keller said. "That can be measured, especially when it gets to the acting part. How they act, and what they do, and what they buy.”

Advocacy is the tip of Keller’s Brand Resonance Pyramid. He said recommendations or encouragement from everyday people can often be more effective than celebrity endorsements. “I’d say some of the best proponents for a career or a vocation are those who are actually in it,”

Keller said. “They are sincere and come across as real. They're going to have a certain amount of credibility and often have the passion about the vocation to talk about it in a very compelling way.”Keller said brand builders must understand existing perceptions of the product (or vocation) and then the actual reality. What is the gap? How can you create new perceptions or change existing perceptions to put your best foot forward?

 “You have to be careful in branding to meet or exceed market expectations. What am I going to get from this? Will it at least meet, if not surpass, those expectations?” Keller said. "You want expectations to be positive to encourage people. But if you go too far and over-promise, people will be disappointed. You can be worse off because you've actually anchored them higher than they should be."

Brands, beer, oh my

“Brands are a big strategic differentiator in the beer market, but the beer market itself has been shrinking for years now. Maybe the market leaders should think about promoting beer too, even if a competitor might benefit?” Keller said.

"The logic is simple. If the beer category is getting bigger, we're all going to get bigger slices of the pie.  Instead, too often you get into comparative advertising battles or even wars where the category itself suffers.”Keller said these competitive battles can apply to vocations if not careful. He said, nurses, for instance, are highly recruited. Hospitals may have a dominant presence in one region, but the notion of selling a vocation, even knowing that it might help other hospitals, could still be a good result because that hospital will get a share of a growing labor market. 

Keller notes that vocational branding by an organization can offer an unbiased and credible effort on behalf of the vocation. One downside to watch out for, however, is that it can put an organization at a disadvantage if it obscures other important positives or advantages about the organization.