Branding an Avatar in WestWorld: The New Normal

J. Kim Scholes, Director of Human Resources, Aldridge Pite LLP

You woke up one morning, quickly realizing your job had experienced a cataclysmic shift. If you’ve returned to your office desk at all during this pandemic, it’s as if a natural disaster occurred. Cubicles contain half-eaten food, and desk calendars are opened to March. What is your professional identity now, besides a homebody in sweatpants trying to work in a space that’s now shared with noisy roommates instead of cubemates.

No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door. – Sigmund Freud

What is the magic key to sustainability for all organizations, good or bad – branding. The word derives from the physical act of branding live cattle with hot pokers to signify ownership. In today’s world, companies are identified by brands of hot ideas, images, communications, and slogans that are durable, strong enough to withstand the structural boundaries that have now evaporated in an instant.

If your career is long enough, chances are you will work for a Fortune 500 company, a venue of seemingly limitless resources for marketing, communication, learning, and development. Only then can you truly comprehend the vast expanse of efforts that go into branding an organization and its employees. Some of us will also work for organizations that may not have such budgets; however, those organizations may also have established an employer brand based on reputation and credibility of goods or services. A company’s ability to reach this zenith of branding is rare, indeed.

"Organizations must grasp how they want to be seen by all stakeholders by creating a focused list of defining qualities that they want to be associated with the future that is clear, detailed, and very easy to understand"

Only they will be able to forge, not only profits and wealth, but the ability to recruit and retain employees with little to no effort. Indeed, a Fortune 10 company I once worked for rarely spent any money posting job ads to external sourcing sites. Internal recruiters could fill roles by merely suggesting a vacancy on their networks, the actual posting for which would garner tens of thousands of applications in minutes, if not seconds.

How does this happen?

Companies now fill these opportunities at the intersection of personal branding and employer branding, using Boolean search formulas that combine keywords with operators to produce relevant results.

Some applicants have even propelled their own personal brands above organizational ones. These personal brands possess the capability of making mega mullah just by being an “Influencer” who hawks products. For organizations, they’re less likely to become a star by accident, unless you’re Moon Pie or Explore.org – food and animals seem to be big corporate influencers.

Creating the Intersection

Employment Branding

If personal brands represent the players on your organization’s team, then the employer brand is the field. Employers must commit to redefining who they are by analyzing their culture through a vision to values and then enhancing their stories to communicate it to the virtual world. They must conceptualize their own narrative before the greater population and industry do it for them. For instance, before Chevrolet designed and named a popular automobile called Nova years ago, brand managers should have reconsidered selling it to Latin Americans where that word literally translates to No Go.

Organizations must grasp how they want to be seen by all stakeholders by creating a focused list of defining qualities that they want to be associated with the future that is clear, detailed, and very easy to understand. Keep it simple. This list should clearly marry to the individual personal brands that indicate what’s in it for them to either work at your organization or why they should purchase your goods or services.

Once an organization develops or enhances the pillars of its brand based on its mission and values, the creative part kicks into the process. All communications, internal and external, should be consistent with these distinctive assets and attributes. They should develop templates for use in these communications that have the same creative brief, brand theme personality, and visual imagery elements, e.g., an icon. Icons are key – this one brand feature can catapult the passion of employees and customers alike to the stratosphere. All graphics should be similar and include photography, video, copy, tag lines, messaging, advertisements, and career/job apps.

Launch the Live

You never know where you are unless you have a path to get there. – Lewis Carroll

• Develop key audiences for channels and media

• Develop consistent strategies for internal and external communications – tell real stories and make them funny or profound

• Start with internal communications – gets buy-in from your own teams who can spread the message; identify those brand advocates

• Execute external communications strategy, including talent acquisition – basically social media, career sites, professional networking media, and ads

Modern branding is mostly determined by either formal or informal (accidental) means on social media, the importance of developing a strategy on that platform is exceedingly important. Companies must outline reactive courses of action to media by monitoring identified sites and replying to posts; a triage unit to address these matters. For instance, if someone posts a negative comment on Glassdoor, make sure the company responds to it immediately. Alternatively, organizations should proactively develop approaches to brand awareness that include channel and content strategies by type and schedule - structure a calendar of company-specific events and press releases.

The final ingredient of this strategic initiative is to measure its effectiveness through data analytics. Whether you perform this step though vendor partnerships or through simple webpage clicks, it’s important to determine the level of your brand awareness – what is working? Human Resources already performs regular reviews of standard recruiting and workforce metrics (time to fill, cost per hire, quality of hire, time to productivity, external applies to hires, employee referral rates), but Marketing departments should also define brand metrics, such as earned media value, external brand sentiment, CEO approval ratings, source of influence, total yield by channel, etc. Use this information to correct and refine your fluid brand.

Like the Russian proverb, the key to longevity is to keep yourself and/or your organization in the minds of those who remember you…and peoples’ memories are very short in today’s fickle livestream world.