Bridging the gap from EX to CX (The Great Branding Fallacy)

As consumers we’re faced with hundreds (if not thousands) of little choices every day. Images, words and ideas compete for our attention, our time, our love and our loyalty. The most effective of these appeal to our emotional, rational and aspirational desires – our hearts, minds and dreams. They take the hassle out of difficult choices, offering us answers that we were already searching for.

It’s no surprise then that organisations invest a staggering amount of time, money and effort to influence consumers to choose their unique offering over the competition. As consumers we’re spoilt for choice. Similarly, as employees we’re faced with just as many choices, with the potential to greatly impact our lives. It’s not just our preferred beverage at stake. It’s our careers and our futures.

As important as these choices are for us, they’re just as critical for employers. Drawing in and retaining the right talent, while embedding employee engagement and brand advocacy is as much a financial as it is a cultural imperative. And organisations’ increasing budgets for People and Culture investment reflect this¹. 

At We Are Unity, we believe that your customer and employee experience are closely tied and must be consciously designed and recalibrated to accelerate the commercial outcomes of the business. While organisations understand that P&C is important, our 2020 Progressive People and Culture Report revealed that only 32% of HR leaders can directly relate the commercial impact of HR to business outcomes. Our work aims to close these gaps and connect the dots using our unique Unity Dynamics framework. In reality we see there is still a long road ahead for the world of the Employer Brand to catch up to the world of Consumer Branding to create perfect alignment.

So what lessons can we learn from the latter to apply to the former? 

Get real!

A great sell is all about telling a compelling story, but a story’s power needs to be grounded in honesty, authority and authenticity. Organisations know this (90% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support), but striving for authenticity and achieving it are two very different things. 92% of marketers believe most or all of the content they create resonates as authentic. In reality, most consumers think less than half of brands create authentic content². That means for every perfect authentic pairing of brand and message, there’s a can of Pepsi out there just waiting to solve institutional violence. 

Similarly, your Employer Branding needs to authentically communicate the story of your organisation to potential and existing employees, bringing your Purpose, Vision, Mission and Values or Behaviours to life. Sure, lofty and aspirational promises might net you a slightly larger recruitment pool, but if you can’t walk the talk, you’ll find it difficult to build brand advocacy within your organisation and your chances of retaining and developing that talent will be greatly reduced.

With little room for internal career progression, one organisation we worked with opted for a very transparent approach to recruitment (as a key pillar of their aspired culture), adopting the narrative: “Come here to build your knowledge, skills and experience, but if you need promotion then this is not the place for you”. And sure, their response rate took a hit, but you better believe those that did respond were more suitable for the role, and more invested in the honesty of the business.

Let’s get digital.

Think about how our lives as consumers have dramatically changed in the last decade through digital innovation… Netflix has fundamentally changed the way we consume entertainment. Uber, the way we move. Amazon, the way we shop. Consumer brands are constantly evolving to stay ahead of changes in culture and consumer behaviour. 

Employee Experience needs to follow suit, proactively embracing digital innovation and disruption to stay relevant and engage their people at every step of the employee lifecycle (from recruitment to development to offboarding). At the end of the day it’s these employees who are responsible for delivering on your world-class customer experience. This can be difficult to do, particularly at scale (some employers are still getting used to video conferencing) and knowing which platforms and technologies to invest in can be daunting. 

Instead of focusing on which outputs to adopt, the trick is to focus on the desired outcomes of your EX strategy. Once you know ‘where’ you’re going, finding the right methods to get you there becomes significantly clearer.

“Data, data, data…” 

The Consumer Brand world is all about data. Focus groups, customer profiling, competitor analysis, NPS, ROI, brand advocacy, Google analytics – no stone is left unturned in the pursuit of that deeper story behind your brand. On the other hand, far too many Employer Brands still depend on engagement scores to drive their strategy and execution. This data alone is only telling a portion of the story, and the key to a more robust set of EB insights requires a consolidation of all your data – from brand to audience to competitor data – and an understanding of how it all fits together. When focused, the right data is a powerful tool to inform strategy, drive creative, help make decisions, and better understand the people we hope to impact.

In our recent Employer Brand and Purpose work with Australia's largest privately owned IT Services provider, we used qualitative research with the leadership team and employees, and behavioural research along-side predictive analytics to inform our creative ideas in a unique process we call, Data-driven Creativity. 

So what’s the difference?

It’s time to start thinking of your employer and consumer brands as two sides of the same coin. They’re inextricably linked after all. Savvy consumers are more conscious of what brands stand for, so an inauthentic Employer Brand will quickly cascade into an inauthentic Consumer Brand. A digital-friendly Employee Experience will engage the right people, ensuring your internal digital capabilities evolve with the times. And your marketing and HR teams would do well to share their data-driven insights. 

Let’s look at Employer Branding more holistically as an integrated part of the entire brand mix. At the end of the day, all your branding is an interruption – designed to break people out of their routine and influence their hearts and minds – and if branding is going to interrupt my day, it better be bloody worth it. To find out how we’re bringing Employer Branding to the forefront as an important part of the overall brand mix for some of Australia’s largest employers, get in touch with the team today at hello@weareunity.com.

1. Wiles J 2019, HR Leaders expect bigger budgets in 2020, Gartner, <https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/hr-leaders-expect-bigger-budgets-in-2020/>. Retrieved on 8 February 2021.

2. * Bridging the Gap: Consumer & Marketer Perspectives on Content in the Digital Age, 2019. Retrieved from https://stackla.com/. Retrieved on 8 February 2021