Branding is a vital part of any organisation. But what many companies don’t realize is the difference between and the importance of their consumer brand, corporate brand and employer brand. Ideally, the three should align together because if not, the company may appear disingenuous. This can raise red flags to both customers and current/potential employees. Of course, being disingenuous can lead to a poor reputation, and as an article from the Harvard Business Review reveals, a bad reputation could cost a company up to 10% more per hire.
Consumer Brands
A company’s consumer brand is probably the first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks about a company’s brand. Think Nike’s “Just do it,” or Apple’s “Think different.” Investopedia describes this as a unique symbol, slogan, name or a combination of all that sets a company apart from all the others.
A consumer brand is also the most common understanding of what a brand is and relates to the product that is being sold to the consumer. A company’s consumer brand is a kind of public identity that can become synonymous with the company itself. An organisation’s consumer brand tends to have a greater reach compared to their employment brand and is a contributing factor to brand loyalty.
Consumer brands build a set of associations people have with regard to a product or line of products and can range from B2C (business to consumer) names such as Coca Cola, Dove, Pampers or Nivea, B2B (business to business) brands like Accenture, Oracle or SAP and brands that offer both B2C and B2B products, with Microsoft, Google and LinkedIn as some of the most prominent.
Read also: Purpose driven branding
Corporate Brands
While consumer brands relate to products and services, corporate brands relate to companies. Good examples of this are global corporations like Unilever and Procter and Gamble, who have numerous consumer brands under their umbrella. However, the architecture can vary and some corporate brands are named the same as their consumer brands. For example, Microsoft, Nestle and L’Oreal are both consumer and corporate brands. This sort of branding can work absolutely fine, as long as both the corporate and consumer brands share the same set of values and don’t try to convey contradictory messages.
While consumer brands communicate mostly with end users, corporate brands talk to a wide range of stakeholders: investors, governments, local communities, employees, trade unions but also increasingly to consumers and customers who want to know who they buy from.
Employer Brands
The employer brand is subordinate to the company’s corporate brand. While your audience for your consumer brand is the people who buy your product, the audience of your employer brand are your employees (both current and future). Your company is likely to employ a much wider range of people than those who buy your product. In fact, they may not even be among the target audience for your product or service. Not everyone who works for a children’s brand has a child, not everyone who works for a medical device company uses that medical device.
The audience of an employer brand is probably also much smaller than its consumer brand. A food brand can sell millions of food packages a year, but it can only employ thousands of people and hire only hundreds of people a year. Employees just need to believe in a company’s product and mission, not necessarily use it.
Consumer vs. Employer branding
An article by This Glassdoor lists the following as three of multiple areas in which consumer and employer branding differ:
Read also: Reviewing competition to build a better brand
a. Target Audience
One of the main differences between an employer and consumer brand are the audiences that each of the brand messages target. Depending on the type of product, the target audience for a consumer brand could be very broad. For example, a toothpaste company would target everyone since everyone uses toothpaste. However, for employment branding, the messaging is most likely more targeted since an employer would be targeting those individuals who fit specific qualifications or whose values align with a mission statement or company values.
b. Competition
Due to the different target audiences for employment and consumer branding, the competition is different as well. For consumer branding, your competition would be those customers who sell similar products or offer similar services. For employment branding, the competition could potentially be much fiercer since you’re competing against every company that is hiring for similar positions. For a sales role for example, you might be competing against almost any company since salespeople are needed to build almost any company.
c. “Customer” Experience
A consumer brand and an employer brand cater to two different types of “customers” and as a result, there are two different experiences that need to be considered. For consumer branding, the customer experience might involve a website or a physical store and some sort of tangible product. But for employer branding, the “customer” is actually the candidate. The candidate’s journey involves everything from the application process to the final interview process. An enduring consumer brand is what attracts customers to an organization but a unique employer brand is what allows a company to attract and retain ideal talent.
Last line
In order to harness full potentials and merits of total branding, it is important for companies to carefully integrate necessary approach(es) for enhanced visibility, impact and sustainable market and mind shares
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