Advertisements' potential to coin new worlds

The advertisement have the potential to influence people's judgements and decisions. Recently, it also aspires to lead language evolution by coining new worlds. The strategy is similar across several recent advertisements, a dating platform, an online platform offering private accommodation or a third biggest German insurance group. The brand name is converted to a verb.

Src: top.parship.de, www.wimdu.de, www.steptone.de (February 4, 2015)

Talanx-Group is not the only employer creating the brand promise around its name.
What comes as a very refreshing treat is the job ad of treatwell.nl in which the company invites jobseekers to submit their job application with this request "treat us with your application".

Do you know other similar strategies?

Marketing instrument by HR service provider, Randstad

As buyers of human resource services, human resource professionals are pampered with diverse give-away articles. Cups, pens, notepads, key rings and chocolates are the most frequent promotional items brought to business meetings by recruitment agencies’, hr software providers’ and other service companies’ representatives.

All those items are meant to deepen customer contact, combined with the aim to generate customer loyalty. They give not only eye contact with the service provider, but present something "tangible" in the hand.

Towards the end of the year, Randstad, the second largest HR services provider in the world, implements personalized calendars as their marketing instrument which reminds that b-2-b is done by individuals and not businesses. Check a few pages below:







This calendar definitely increased my attention far more than any other promotional item. And as a person making buying decisions, I am precisely the target group. Usability of calendar and maximum individuality is given. Furthermore, the calendar does not only become a possession but a memorable "gift" with a high potential to strengthen word of mouth. Randstad successfully conveyed the feeling of being cared for individually by their company as a customer.

Well done!

Focus on Strengths

In both Marketing and HR, the dilemma arises as to where one should allocate resources. Two choices exist; either focus on strengths or concentrate on compensating weaknesses.

For Marketing, these two approaches are discussed, for example, by Dru*:

“If a P&G product had a 12 percent market share in Normandy and only 6 percent in Alsace, P&G would spend twice as much in Normandy as in Alsace. P&G invests where it is strong. Colgate would have done the opposite, believing that the 6 percent in Alsace, lower than the national average, was clear evidence of underexploited potential requiring investment.”

For HR, alternative examples include:
• Guide and encourage high performers to deliver even greater results or help low performers reach average results.
• Motivate employees by focusing on their strengths or helping them identify and overcome some of their weaknesses.
• Reward, grow, and retain “A” players or concentrate on salvaging “C” players.

Without a doubt, performance-driven organizations will choose to focus on high-performers and allocate resources accordingly.


* Dru, Jean-Marie (2007). How Disruption Brought Order: The Story of Winning Strategy in the World of Advertising. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. P. 177.

Internal Employer Branding Strategy

You cannot stop marketing to your employees just because they work for you. Employees must be constantly reminded of why they joined the organization in the first place and what is special about your company that causes them to stay.

A few ideas for strengthening your company’s brand internally:
• Communicate your strengths frequently; for example, your involvement in the community, awards, and successes that are acknowledged in the press or by professional associations.
• Encourage stories about what it is like to work at your company and store them as a “Story Inventory”.
• Engage employees during the interview process by having them deliver a company pitch to job candidates.
• Involve your employee’s family, if applicable.
• Celebrate your accomplishments publicly.

Internal branding efforts help build self-esteem, commitment, and increase motivation among employees.

Employer Positioning

When generating synergies between marketing and HR, one can not overlook learning from Levi Strauss or Nike. Both corporate giants offer tailor-made products to fit unique needs and desires of every individual customer.

HR departments already recognize the need to position their companies in job markets. They draft, declare, and communicate the company’s value proposition to employees and candidates. An Employee Value Proposition (EVP) in the form of a statement of why the total work experience at a given company is superior to that of another is however not enough.

EVP must be real in terms of what the employee receives from the company for their commitment and the contributions they are expected to make. VOI2C2E is a framework for detailing elements of an EVP*:

• Vision. The firm has a clear sense of the future that engages hearts and minds and creates pride among employees.
• Opportunity. The work provides a chance to grow both personally and professionally, and to develop skills and knowledge that promote present and future employability.
• Incentive. The compensation package is fair and equitable, including base salary, bonus, and other financial incentives.
• Impact. The work itself makes a difference or creates meaning, particularly as it connects the employee with a customer who uses the employee’s work.
• Community. The social environment includes being part of a team (when appropriate) and working with co-workers who care.
• Communication. The flow of information is two-way, so employees are informed about what is going on.
• Experimentation. Working hours, dress, and other policies are flexible and designed to adapt to the needs of both the firm and the employee.

Obviously, different employees will rank the importance of each element of this framework on their own accord. Therefore, an effective EVP will personalize the agreement so employees who meet expectations will be rewarded with VOI2C2E elements that matter most to them.

So, it is not only vital to differentiate the company from other companies. Just like Levi Strauss and Nike can address customers’ unique preferences, HR ought to differentiate the EVP for each employee.

The goal of HR should not be so much attempting to differentiate the company from other companies, as putting people first and differentiating effectively between them. This sort of flexibility from an EVP can build true commitment among employees.


* Ulrich, Dave, & Brockbank, Wayne (2005). The HR Value Proposition. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Job Branding

Job branding is yet another concept that brings the principles of marketing and HR together in order to attract and retain talent.

Essentially, this is a technique to increase the importance of the job by tying it directly into the company’s strategy, vision, or an important initiative or major project. Accordingly, candidates and employees can clearly see growth opportunities that come with successful performance, i.e. what they can learn, do, and become.

Surprisingly though, job branding is only becoming fashionable now. But, tying each job in some way to the company’s strategy should have been HR’s task for decades. How else could HR have determined the need for new positions or additional staff in certain positions?

Or is it that simply with growth, companies hire more and more employees who do not (recognize how they) create value and whose work does not connect to the company’s strategy?

True, some jobs can be more directly connected with strategy than others, and there are jobs that are absolutely strategy-general, e.g. switch-board operator. However, a clear sight between employees’ work and value creation must be sought to create a win situation; for employees, customers, or shareholders.

Internal Blogging

Besides stay interviews, internal blogging is an excellent communication platform to increase performance and retention.

Internal blogging encourages business conversations, team building, project management, knowledge sharing, cross-shift communications, and provides a window of opportunity to learn what employees think about their company*.

Companies that support internal blogging have seen improvements in their products, processes, and quality of service as a result of employees being more communicative, more involved, and more outwardly focused. Other benefits of internal blogging include:
• Employees enjoy their work more,
• Employees connect more with people outside their teams, and
• Employees share and receive information on a whole in a new scale.

Furthermore, the best employee blogs allow for open brainstorming and problem-solving and thereby improve efficiency across the organization.

For these reasons, internal blogging has a great potential to become another “HR best practice”. However, before your organization can deploy internal blogging, it must be considered either this framework is appropriate given your organizational circumstances.


* Wright, Jeremy (2006). Blog Marketing. New York: McGraw Hill.

Service Orientation

In China, businesses still do not quite get the change necessary to bring about high quality customer experiences. Employees’ behavior remains inadequate despite the rising customer expectations. Weak organizational cultures are responsible for this poor understanding of customer care amongst employees.

To overcome employees’ poor service orientation, leaders should define the desired culture along with specifications of how people should behave. While the former will dictate how customers perceive the company’s culture, the latter will drive employees’ behavior.

As an example, visitors to a Disney theme park experience the friendly Disney culture. This means that Disney employees smile, make eye contact, answer questions cheerfully and accurately, offer to help anyone who looks lost, or try to bring laughter to tired or irritable children.

Personal Impact Map

The rise of job branding clearly shows that companies are unable to communicate to their employees how each and every one of them creates value.

Thus, only a few employees can share bottom-line accomplishments like increased revenues, decreased costs, increased prices, increased product/service quality (so that it leads to one of the previous three) or efficiency improvements (better, faster, cheaper) during their tenure.

The vast majority of the workforce does not even believe they make a difference let alone their performance or lack thereof can have an impact on the company’s profits. As a result, when applying for a new job, many applicants have difficulties specifying their achievements.

Managers should start changing this reality by helping employees develop a personal impact map. Together with HR professionals, they should undertake job redesign to create positive benefits, better outcomes, or further progress toward employee career goals.

As a result, each employee will understand how specific activities that he or she performs contribute to the organization’s vision. They will also better recognize their accomplishments.

Lastly, job branding and personal impact mapping can act as catalysts for meaningful and purposeful jobs across the board.

Candidate Value Proposition ?

Recently, a Candidate Value Proposition (CVP) has been recommended to position a company on the job market more effectively and attract talent more successfully. I do not follow the logic of this concept because CVP inherently misses the value-transfer.

CVP probably has its roots in a (Customer) Value Proposition (VP) (marketing) and an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) (HR).

While VP is the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises that a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment; an EVP is the sum of everything employees experience and receive while they are part of a company for meeting expectations, exhibiting desired behavior, and producing results. Furthermore, just as VP targets customers and prospects; EVP focuses on both employees and job candidates.

CVP seems thus to be obsolete and possibly confused with 4 P’s of Marketing and the AIDA sales process.

Talent Pivot Points

In the book, “Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital”*, Boudreau and Ramstad show how HR can evolve to fulfill its potential as a source of strategic advantage.

The authors reviewed what they termed the “Peanut Butter Approach” used by HR in respect to HR strategies; the essence of which is equality and maximizing the company’s investment in its workforce by providing the same incentives, engaging all employees in the same way, and applying HR initiatives equally across the workforce.

Boudreau and Ramstad recommended that HR needs to develop and implement a differentiated and optimized approach to managing human resources. To support their line of thinking, they appraised principles of production and marketing and its relevancy toward HR. For example, the former does not let every machine run at maximum capacity, but optimizes output. The latter on the other hand, focuses on differentiating between customer segments and exposing only certain customer segments to maximum advertising. Just as marketing professionals will ask what customer segments will make the biggest difference to the company’s strategic success, HR professionals should ask where the improvements in talent performance make the biggest difference to the company’s strategic success. Those places are referred to as talent pivot points and are identified using talentship process. The authors then distinguish between vital and pivotal positions using examples of employees at theme parks: “character”, wearing a costume of a cartoon character, and “sweeper”, cleaning; and at the airline: “pilot” and “gate agent”.

The “character” and “pilot” are both vital positions for strategy execution and performance must be maintained at a specific and consistent level.

On the contrary, the “sweeper” and “gate agent” are pivotal since a small difference in performance can make a big difference to customer. Employees in these positions have a lot of opportunities to interact with customers and so may innovate at their own discretion to create great customer experiences.

HR professionals and all employees should think over what specific employee duties can make the biggest difference to the success of their organization. Whatever responsibilities those may be, these talent pivot points must be included in job descriptions and measured in employees’ performance appraisals.


* Boudreau, John W. & Ramstad, Peter (2007). Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

New Intelligence

Generating intelligence through cross-departmental learning can help your HR department transition from a traditional to strategic approach.

Marketing wisdom and departmental know-how can be applied by HR departments in the following ways:
• It is less expensive to retain high performing employees than to attract new ones just like it is less expensive to keep a customer than to attract a new one
• Employees and managers just like customers do not have needs--they have problems. They do not sit down and think 'I've got a need'. Instead, they experience problems and hence seek solutions to these.
• Every employee is mildly dissatisfied with their employer just like every customer is mildly dissatisfied with a product and/or service.
• Applicants are very smart and will often wait for companies to outbid each other in hopes of receiving a higher salary just like customers are smart and will wait around for a lower price in the market.
• Failure to coordinate HR functional activities results in a lost opportunity and meager business impact just like failure to integrate multiple media in an advertisement campaign will yield poor results.
• Just like marketing, HR creates impact gradually, not immediately. Strategic HR results emerge over time, not overnight.
• Just like marketing efforts must occur continuously, treating employees as valuable assets must occur regularly and often.

Adopting Marketing Practices in HR

How would marketing professional address HR challenges and problems?

Using marketing practices and principles, marketing professionals would set the following priorities in the HR department:
• Continually track shifts in the external environment, learn quickly, and then adapt HR strategy to the changing business world.
• Develop an employer brand identity.
• Target the message and develop creative slogans and memorable job advertisements.
• Segment employees based on performance (high versus low performers) and management level.
• Give high priority business units, programs, or high potentials special treatment.
• Differentiate the retention strategy and avoid running with the “herd”.
• Stay in touch with employees and managers without being viewed as a pest.
• Collect employee data (e.g. surveys, polls) and analyze what employees think.
• Build better tools to enable efficient and effective communication between employees and HR.
• Do not focus on the HR program but instead concentrate on its benefits - how the HR program can benefit the business?
• Solicit feedback at the end of each HR program–can you improve anywhere?
• Measure the effectiveness and return on investment of the recruitment campaigns, training interventions, any other HR initiatives.
• Ensure that all managers, management systems, measures and rewards work together "in unison".
• Communicate to others in dollars, the universal business language.

Addressing HR using a marketing/sales perspective can strengthen organizational learning and bring forth synergies.

Applicants as Customers

Following the logic of viewing employees as customers; job applicants and short-listed candidates can be classified as prospects or even leads. In this regard, every successful sales professional will tell you that to be successful in sales; you must treat your prospects as if they are already your customer. Taking this advice could make recruiters and hiring managers in China more in control of whether a candidate accepts an offer. After all, the recruitment process symbolizes how valued one is to the new employer.

How well does your HR department serve applicants as customers?

To find out, critically review the applicant’s journey and experience with your company from the moment they submit an application or initiate contact. There are several points to consider:

“If you want to work here, you’ll have to find us.”
Is your HR department easy to find? Are there any signs to direct job applicants to your HR department? Is the career website easily accessible and informative at your company’s website?

“If you wish to receive an acknowledgement for submitting an application, please attach a self-addressed envelop with proper postage.”
Do you write back to applicants confirming that you received his/her application? Are you utilizing an auto-response feature for online applicants?

”We will keep your CV on file.”
Do you store resumes of applicants? Or do you really review those CVs toward new vacancies?

“We only contact short listed candidates.”
Are unsuccessful candidates simply forgotten? Do you ever thank applicants for their interest in your company and position?

“Thank you for coming.”
Do you communicate to short-listed candidates reasons why they were not successful? Do you provide valuable feedback to stimulate candidates’ self-development efforts? Do you maintain a communication loop to create evangelists for your company?

Post Interview Satisfaction Survey
Do you investigate the applicants’ perception about the recruitment process and their satisfaction levels with the job interview? Are results of such a survey part of the performance review of recruiters and hiring managers? Do you explore what candidates think about your company?

First impressions and administration of the recruitment process sends a powerful message to applicants and candidates. HR can set an example by maintaining the communication loop with potential employees regardless of the outcome. Simply put, show that your company cares and treat potential hires like they were already your HR customer – they just haven’t signed an offer yet.

Employees as Customers

In a service economy, every organization and department now looks after customers. Students are customers of Universities, the general public is the customer of police, job seekers are customers of job centers, etc. This trend and understanding has been incorporated into HR as well since employees are also referred to as customers.

Looking at employees and managers as customers helps HR move from a tactical (administrative) to strategic approach (leadership and consultancy).

For your HR department to be more customer-friendly, HR professionals need to aim at achieving high customer satisfaction levels. A pyramid consisting of 4 levels of customer satisfaction can be used to guide you along.


First, HR must be accurate. At this level, employees expect to receive the benefits they enrolled in, the payroll slip to reflect all information accurately, and for HR staff to answer questions competently. It does not matter how friendly HR employees are, if the HR department consistently fails the accuracy test, then customers defect.

Second, HR must be available. At this level, employees expect an open door to their HR department; this means that the HR staff is available anytime, anywhere, and can notice that important, “I need help now” look.

Third, HR must act as a partner to employees and managers. At this level, employees want their HR staff to listen to them, to be responsive to them, and to make them feel that they are on their side of the fence. Employees and managers who feel understood and enabled to execute the strategy are one step closer to real satisfaction and genuine advocacy.

Finally, HR must provide genuine advice. At this level, employees and managers feel the closest bond to their HR staff because they have helped them learn and achieve goals.

The first two levels, accuracy and availability, barely prevent dissatisfaction. The greatest benefits arise at level 3 and level 4. After all, partnership provides HR the opportunity to create positive feelings of satisfaction and advice constitutes the most advanced level of customer satisfaction.