David Kippen, Ph.D.'s Blog

If you're like me, you believe that a brand is first a verb, then a noun. That is, a brand exists first and foremost to make people take action. The fact that it can also be used as a shorthand signifier for your organization or product is also important, but secondary.

If a brand exists to make people talke action, it stands to reason that we'd look for the success of our new brand position in metrics that measure actions taken, right? Of course.

On the consumer side, savvy organizations develop a brand strength index to measure the state of the brand. This index is really nothing more or less than a roll-up of some important numbers--product sales, customer satisfaction stats, intercept responses--to a single number that speaks to the state of the brand--and, by extension, the corporate reputation.

So how can you build something like that for your employment brand position? Where do you get numbers like that?

I'll bet you already have them.

If you're in recruitment, you measure time to fill, cost per hire, you may measure "fit" (i.e., how long your hires stay), and so on. Your leadership in HR will look at things like overall salary costs as compared to your competitors, absenteeism, etc.; their colleagues in operations will look at things like returns, absenteeism, product defects per hundred (thousand, ten-thousand, whatever) etc.; while their colleagues in sales look at things like customer satisfaction, repeat business, etc. And let's not forget direct measures of employee engagement like annual attitude surveys. Point is, your organization collects a great deal of data, and many of these data are actually an excellent quantitative reflection of the state of your workforce.

It may feel counter-intuitive, particularly if you're among the majority of folks in recruitment who still think of employment brand as a marketing tool for attraction only, but these data are the best way to measure the state of your employment brand. Unlike your colleagues in marketing, you know you can't go to the talent market to measure your brand. (Read my last post for a refresher on why this doesn't work.) But in your workforce, you have the benefit of a captive audience. They not only know your brand, they have a much closer relationship with it than consumers do. In fact, they live it every day. So all those data are actually telling you an important story about "what it means to be [insert your company number here]."

I can't tell you which numbers to select to tell that story without knowing more about your sector and your company, but I can tell you that the right mix of these numbers shouldn't be hard to arrive at, because they're the unique set of numbers folks care about where you work.

You'll need to take four steps to get and use them.

First, you'll need to decide who the most important leaders are in both line and staff positions. (No matter where you work, what you do, or how many leaders you talk to, this should include folks from finance and sales/marketing.) Though the most powerful peopole tend to end up in the positions with the greatest organizational impact, this is not a political kind of important. You're looking for the leaders that own the operations that make your business grow...or not.

Second, once you've identified the leaders you want to talk to you'll need to find out what their top three or four numbers are. (These are the numbers their leaders ask them to report out on frequently.)

Third, you'll need to find out what kind of variation they routinely expect. Put another way, is a three percent change a big deal or ten percept behind where we should be? Is ten thousand more units this quarter a win or a disaster?

Fourth, on the basis of what you've learned you'll need to weight the numbers both with respect to themselves (step three) and with relation to each other (how much more important is an increase in units than an increase in defects?). Your new friends in finance can help if you get stuck but don't get too hung up on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin: all you're trying to do at this point is get some clarity on how to read these data if they point in different directions.

Now you're ready to measure. The easiest way to do this is to take a snapshot of these numbers just before launching your new brand campaign. Measure again shortly after launch and again every six months. If you've done your work on the brand side well, you should see a clear spike at launch and a clear upward trend. Again, your friends in finance can help you demonstrate at least a correlation between your work and improved motion in the numbers that matter which in turn provides you with the first few pieces of data you'll need to demonstrate the ROI of your brand work. And if you're very lucky, they may be able to demonstrate causation, in which case the ROI is a slam-dunk.

The slightly more difficult--but more useful--way to do this is to roll all those numbers up into a single number and call it your brand strength indicator. That way, you don't have to worry about the fact that arrows point in different directions: you can focus on the overall direction. More importantly, you can tell your leaders a simple, one-number story and avoid a complex "here's how I read the data" conversation. (It's the difference between, "our brand strenght monitor jumped from 7.4 to 9.2 within the first three months after launch" and "we're doing really well on the four numbers we got from finance but the problem in the Dalian facility dragged down the average on this month's people pulse score so we're lagging a bit there...")