Do you still need an employer brand?
In my opinion, the word employer in employer brand is becoming redundant. A brand is a brand! In my experience, too many companies have a marketing team working on their consumer brand and an HR team working on their employer brand. In many cases, the two are not aligned. Which is crazy.
In the current times, all employees of your company are advertising channels. Every time they mention something on Twitter or Facebook, they are advertising your brand. Even if they are talking about their private life, it is a statement that is correlated with the culture of a company. Let’s go a step further: I belief that a brand is the consequence of a company culture. The brand positioning is a lagging effect of the culture. So brand management becomes culture management. Company culture becomes brand positioning. Let’s go another step further. This implies that HR departments and marketing departments should cooperate more. Maybe, it should even become one department (with different roles of course), but they are both managing the brand positioning of the company.
Let me know what you think about this, because it has an impact on the organization design within a company and on the way we look at brands and company culture.