What follows is a response I wrote to a “discussion” that came from a question raised on a LinkedIn Group on Employer Branding (I scaled down the response on LinkedIn though – I generally see that environment as more about questions & answers than a forum for debate). The question was posted asking (basically) if anyone within the Employer Branding Group had any research on the measurable effects of an employer brand on an organisation’s bottom line. Steve White (from TMP) thought his Head of Planning & Research had some work on it, but as of writing this post other examples weren’t exactly forthcoming, which got me writing about my personal experience, opinion and hopes for the evolution of Brand as a single entity in the emerging hyper-connected world:

Recruitment and employment experiences touch a person more directly and intimately than any other channel of communication – that is surely an incontrovertible fact. It still blows my mind that organisations who pump millions into marketing and branding haven’t cottoned onto this and invested accordingly in their Employer Brand – instead leaving it to generalist HR departments to try their best to understand, establish and promote with their ever shrinking resource and broad remit, viewed (as I generally believe they are) as a business necessity but all the same pretty much just an operating cost (despite the glib “people are our greatest asset” statements that seem to spew forth with regularity from CEO annual statements).

If TMP’s Head of P&R does indeed have such research then I applaud them for nailing it down and following it through. I’ve always been amazed that those companies who actually do invest in significant Employer Branding activities seem to stop short of the ongoing investment to comprehensively track the fundamental effect and returns of their efforts. Even long served recruitment industry Employer Branding experts I’ve listened to and spoken with seem to never have delivered the complete circular service to prove actual ongoing ROI measurement – which I think if you were to start now with current tracking & measurement technologies and a broad enough remit and reach would be quite startling and incredibly compelling.

One of the contributors to the LinkedIn discussion mentioned that some published research done by Tesco discovered the difference in sales volume between stores with high and low levels of engagement (although it wasn’t stated how that was qualified though) was no less than 36%. Whatever the specifics of that research piece a few years back I produced a site for Tesco (HR) and their driving force was pretty much to keep the price as low as possible – so I wonder at what point Marketing departments start to realise how powerful the employment and recruitment experience is as a key brand influencer and appreciate the opportunity that is quite literally right under their noses to manage and leverage accordingly.

Recruitment Advertising has for so long played the role of being the poor relation of “proper” Advertising and Marketing Communications and perhaps it’s a form of snobbery that prevents businesses Marketing Departments looking into themselves rather than at “sexy” external reach campaigns, but as Social Media continues to bring conversations online (and therefore eminently more broadly influential and at the same time trackable) maybe the day when Marketeers get to understand the influencing power that many brands have available through their own workforce and recruitment activity is finally approaching.

So I too hope that Steve White opens up whatever research TMP may have in a web2.0 collaborative style – maybe it’ll give renewed impetus to unlocking a greater appreciation of what a brand is all about: an enmeshed product and employer entity that is as much individual and peer conveyed experience & perception as it is straplines, PR and marketing cleverness.

Of course with greater attention from Marketing and the budgets they carry then the face of HR would change from being what is effectively IMHO&E a ‘department of doing’ to being a key group of specialists within a newly created division called Engagement. Engagement would be headed by a C level representative who truly understands (and critically can illustrate) the £s & pence effect to the businesses bottom line of really treating “people as our greatest asset”– creating a business that in this highly connected world truly embraces the full power of people engagement right across the communications spectrum.

Hey – why not start the year with some near hallucinatory day dreaming and far reaching predictions. Seems to be the thing that breaks bloggers back into the new year.

What I especially love in this game is when something happens that brings home the real potential and actual value of a particular technology/platform. Today’s example: the internet and the potential to engage, influence and convert opinion – AKA e-brand management (and I honestly think this formula might hold water too – clearly I did pay some attention in that Economics degree!).

I started the day picking up an RSS feed from the Bairdyblog – highly amusing find by Andrew of one of the worst types of corporate “engaging wiv da yoof” / trying too hard that I’ve seen in a long time (video below too). It was too good to let go without sharing so I posted a Tweet (a posting on the Twitter microblogging network) that commented:

“in case you missed it – this from the Bairdyblog – http://is.gd/ak75 Toe curlingly bad from CapGemini US! Or is it Sacha Baron Cohen?”

So the comment’s out there. I know a couple of people picked it up and probably passed it on enjoying it too – but then a couple of hours later I get a Tweet back from @capgemini saying “I have to agree. We’ve discussed this internally and it makes many people cringe! – Richard”

So let me explain what excited me so much about this.

They can’t retract the original video – it’s done & it’s out there. Hey, we all make mistakes, and clearly this Sacha Baron Cohen lookalike may be thinking his was to press the record button. But now it’s out there people will chatter about it – it’s human nature. But rather than doing so just down the pub, in the student union or wherever else people may gather, it’s now going on louder than ever online too.

But it doesn’t take a lot now for brands to hear what people are saying and by taking part then to at least to some extent put themselves in a position to positively influence the conversation. And are they going to stop me laughing at this guy? No. Am I now going to apply for a job with them? No. Am I now going to buy a product or service off them? No. But if I’m ever in such a position where I might be in a target audience for either of the latter then my first recollection will not be of Jonathon “getting wid da kidz” (although it will take a while for that to fade completely), but how CapGemini then engaged with me and in that one act of listening and communicating showed their empathy and human face – and the fact is that as humans we all prefer to do business with humans.

There’s a lot of talk about “listening to” or “joining the conversation”, this is certainly not the first (nor the last) post on this subject – but here is an example that I felt made it all very real. Well done Richard – and you never know, thanks to him/his teams work then Jonathon’s recording faux pas may actually be turned into a positive, or at the very least something less negative (although I think it’ll test Jonathon’s personal skills of Internal Comms management if he manages to turn this into a CapGemini career enhancing positive – I’m sure already he’s writing a white paper on how he planned this whole thing right down to the follow on digital engagement and PR benefit of his “out there” personal style humanising the CapGemini brand).

If you have a spread of blog feeds (in particular feeds that are from the US) then you will probably have picked up that over last weekend there was a real stir in the blogosphere. Basically Motrin (a painkiller brand) produced an ad that they posted on their site targeted at mums, hoping to strike a chord and spread the word virally – but boy oh boy did they get it wrong.

There was a massive outcry from those active online participants within target audience who felt patronised and insulted by the ad (which you can see here – make up your own mind, but I have to admit I very much see why it solicited such a negative reaction) – and quite quickly there was even a YouTube video response (see that here). The ad was retracted with (at time of writing) a pretty copybook apology posted on their site.

Lots has and will be written about this, but for me a couple of things stood out as some key elements:

1.    Motrin properly mucked up (or at least they did with the assistance of their Ad agency did). You’d have to ask why no one picked this up. Did they not show it to some of the target audience? How could they so clearly not understand the target audience?
2.    The Internet has demonstrated (again) how quickly and vociferously it can get a collective impassioned opinion felt by decision makers.
3.    The ad was pulled and because it was Internet based that could be done as soon as there was a clear issue – could you imagine the cost and difficulty if this had been running in printed press or on TV. The damage was quite big here, but could have been a lot worse.
4.    But clearly the ad still exists on youtube – and the fact I (and countless other bloggers) are talking about it means that this episode has and will cast a long shadow within a relatively short time.

So what might be learned?
> We all make mistakes – that’s what makes us human. Motrin were clearly listening (to some degree) to the feedback and acted pretty quickly to take down the offending advert. And this is why it’s important to listen, because when the Internet speaks about you then you need to at least hear it. Hopefully you won’t get things quite as wrong, but even so, the Internet is like the biggest most diverse (and lowest cost) focus group you could hope to gather – so use it.

> But because this is the Internet this episode will live on, both in its cringe-able full glory and through the comment and dialogue about it. The thing is, there’s nothing you can do about that. So what’s most important is actually now what Motrin do from here. It may be ironic to some, but what they actually have is a great opportunity – because the brand almost certainly has more attention than ever before, so here’s hoping that they have the sense and skill to use it. Sticking their heads in the sand now would actually do more harm than good.

Brands are made or broken at key moments, and I’m sure Motrin will look back in years to come and see this as one of their defining moments. It’s long been said that “No PR is bad PR” – can Motrin make that a truism?

I’ve been a t-mobile customer for a year now. How do I know that? I know that because a week before my contract expired I was inundated with unsolicited calls from 3rd parties offering to upgrade my phone if I renewed with them. This niggled me. I’m sure I hadn’t consented for t-mobile to pass my details on – and I also couldn’t work out why they would want to as this would only serve to cost them commission on my account?!

Luckily for t-mobile though (I would have thought) I was in no rush. Well not exactly true. With the recent high profile phone releases (i-phone, Blackberry storm & the G1 (google phone)) I was of course in a rush as much as anyone that gets excited by new things (in a real “boy with a new toy” type way) to see what phone I might upgrade to. I’ve had a mobile phone for a good while and you kinda get used to getting a shiny new toy to play with in exchange for your continued loyalty at no cost (well – we all know it’s hidden in the contract, but you know what I mean). So you can imagine how that was magnified when I realised that my renewal date coincided with the day the G1 came out only on the t-mobile network. GET IN! This was surely fate solving any decision I might have had to make about whether to go sexy, business chic or web guy functionally cool.

Interestingly – whilst everyone and his brother (particularly if they worked in a South Wales call centre it would seem) was in a hurry to sign me back up in the days leading up to my contract expiring t-mobile didn’t want to speak to me until the day it had expired. It’s OK I thought. I’ll wait. I’m a loyal kind of customer.

Unfortunately that was the start of the customer service paradox and the wait was all in vain. My hope shattered. My nose was to be left pressed up against the virtual shop window. You see it would seem that about 6weeks ago t-mobile changed the upgrade game for their customers, although you’ll not find it explained in any of their literature or on their website. No longer do they automatically offer reasonable upgrades after your contract expires – oh no. It’s all spend dependent. And I don’t mean that I was told I just had to pay a little something extra to get the phone that would keep me being a loyal customer – nope – this was a point blank “’dems the rules as of now, so it’s pretty much pay the price of the phone or make do”.

I’ll be fair – for customers not entitled to an upgrade they offer £5pm off your bill. And I’m sure for any logical decision process that’s probably not a bad deal – I’m well aware that the price of the new generation of phones to the phone companies is certainly creeping up and they have to make some tough business decisions – but when has getting your hands on new toys been a logical decision process. Logic doesn’t see people queuing for days before to get their hand on the new i-phone. Logic doesn’t then see the same people wait patiently days later whilst O2 get their systems in order to activate the thing. Logic doesn’t see people paying for two phones on different networks just so they can have the latest thing in their pocket.

I can’t work out whether it’s a bold or stupid move by t-mobile – as with many such changes only time will truly tell. But whilst there are other providers in the same space at about the same price with similar coverage as t-mobile and who would love to steal my custom and will give me a new toy right now (with a 1month lag and cost to port my number) then perhaps t-mobile have misjudged this one. I don’t feel any unbreakable brand affinity with the people in pink. But perhaps they’re target audience are people who can’t be faffed moving to another provider (although looking at their advertising and target demographic shown in that I think not).

This is what I can’t get – surely every business knows that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire new. If I walked off the street and wanted a new number and contract they’d give me exactly the phone I want (tariff dependent). But they’re gambling, and I think it is a gamble, that the majority of their existing customers who are good regular (but maybe not the highest) spenders with them won’t feel cheated when they’re denied that annual little technological lift that people on contracts generally have come to expect.

So if you’re reading this and are responsible for managing relationships, be they customers, employees or candidates, then my advice is to be sure before you change anything that you put yourself in the shoes of those who have come to accept things being done a certain way. Cutting back on providing a company water cooler may on paper look like an easy way to save a couple of hundred pounds – we’re lucky to live in a country where we can all drink the perfectly decent water from the taps after all – but what if that’s the last straw for a half decent person who’s feeling the “place just isn’t the same as the one I came to work for”. How much would they cost to replace? What if you’re working at an agency feeling the pinch and decide that the annual Christmas client lunch is an easy thing to cut back on, certainly for anyone other than the top billers? I’d suggest you ask yourself how much you’d spend re-pitching or pitching to replace that business if that’s the final nail in the coffin for your relationship – they never saw you and always felt unloved speaking to a different Account Exec each time they called anyway.

Loyalty can be a fickle thing – but thought and good communication can generally re-enforce the bond even when some prickly decisions are having to be made. Had t-mobile been clear and honest about what their new policy is and why then maybe I might be more tolerant – rather than still reading:

You and your mobile have been joined at the hip for ages now, but let’s face it, ever since the paint rubbed off the 0 key you just don’t feel the same way. Well, here’s some good news: if you’ve been with us for a while, you may well be eligible for a free upgrade or a brand new mobile at a reduced price… If you’re still thrilled with your mobile, you can choose other savings instead.

I’m not thrilled with my mobile and I’ll get a new shiny one without spending £400+ thank you very much, because it’s the price that you and your competitors are willing to pay to get me to switch, but clearly not something you are willing to stretch to to retain me. I hope your clients or employees don’t feel they want to try a shiny new interface just because they feel shortchanged.