A positive return on investment (ROI) is one of the only metrics that matters – simply put, do your gains outweigh the cost of your investment?
Concerning brand management tools, searching for online solutions that provide great value can lead to trying many ‘shiny new objects’ that address key business challenges – brand consistency, reliance on expensive agencies for assets, a bird’s-eye view of campaign activity, gatekeeping brand guidelines, to name a few.
In reality, few solutions generate a positive ROI whilst creating long-term business benefits that support advancing your brand strategy – allowing you to maintain gatekeeping control of your brand. In short, having the right information before you invest in brand management tools is pivotal.
That’s why Papirfly commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to determine the financial and business benefits our customers experienced from our brand management platform.
And the results are in.
212% ROI over three years
Combining the results of four customer representative interviews and the financial analysis of their business, a composite organisation was formed.
The study found the composite customer experienced benefits of $1.72 million over three years versus costs of $553,000 – adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $1.17 million and an ROI of 212%.
Improved asset creation efficiency
Whilst external agencies can be important collaborators, Papirfly have empowered brands to reduce the requirement, and therefore cost, of regularly using external agencies when a high quantity of fast, high-quality marketing materials are needed across any location that brand operates in. Prior to adopting Papirfly, the study reports that customers’ global and regional teams primarily worked with agencies to create branded collateral – and the composite Papirfly customer saw a three year-benefit of $455,400 in reduced agency spend.
In addition to less reliance on external agencies, the interviews from the Forrester TEI study showed that, prior to adopting Papirfly, our customers experienced limited brand governance, a single source of truth for the brand was lacking, and brand guidelines and assets were stored in disparate systems or folders across the organisation.
Interviewees confirmed that after investing and using Papirfly, they had advanced asset production processes – to the benefit of $1.2m across three years for the composite organization – and reduced costs by enabling teams to create assets in-house. By centralising brand assets and guidelines in a single portal, content distribution was improved thanks to the centralised brand hub – to the benefit of $27,800 in three years.
Long-term on-brand benefits
Whilst an all-important ROI figure is key, it’s important to highlight some overall improvement that showed in Forrester Consulting’s findings as a result of the customer interviews:
Increased brand adoption –granting all employees access to view assets in the centralised brand hub
Improved brand consistency – interactive experience with the brand hub to more fully embrace guidelines
Maintained gatekeeping control – the ability to quickly and easily validate and approve any material created from our on-brand template technology
Enhanced content quality and improved business outcomes –users across brand, marketing, talent acquisitions, and communications could increase focus on crafting relevant messaging and engaging content
Discover how Papirfly delivered significant ROI
Determining the value of your brand management platform is made easier with a study such as the Forrester Consulting TEI study. Whilst the results are from a composite organisation, the specific impact Papirfly can have on your business will be unique to you.
Download the study, and talk through the findings with one of our brand management experts.
5 marketing focus areas when facing an economic downturn
Karl-Fredrik Lund
5minutes read
Cutting marketing budgets can feel like an obvious decision when facing a new economic downturn. Yet companies that do go down this road often perform worse than their competitors – the brands who understand that working smarter is more beneficial than working harder with less resources.
Recently I’ve been thinking of a friend in my youth. He would only spend a fixed amount when refuelling his car. He said it was his way of navigating high prices. When prices suddenly rose enough, I remember asking him if was going to cut down on driving. “Stop driving? Never!” he said. Then, with a knowing smile, he told me he would in fact be doubling his fuel budget. After all, he was a busy young man.
I wouldn’t have said my friend was wise at the time, but he came to mind after reading many recent articles on preparing for the economic downturn. The common message from the most successful brands seems to be “Don’t stop marketing!”. Perhaps my friend with the car came to mind as one writer’s article questioned Henry Ford’s insistence that “Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping the clock to save time”. My guess is he had the same knowing smile as my friend had when he said it.
Looking up and ahead when facing a downturn
Luckily, academic research can support businesses when the immediate impulse is to stop. The data reveals that there is a real cost in doing nothing – in fact opportunities are lost when the focus is in the wrong place.
For example, in German professor Peter Steidl’s 2009 book, Neurobranding, he points out that companies that increase their advertising budgets as part of their corporate strategy in times of recession, can really pay off. In fact, some have actually increased profits by 4.3 percent – while those that cut back only increased by 0.8 percent.
A more extensive study, carried out by two professors from Harvard among others, followed 4,700 listed companies in the USA through the 2008-2009 recession. They found that 80% of the companies took a minimum of three years to return to approximately the same level as before the recession – while 9% flourished and delivered at least 10% better results than their competitors quickly after the downturn was over.
The secret, according to a Harvard Business Review article summarising the study in 2010, consisted of what the professors called “pragmatic behaviour” – strengthening the organisation’s internal efficiency, and investing significantly more than competitors in marketing and R&D. However, this is not simply about maintaining the advertising budget. Reassessing the multichannel strategy, taking a closer look at what works, and in short, adjusting to get the most bang for your buck, is what works.
Prepare for the future, today
Positive results for businesses that not only aim to survive the downturn, but also make the effort to prepare their brands for the future was evident in both studies. To save you from sifting through a pile of academic papers, I’ve narrowed down 5 key action-focused pragmatic points to consider to help your business to more than survive, but also thrive when facing the downturn:
Don’t cut advertising
Marketing and advertising are not “nice to haves” – they are a vital prerequisite to maintaining operations. Remind management that this attitude cannot change during economic downturns. If the strength of your brand cannot be maintained at every touchpoint – and even made stronger in the minds of your customers – both sales and profitability will fall.
Look closely at the technology stack
Recessions provide the opportunity for a holistic, scrutinising look at your company’s portfolio of ICT tools and software solutions. Do any have overlapping functionality? Are some expensive in relation to the value they provide. Or have competing solutions with better features emerged? As the number of advertising channels has exploded in recent years, is the company still equipped to operate effectively in the ones relevant to you business? “Work smarter, not harder” can be an important mantra to adopt, as there are modern brand management tools that can significantly improve efficiency and provide the value, available to even small marketing departments on reduced budgets. Getting these in place before austerity measures take hold in earnest is vital to survive and thrive through the challenging times ahead.
Focus on ROI analysis
Is the marketing department (and the company) equipped to make useful, traceable analyses of channel use, tactics, partners and campaigns, so that you know what promotes the brand and turnover? Two developments make this necessary. Firstly, marketing now encompasses so many parameters that few companies get far with gut feeling alone – experience must be linked with data so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. And secondly, most CEOs and CFOs have now gained great respect for the importance of data analysis in most decision-making processes. So much so, every CMO must now be able to show solid data analysis to justify their actions and decisions – that is if they want to be taken seriously by the rest of the board of directors.
Experiment, learn and try again
In many contexts, brands can go a long way by trying out a few simple moves, seeing what works and then doing more of it. Here, it is not necessarily a question of gambling with large sums. Start small. Measure the effect. Increase the effort on what is working. Following what your customers are doing, and looking for trends in target groups’ behaviour, keeps the customer at the front and centre – and your brand’s responsive attitude has a great chance of being rewarded with loyalty.
Adapt. Adapt. Adapt.
In economic downturns, it is extremely important to be able to adapt quickly – it has been proven time and time again. Have you invested in a direction that suddenly turns out not to work? Make sure you can quickly turn around and drive in a different direction. Does an unexpected opportunity align with your brand in a way no one had anticipated? Make sure you can grab the opportunity – fast.
I was catching up with my old ‘fuel-smart’ friend this past summer. It was in the middle of pump prices reaching record highs across the country. He told me that long ago he had switched to an electric car. One that automatically smart-charged when the electricity price was at its lowest. Yet toll rings, parking and other considerations meant that he tended to cycle to work on a daily basis. Still working hard to think smarter.
He gave me the same knowing grin as he gave me all those years ago. If I’ve learned anything from him, it’s that even when facing hard times, with the right attitude there can still be plenty to smile about.
This article was originally published on 25 October 2022 on kampanje.com.
The 5 challenges brands face when reducing marketing costs
Papirfly
6minutes read
With marketing being such an integral part of growing business and revenue, it’s always heartbreaking to ask your marketing team to find ways to reduce costs. When faced with harsh cuts, how can you maintain the right balance between all your focus areas, and still maintain optimal operational efficiency? The uncomfortable truth is that companies will from time to time be forced to reduce their marketing spend – yet there are ways to do more for less, allowing you to deliver equally impressive marketing whilst keeping your finance team happy.
Cost efficiency is the name of the game, but even in hard times one shouldn’t forget the old adage ‘you have to spend money to make money.’ When you’re focusing on getting the most out of the money you do spend, the challenge is naturally to map out where and how it’s best put to use. A good place to start is understanding the direct challenges marketers face when they have to operate on a lower budget than expected.
1.Maintaining content production volume
A busy marketing department always has a lot of plates spinning at once. Brands have more channels available than ever before to engage with their audiences, build visibility, and grow their business. While some of them will be more relevant to your business than others, your strategy will undoubtedly include multiple channels, and taking full advantage of them traditionally requires a great deal of time and resources.
When budgets shrink, it becomes a real challenge for marketing teams to uphold the same level of production through conventional processes. Sacrifices have to be made somewhere, whether that is limiting the number of utilised channels or how frequently content is created for them.
Completing repetitive tasks is a constant necessity when producing content for marketing. This time-thief gets even worse in the face of budget cuts and reduced capacity for content production. If the workflow is clunky and assets are being created from scratch far too often, the time it takes for everyone to contribute, review the work and carry out the revisions can lead to substantial delays in sign-off times. Deadlines are missed, and so are timely marketing opportunities. Solving such bottlenecks can make a big difference for your marketing team’s agility and ability to respond to important trends in the market.
2.Less time to plan and strategise
You’ve reiterated to your marketing team that now is the time for action and getting material out to the market. Now everyone is immersed in their own tasks and projects to keep the marketing engine running, and less time is spent on coordinating and realigning. Before you know it, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. From there you can quickly end up with duplication of work, caused by lack of communication and planning.
Not only has precious time and resource been wasted at this point, you might even have frustration and discontent growing with the people whose work had to be cut, and perhaps with the team as a whole. The last thing you need in times like these is a team underperforming due to unhappiness and dysfunction. What’s more, the cost of replacing someone unhappy enough to leave will only increase the stress on your overall marketing budget.
This may be a slightly exaggerated example, but communication breakdown and lack of oversight and planning are serious obstacles. Left unchecked, they will negatively affect your marketing output. And the longer you leave it, the worse it gets for everyone involved. What you need is an easy way to get a bird’s-eye view of the operation, so you can be sure that every effort goes towards fulfilling the company’s goals – and no resource is wasted.
3. Powerful but expensive content types like video get shelved
There’s no question that video content is proven effective when marketing in almost any setting and platform. It’s eye-catching wherever it’s deployed, and provides a pleasant way for your audience to absorb information. Unfortunately, video content also tends to be expensive and resource-intensive to produce, compared to simpler forms of content. As a result, it’s often the first thing on the chopping block when managers are asked to find ways to reduce marketing costs.
Instead of putting all video projects on ice, it’s worth considering a more measured approach. While it might be best to hold off on the big ‘flagship’ videos with all the bells and whistles, there may be smaller areas where more simplistic video content can be very effective. You’d be surprised how far you can get with a phone camera on a tripod, a friendly face and some simple design and editing.
4. Display ads and social media takes priority
Keeping a good level of focus on social media marketing is always a smart decision, since it’s a relatively inexpensive and cost efficient form of marketing. It’s also the main channel where you can keep a finger on the pulse of your customer base, and follow market trends. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, social media platforms are the main avenues for building visibility, interest and traffic for your brand, and so it’s always worth spending time and resource to maintain and execute a good social media strategy.
For many brands, display advertising or banner ads is what gets people through the proverbial door. As one of the primary ways of advertising and driving traffic, they are often considered essential to marketing efforts. There is definitely truth in this, but display ads also tend to have a short shelf life, while being challenging to create. Reducing the time and resource necessary to produce these assets is sure to have an all round positive impact on your marketing team.
What separates social media posting from display ads, is that social media requires greater focus on presenting content that has real value if you want to get results. Creating engaging content is challenging in itself, and when you consider that you need a good frequency of posting on top, the issue is immediately apparent in the face of budget cuts. You may have a lot of existing content you can lean on and highlight, and making use of content that’s still relevant is a smart move. However, allowing your output of new content to stagnate is a huge risk to your growth.
5. Maintaining brand consistency under time pressure
Making sure that brand consistency is maintained in every asset and piece of content going out is a full-time job. If you don’t have a dedicated brand manager, odds are the job falls to the marketing leadership. When time is already limited, and your marketing heads are busier than usual, they will be hard pressed to make sure every detail is following brand guidelines in addition to handling their other spinning plates.
Research shows that you can increase your revenue with 23% if your brand is consistent. The economic impact of lost revenue is something you definitely don’t need on top of the external factors that are already having an effect on your bottom line.
This leaves marketing teams with a dilemma. Either you spend the time and money to maintain better brand consistency, at the expense of your output. Or you take the hit and spend it on other marketing efforts until you have the capacity to focus on it again. This is a tough decision to make. On the one hand you have to try to maintain as much growth as possible in spite of the market cooling down. On the other hand, putting your brand consistency at risk could have far-reaching repercussions that haunt your brand long after economic downtimes.
You can overcome the challenges – there is a better way
As evidenced by the challenges we’ve highlighted, Speed, finesse, volume and oversight is tremendously valuable to a marketing team’s day-to-day workflow. Optimisation of your processes is necessary to remain competitive, in both the good times and the hard times. If you choose to stick to the traditional ways of producing content and designs, getting approval and publication, there’s only so much you can do to plan around and alleviate the problems of working with less resources at your disposal.
Fortunately there is a better way to help your marketing team win back what they lose in capacity when brands have no other choice but to tighten their belts.
It’s time to make a change – read more in our free short guide.
13 steps to developing your employer branding strategy
Papirfly
13minutes read
As a company, you’re always looking to uncover, recruit and retain the best talent out there. People who will work to achieve your goals. Fit into your culture. Have that drive for success.
But there’s a problem – your competitors have the exact same aspiration. And with the reputation of a company more visible than ever before, be it through a jobseeker’s Google search or reviews on comparator sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, presenting a powerful, compelling employer proposition is more crucial and more challenging than ever before.
With a finite pool of truly exceptional individuals that can make a difference to your organisation, it is essential that you can stand out from the crowd in attracting the talent that’s out there, as well as keeping hold of the people you already have.
That is where your employer branding strategy comes in. It sets you on the journey to locating prospects that fit with your organisation’s ambitions and clearly demonstrating why they would feel right at home in your teams.
Here, we’re going to delve into greater detail on what your employer branding strategy is and outline thirteen critical steps to developing one that connects you with the best talent available.
What is an employer branding strategy?
At its core, the definition of an employer brand strategy is a documented, universal approach to translating your organisation’s values, approaches and personality to your audience. It’s a comprehensive offering of everything you have to offer as a workplace to benefit your most important asset – your employees.
It’s how you project your employer brand – how you are viewed by your current workforce and people you hope to one day recruit. Your employer branding strategy needs to transparently and consistently promote these aspects to both your existing team and those you intend to recruit in order to achieve three salient goals:
Positively distinguish your offering from your competitors’
Demonstrate why someone would want to work in your organisation
Illustrate how your brand is developing and strengthening over time
Not all employer branding strategies are created equal, and creating one that ticks all the right boxes requires clear thinking, total buy-in from your team members and refinements over time. By utilising the following best practices, you’ll find yourself in an ideal position to attract the talent that can drive your brand forward.
How important is an employer branding strategy?
As mentioned earlier, Glassdoor and Indeed are just two examples of platforms that highlight your company’s culture and processes. There’s your website and other marketing channels to consider, and word of mouth from employees spreading on forums.
If your negatives outweigh your positives, or you are not dedicating the same attention to your employer branding strategy as your competitors, you stand to miss out on top talent, and even losing current team members in the process.
Developing a brand that appeals and connects with today’s increasingly web-savvy job candidate is vital, and can result in numerous benefits, including:
Improved employer attractiveness to talented individuals interested in working in your industry
Greater motivation among your existing employees by feeling more connected and in-sync with your brand values
Tangible drops in the costs associated with hiring new talent and retaining them long-term
A workforce that actively advocates and promotes your brand, extending your reach to other candidates and customers
A clear, unified vision for your organisation to move towards, with all people associated with your company pushing it in that direction
13 steps to best practice with your employer branding strategy
Effective employer branding strategies can be the difference-maker in an ideal candidate’s decision to join your organisation over the other options available. Following these best practices gives you greater control over the messages you project, and the ability to influence how these individuals see your brand.
1. Audit the perception of your brand
Before developing your employer branding strategy, it is important you have a clear understanding of how people view your company initially. Otherwise, how will you know what adjustments are required?
A thorough audit of your current brand perception, both through the eyes of your employees and your external audiences, lets you understand if your current messaging and reputation is projecting the values and attractiveness you are aiming for. Especially in organisations with teams spread across the globe, it is easy for your values to be mistranslated, or be in needing refinement to connect with local audiences.
There are a host of places you should be examining, including:
Employment review sites – most candidates will be researching these in detail before making a decision on their next employer. What are people saying about your company’s processes and culture? Do you get rated five stars? Do you come across as an attractive brand? Are there negative reviews? If so, have you addressed them effectively?
Social media – investing in social listening tools can help you track mentions of your organisation over social media, so you gain a deeper insight into how people view your brand.
Employee feedback – conducting internal surveys or having open meetings with your teams helps you identify problems that might be affecting your ability to attract and retain talent, so they can be rectified as part of your unified employer brand strategy.
Google alerts – like on social media, it is important to closely monitor the reputation your brand is presenting on Google and other search engines, and determine if this is in line with your objectives.
2. Build your employee persona
Who is your ideal candidate? Without a clear answer to this question, you are in no position to effectively develop an employer branding strategy that targets a person with the personality, aspirations and skills to seamlessly join your teams.
Dedicate time to breaking down the qualities your target audience possesses:
What are their main personality traits?
What causes do they care about?
What motivates them day-to-day?
Where do they research for information?
What roles and responsibilities do they want?
Who influences their decisions?
This is just a sample of the line of questioning you should be asking about what constitutes the right employee for your brand. Of course, these qualities will differ according to the specific staff role and location you are marketing to, but at a fundamental level there must be a template that helps you craft branding that appeals to the right candidate.
Furthermore, by clarifying your ideal candidate, it is more likely that their transition into joining your team and growing within your organisation will be more satisfying and fulfilling.
3. Establish your company’s differentiators
Knowing what makes your company unique goes a long way to crafting your brand story.
It’s your organisation’s mission statement. Its values. Its social responsibilities. Its culture.
This feeds into your employer branding strategy by determining why someone would choose to join or stay with your company over X competitor. To effectively establish your differentiators or USPs therefore, it is important to reassess your own values and compare these with potential alternatives for recruits.
What issues do you stand for that others don’t? What aspects of your work culture can you promote that others aren’t? Where does your brand excel and stand out against what your competitors can produce? The answers to these questions will define the unique characteristics your company has to boost your attractiveness to recruits.
86% of HR professionals believe recruitment is now on an equal footing with ‘marketing’. In the same way your marketing efforts are geared to set your products and services apart from the crowd, your employer brand strategy needs to working just as hard to keep you in the minds of candidates and improve your current teams’ sense of belonging.
4. Determine and utilise your primary marketing channels
How are you going to reach your prospective recruits, or best engage with your existing employees worldwide?
As part of establishing your audience persona, you should have a clearer understanding of what channels are going to connect with the candidates you’re seeking. But it is vital to have these defined as part of your employer branding initiatives, and that consistency is maintained across all platforms you choose to utilise.
By choosing the most effective channels, be it through a careers page on your website, paid media campaigns, or taking your employer branding to social media, you are in a position to tailor and target your audiences far more successfully. Ask employees how they first encountered your brand. Research the most popular platforms and forums for people working in your industry.
Once you’ve identified where you will engage with, use these platforms to frequently translate the inclusivity, vision and development of your brand and your employees. These images, blogs, testimonials and more across the most popular channels for your audience will drive a clear connection with what your brand stands for.
However, it is essential that your collateral feels in no way forced or fabricated. Authenticity is essential in truly appealing to your target audience. Without this genuine aspect, people will see through your attempts and will likely distrust you going forward.
5. Create your Employer Value Proposition
Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is your promise to current and future employees. It’s what you offer that will make them passionate about being part of your team, and as such is a lynchpin of your employer branding strategy.
At the centre of your EVP should be your employee – their motivations, their interests, their goals. Ideally your proposition will cover everything they are looking for to connect them to your company in a positive, fulfilling way. To this end, you should consider what matters to staff:
Professional development?
Holiday allowance?
A thriving workplace culture?
Healthcare benefits?
Flexible working opportunities?
A strong work-life balance?
Bonuses?
A comfortable environment?
Unique perks like gym memberships and social outings?
Charity work and corporate responsibility initiatives?
Most employer branding strategies should contain an assortment of these. But on top of these perks, you also need to consider the core values of your business. How highly your employees are valued. How committed you are to being the best in your industry. How much you care about supporting your customers.
Your Employee Value Proposition is central to how attractive your brand is to recruits, and how effectively you can retain the staff you already have on board. It should be kept transparent and in easy reach of any member of your organisation at all times to reinforce these messages, which is why our brand management solution’s capacity to ‘educate’ employees allows our clients to house core brand documents that can be accessed at any opportunity.
Develop your brand guidelines and assets or review your existing ones
Your company already likely has overarching brand guidelines, assets and logos – but what about your employer brand? Has this been properly defined?
In order to effectively implement your employer brand strategy, you need to have assets in place that sets your employer brand apart and the resources available to create and complement your campaigns.
This includes anything from country-specific guidelines, culturally appropriate imagery, colour palettes, logo variations, audience breakdowns by country, dos and don’ts for different territories and anything in between.
7. Invest in your current team’s development
One of the core reasons behind bad employee retention is a lack of career development and learning opportunities. Without a feeling of progression or investment in their growth, it is likely a member of your team will seek greener pastures to achieve their aims.
Remember, employees who feel they’re progressing are 20% more likely to still be at their companies in a year’s time. By presenting these training and development opportunities to your team, you’re demonstrating you’re committed to helping them realise their ambitions as part of your brand. This not only provides you with a more highly-skilled and motivated workforce, but a workforce that is engaged and appreciative to your organisation.
On top of this reduction in workplace boredom and increase in motivation, staff that feel more in-tune and connected to a brand are much more likely to become brand advocates. They will share your marketing materials on social media. Tell friends and family about how positive your environment is. Actively encourage people to join when vacancies become available.
With that, you are in a position to harness powerful employee branding that increases your trustworthiness and attractiveness to both potential recruits and customers.
8. Internal review and alignment
Anything you plan to implement in terms of strategy, particularly initially, should have buy-in from all appropriate stakeholders. This may include HR professionals in the business, internal recruiters, management and more. You may also want to get opinions from existing or new employees to make sure what you have developed fits in with internal perceptions.
Likewise, you may pick up on an insight internally that you may not have had access to without holding these conversations. Once everyone is happy on the direction you are taking for the employer brand strategy, you can begin developing the tools and resources to educate the wider teams and make sure everyone is on the same page moving forward.
9. Assess your strategy’s success
Finally, once you have your employer branding strategy in place, it is important that you are regularly assessing, fine-tuning and adapting it as your business and your industry landscape evolves. It is rare anything this important is nailed first time around, so it is critical that you over time analyse the results of your efforts and see where improvements can be made.
Examine the success of your employer branding initiatives against your pre-defined KPIs, which may include:
Time-to-hire
Cost-per-hire
Number of applicants to each vacancy
Improved brand reputation
Frequency of employer brand marketing
If any of these are falling short of your aspirations, it is time to reassess, correct the course and tweak your approach until you see the results you’re looking for. Your employer branding strategy should never feel set in stone – as your overall business strategy changes to reflect new trends, patterns or requirements, your employer brand strategy should follow suit.
10. Talk to employees regularly
An employer brand strategy is never completely finished. This is because not only does the internal workforce demands evolve so rapidly, but as a brand grows so does what it’s trying to portray.
By having regular meetings or focus groups with a select few people you can ensure you don’t become subjective and stay rooted in what really matters to employees. Particularly if you are responsible for campaigns overseas, don’t rely on conversations with employees in your own location.
Ideally, teams would be looking after their own materials in their own country, but this isn’t always possible, so ensuring you get relevant, on-the-ground insight will be critical to your success.
11. Invest in video
Whether it’s for organic or paid for advertising, video is a powerful medium to get across your company’s true values. Potential candidates can read handbooks and website pages until their hearts are content but the truth is only video or a face-to-face visit can truly convey the experience of working somewhere.
This is particularly important for larger businesses, whose success has seen them become so vast that potential candidates may perceive them as a faceless corporation. Hearing from real people with real stories helps to humanise your brand in ways that written content can’t always achieve.
12. Create advocacy internally
If your existing employees don’t believe in your employer brand strategy, how can you expect prospective candidates to feel anything? Having members of the workforce on board is one thing, but having them actively promote your brand and company as a positive place to work can be more powerful than many other methods.
There’s an element of authenticity that candidates connect with. As long as your content isn’t forced or dishonest, the genuine passion should shine through. And if it does, you could be on to a winner.
13. Work out the logistics of your localisation
Working across multiple territories can be a nightmare to navigate. Having processes in place to ensure that any culturally sensitive content or translations are up to scratch is important for maintaining consistency and retaining a decent reputation, both internally and externally.
Anything deemed insensitive would not only ruin your chances of a successful recruitment campaign but also demoralise employees working in that region. It’s important that no matter in the world where they are, they feel connected and represented as part of the brand.
6 companies that have nailed their employer branding strategy
We’ve discussed the key steps to building an employer branding strategy, but what do these mean in practice? Below we discuss several companies across the globe that are maximising their potential to attract, recruit and retain the best talent available through their messaging, and what lessons you can pick up from them.
Vodafone
Vodafone is a prime example of a brand that felt it was doing everything right, but after careful analysis determined they were lacking in some areas. They quickly rectified this by conducting a thorough survey across 40,000 people to find out how people felt about the Vodafone brand.
This feedback became the heart of a new employer value proposition, which has proven far more effective in appealing to new and existing talent. At the core of this is something called the “two-way deal”, which promises team members that they will get as much out of their career at Vodafone as they’re willing to put in.
We’re proud of the role that our brand management solutions have played in supporting Vodafone’s employer branding strategy, helping them deliver greater campaign materials on a global scale.
Unilever
Another of our clients, Unilever, has built the strength and success of their employer brand through their status as a leader in their industry. By focusing on materials that emphasise their notable reputation in their employment brand strategy, they present an aspirational image to potential recruits, as well as improve the motivation of their existing employees.
Plus, Unilever in recent years adopted an approach of responding to every testimonial left for their company on Glassdoor, positive or negative. This willingness to respond to employee concerns and use their reviews to improve conditions has consistently kept the company among the “Best Place to Work in the UK” rankings.
L’Oréal
L’Oréal back in 2013 demonstrated the value of placing your employees at the centre of your employer branding strategy. After passing 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, they used this as an opportunity to highlight the stories and skills of their team members across the globe, emphasising the opportunities available at their business to potential jobseekers.
As it’s well-established that people trust other people over brands, L’Oréal’s approach was an effective way to build confidence in their brand through the voices of their own employees.
Zappos
While many fashion brands utilise their social media accounts for their products, Zappos pairs this with content demonstrating the benefits of joining their team. On Instagram in particular they share a substantial amount of CSR work, employee stories and company-wide events to help their brand feel more appealing to both jobseekers and the wider public.
Furthermore, their Insider Program has been a great innovation for their employer branding strategy. This allows anyone interested in joining their team one day access to information relevant to the company, allowing Zappos to source from the best available talent.
Hubspot
When Hubspot came under increased scrutiny after being named one of the Best Places to Work in 2018, this investigation simply shone a bigger spotlight on their commitment to listen to their employees and take their feedback and suggestions on board.
This extends to Hubspot’s social media presence, where they have regularly encouraged followers to leave comments that can act as jumping points for future content. It also champions its dedication to a fun company culture, with flexible work hours and tuition reimbursement.
Heineken
Pushing a strong visual element to their employer branding strategies, Heineken in early 2019 launched their “Going Places” campaign, focusing on celebrating the stories and development of 33 of their employees across the globe.
After conducting research into the values their brand represent, the company honed in on three pillars: authenticity, transcendence and longer-term brand management. These were combined into the campaign, inspiring their existing workforce and encouraging prospective employees about the potential they can unlock at Heineken.
The future of your employer branding strategy
We hope that this insight into the best practices of employer branding strategies will help guide your way to presenting a more attractive, comprehensive proposition to prospective candidates, as well as keep your current team members engaged with your brand.
The importance of employer branding can never go understated in how it drives the future of your organisation, and establishes a workforce that is motivated, committed and inspired to be part of your company. Achieving this on a global scale is far from straightforward, but through our market-leading brand management software, your team is able to efficiently execute your employer brand strategy.
Start empowering your team with an all-in-one brand management platform today.
12 corporate communication metrics you should be tracking
Papirfly
8minutes read
There is a significant amount of value in your communications – but how do you determine how much?
Identifying the key corporate communication metrics that an organisation should be judged against has been an ongoing challenge across the marketing industry. During a PRWeek Breakfast Briefing in late 2018, Allison Spray, Head of Data and Insight at Hill & Knowlton Strategies, explained the situation quite clearly:
“I’ve worked across a lot of different (marketing) disciplines, particularly on the media-buying side, and when I look at how drastically they’ve moved in the past ten years compared to us, that’s when the gulf really becomes apparent”
While she was specifically referring to PR, this is arguably a constant across all forms of corporate communications. This is how your organisation communicates with its various audiences both internally and externally, from your employees and stakeholders to customers and the general public.
The days of evaluating the effectiveness of different communication systems on column inches and Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) no longer apply. But, it is still highly important that you are using meaningful corporate communications metrics to track its usefulness to your brand.
Why is knowing your communication metrics important?
But what is less emphasised is the importance of tracking how effectively it is fulfilling those goals, or how substantial the cost of poor communications can truly be. A survey of 400 multinational corporations in the US and the UK revealed that communication barriers cost an average of $64.2m in lost productivity.
Unquestionably, that is money that can be put to better use, as well as an illustration of the hours wasted by employees as a result of ineffective communications. In fact, according to research by Mitel, ineffective communication amounts to 1 DAY of working time lost per week. Their report also revealed that:
In addition, a survey by Hollinger Scott revealed that 41% of teams don’t have any means to track their corporate communications in relation to user activity and how much content is being seen and interacted with.
Just having a corporate communications strategy in place is not enough – measuring the effectiveness of communications is essential to ensure that this monumental part of your day-to-day life is functioning as efficiently as possible.
Why is measuring communications such a challenge?
While the ability to measure effective communication is crucial, that doesn’t mean that a settled way to track these metrics has been fixed in place. The Barcelona Principles have attempted to offer a benchmark for measuring communications, but it is not comprehensive.
That is largely because the aims of communications aren’t exactly definitive – it is all about brand perception. And while communications metrics like email opens, event sign-ups and the columns you receive in an industry magazine can indicate your strategy is delivering results, it is difficult to be certain.
This has led some to argue the necessity of tracking internal communication metrics in particular, as this is above all a role designed to drive behaviors to fulfill business outcomes. That can be difficult to quantify through typical marketing KPIs.
Other potential barriers facing teams struggling to track their corporate communications metrics include:
Not having access to the right tools to measure relevant data
Fear that bad metrics will put communicators’ job security at risk, even if these numbers aren’t directly caused by their actions
Lack of time/resources – communicators cover so much ground that tracking results can feel like another burden on an already stressful job
But what corporate communications metrics and KPIs will signify if you’re reaching your targets or falling below expectations? As noted earlier, this is still a question which is yet to have a fixed answer.
Fundamentally, how you choose to measure effective communication within your organisation will depend on your specific business objectives. An effective approach to judging the quality of your communications is to place them in the context of what your business and its partners are looking for and judge against those, using these to identify any issues and barriers to these aims.
This places the measuring of communications at the doorstep of your senior leadership team – when both key executives and your communications team are in-sync in terms of what they intend to accomplish, it makes the job of tracking metrics far more straightforward.
It could be that your company wants to foster a stronger sense of brand identity within your workforce? Or that there’s less dependence on email with a stronger emphasis on your intranet or social networking tools? It will depend on what you are seeking from your communications efforts.
However, we can safely say that in order to effectively assess these, there is a mix of quantitative and qualitative corporate communication metrics you should incorporate into your analyses.
Essential key performance indicators for corporate communications
Employee awareness and feedback
Open, read and click rates
Page visits and logins
Peak times of staff intranet use
Corporate video views
Mobile usage levels
Platform adoption rates
Employee advocacy
Employee turnover
Event and benefit sign-ups
Media outreach and digital trends
Speed and effectiveness of crisis communications
1. Employee awareness and feedback
Did you know that 74% of employees feel they miss out on company news and information? Establishing how aware your teams are to the communications processes you have in place or how knowledgeable they are of the content you’re putting out there is a critical internal communication metric to track.
Establish a benchmark and then survey and talk to your employees to gain a consensus on whether they’re receiving the communications you are sending out, and if not, why? By measuring awareness and interest, you get an understanding of where your communications might be lacking.
2. Open, read and click rates
Plus, incorporate elements like event sign-ups and other links onto your communications to help determine if employees are actively engaging with them. While they might open an email, this will allow you to track if people are following the actions you’ve suggested and truly engaging with your content.
While on their own these do not paint a complete picture of the effectiveness of your approach to communications, the open, read and click rates of your emails and other messages will illustrate if people are paying attention to what you have to say. With the average read-rate of company-wide emails sitting at around 37%, this will provide an indicator of the success of your internal communications.
3. Page visits and logins
Similar to email opens, reads and clicks, used as standalone corporate communications metrics visits to a company-wide intranet can only tell you so much. But tracking unique page views, how often employees log in to the platform, how long they stay on there, and so on, provides an indication of how valuable your staff view these and if a change of approach is required. Remember – only 13% of employees strongly agree that their company communicates effectively with them…
4. Peak times of staff intranet times
Alongside how often your employees are logging into and engaging with your intranet or shared company platform, it can also be valuable to identify the peak times they are using it. Knowing the times of highest traffic will indicate when’s the right time to schedule company announcements or news updates in the hope of getting the greatest engagement.
Across all forms of marketing, timing is essential – to attract the largest possible audience to your internal communications, it benefits you to release them when they’re most active on your platforms.
5. Corporate video views
Another quantitative measure. If you have one or several corporate videos on your site or as part of your communications, following their play-rate and view counts will inform you as to whether they are resonating with and appealing to your audiences. Gathering this and other data at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) will allow you to spot any trends and react to these in a timely fashion to protect your ROI.
6. Mobile usage levels
As well as how often employees and customers are engaging with your communications content, it’s important to determine where they’re coming from. With Brits spending in excess of two-and-a-half hours every day on their smartphones, knowing if they’re following this trend when engaging with your materials will highlight whether a mobile-first approach will appeal to your audiences more than focusing on an alternate avenue.
7. Platform adoption rates
If you’ve recently introduced a new social app for your employees, how many have downloaded it? Consider this if you’ve also introduced an employee recognition programme – how many people have actually signed up? Checking the adoption rates of these platforms designed to improve productivity and the effectiveness of communications will give an indication as to whether they’re actually providing a return, and also how well your communications are received overall.
It might mean that an alternative approach is required, or that the processes involved in setting up this platform are too complex or time-consuming for employees to get involved with. Again, it’s about identifying any issues early and reacting to them appropriately.
8. Employee advocacy
The power of transforming your employees into impassioned brand advocates cannot be overstated – it is a natural, sociable way to connect audiences to your company’s identity. Tracking how often your content is being shared, liked, and spread out by your team members is a powerful demonstrator of how connected they feel to your brand, as well as how familiar they are with your various communication platforms.
Identifying any issues with these corporate communication metrics will inform where, when and how you post content going forward, and hopefully lead to you utilising this powerful resource to its fullest.
9. Employee turnover
People who maintain a strong bond with their place of work are unlikely to want to leave it. And, judging how one of the primary reasons employees depart is due to a poor relationship with their manager, it stands to reason that your employee turnover numbers will be a useful communication KPI. The more turnover you endure, the less likely your staff are engaged with your company-wide communications.
When employees feel informed and understand what is going on in their company, they feel a deeper level of respect and trust towards it. This leads to better productivity, efficiency and achievement. If your communications are not as effective as they could be, you stand to miss out on those benefits.
10. Event and benefit sign-ups
If your company has a benefits programme or regularly holds workplace events, tracking how many of your team has signed up to these, and how quickly they do so, will provide insight into how effective your communications are. If the benefit is useful and doesn’t require a great deal of employee effort to get involved with, if enrolments are still low, this corporate communications metric can illustrate your current approach isn’t reaching people, or engaging them properly.
11. Media outreach and digital trends
Both the number of press releases and other external communications your company is sending out and the response to them can be a strong indicator of how effective they are. If they are getting into well-respected publications and websites with high domain authority, you will gain a clearer sense of how strong your content is on these platforms.
Furthermore, whether it’s the trending hashtags page on Twitter or you’re featured on Google Trends, that is another (if not, aspirational) way to determine if your communications are having the desired impact.
12. Speed of crisis communications
Finally, often the effective measure of your communications team is how quickly they can respond and handle difficult situations. Crisis communications form a central component of your overall communications strategy, and so it’s crucial you are tracking how quickly this content is reaching your audiences, and if their response to this is as you’d hope for.
Staying on top of your corporate communications metrics
This is just an indication of some of the communication KPIs that you should refer to when you are judging how the value of your communications to your organisation. The all-encompassing nature of these messages and their relationships with your various audiences, both within and outside your company, places a high priority on whether these are working as effectively and efficiently as possible.
The bottom line is that the quality of your corporate comms directly affects your bottom line. The question is, can you afford to NOT be tracking the impact your corporate communications strategy is having? Hopefully, these 9 examples will help to point you in the right direction when figuring out how solid your approach is.
Why people leave jobs: and how your employer brand can fix it
Papirfly
3minutes read
In any organisation, the feeling of losing good employees is one you have to get used to very quickly. People quit their jobs for a wide variety of reasons – some of which are completely out of an employer’s control.
Nevertheless, while employers must become accustomed to the feeling of losing employees, they should never become comfortable with it. Because in many cases, their decision to leave is something that could have been prevented.
Now with phrases like “The Great Resignation” gaining traction, and a global Microsoft report revealing that up to 41% of employees contemplated quitting or changing professions in 2021, it seems an appropriate time to examine the standout reasons why people walk away from their employers – and how a strong, protected employer brand can keep them around.
Source: The Work Intitute
Citing ‘poor benefits offering’ as a reason for leaving jobs has increased over 100% since 2010
4 reasons why employees quit
1. Lack of growth and development opportunities
Most people do not aspire to be in the same role for decades. They want to know that there are opportunities to grow and progress in their career. If they cannot see these possibilities in their organisation, they will look elsewhere to find somewhere that will empower them to realise their true potential.
If employees feel unchallenged by the work they do, boredom can quickly set in – and boredom breeds demotivated, uninspired workers. In time, too much monotony will spur them to seek a fresh challenge somewhere else.
Source: The Harris Poll
1/3 of workers quit their former job because they didn’t gain new skills or improve their performance
2. Lack of meaning or purpose
Similarly, if employees feel like what they do lacks purpose, or isn’t contributing to their organisation’s goals, this can quickly dissuade them from sticking around. This is particularly possible when employees don’t feel connected to their company’s mission statement, values or objectives. Without this connection, it is much easier for them to disengage from their employer.
Source: XpertHR
More than 50% of organisations have seen a rise in employee requests to work more flexibly
3. Poor relationships with management or coworkers
Employees’ internal relationships are a major influence on their happiness and motivation. If they do not feel like their work is appreciated by management, or that they are constantly being berated by those above them in the pecking order, that is a sure-fire sign that they will not stay with the company long.
This extends to co-workers as well. If an employee feels isolated at work, or struggles to form good relationships with their colleagues, this again could spur them into leaving. The more passionate someone feels about their co-workers, the less likely they are to leave them.
Source: Career Addict
79% of employees consider bad leadership a factor in their decision to quit… and 40% would return to their old job if the boss was replaced
4. An unappealing corporate culture
In the same vein, if the corporate culture within an organisation is unpleasant or stagnant, it is likely to frustrate the employees trying to work within it. Especially for younger generations, a rigid or overwhelmingly negative atmosphere will actively encourage them to find one that is more suitable.
Source: Deloitte
72% of employees would leave their existing employer for one with a more inclusive culture
Attract and retain the best talent with a brand management platform
In many cases, employee turnover can be addressed and minimised. By placing a firmer focus on the quality and consistency of your employer brand, this can convince your most talented team members to be with you for the long haul – and your company will reap the benefits of a more established, motivated workforce.
To help spread your employer brand across the entirety of your organisation, Papirfly‘s all-in-one brand management platform is a powerful ally to have on your side. As well as accelerate the rate in which you create employer brand materials – taking production completely in-house – our solution also enables you to:
Contain all brand guidelines, onboarding materials, training videos and more into one brand portal
Organise all campaigns through a streamlined, effective campaign planner
Store and share all approved assets with your teams globally through a comprehensive Digital Asset Manager (DAM)
It’s safe to say that streaming accounts have been working overtime throughout the last year, and it got us thinking… What lessons can we learn from Hollywood movies, and how can we apply them to have a positive impact in marketing?
If you’re still scrolling endlessly through the movies menu and can’t decide on a film for a quiet Saturday night, we’ve put together a watchlist that’s filled with key take-outs for marketers.
So, grab your popcorn, turn off the lights and get yourself comfy for the premiere of Papirfly’s marketing lessons from the movies.
Oversights can cost you big time
You might have the budget to pour endless time into creative agencies and blue-sky thinking, or to roll out huge global campaigns across every channel you can imagine. But that doesn’t mean you have everything under control…
“No expense spared” is a phrase that appears throughout Jurassic Park before the inevitable happens; mistakes are made, certain things are underestimated, and the park descends into chaos. Compare that to losing sight of your campaign strategy, and you could be looking at inconsistent assets, materials that aren’t suitable for local markets and incoherent messaging.
In the world of marketing, that’s the equivalent of being stranded on an island overrun with ferocious dinosaurs.
The lesson for marketers here is to use your budget wisely. Make sure you can take a step back to get a bird’s-eye-view of your workflows and marketing materials, and how they are being used by your teams.
Our verdict: A classic for all the right reasons
“Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge.”
The five Ds of Dodgeball remind us of the benefits of having an agile approach. And, just as importantly, that there are downsides to not having one. Make the wrong move, or move too slow, and your brand perception could take the hit. You also run the risk of missing out on amazing business opportunities because you simply didn’t react.
Things will always move fast in marketing. So you need to be ready for changes in shopping habits, consumer attitudes, technology, current events and the industry itself.
Taking the time to develop an agile marketing strategy will help you predict these changes before they happen and put you in the position to refocus your approach when they do.
Our verdict: Effortlessly funny and engaging
Know your audience
Just like Sulley and Mike, you might think you’ve got a tried-and-tested way to keep your audience engaged. But when your only trick is serving the same content time after time, it won’t be long before they get tired of it, or start ignoring you altogether.
Using techniques like empathy mapping is a good way to uncover your audiences’ pain points and position your brand as the solution. While your overarching brand purpose might remain the same, the way you communicate it to your audience will be better aligned with their needs and values.
Monsters, INC. also teaches us that the way things have always been done isn’t always the best. It can be hard to break away from the status quo, but being brave and venturing into the unknown can shake up the entire industry for the better and put you ahead of your competition. Continuous evaluation of your audience can help you find new and uncharted ways to resonate with consumers.
Our verdict: A wholesome story that’s elevated with comedy
Don’t lose control of your content
Sharknado is a movie that shouldn’t have been. And yes, it’s as ridiculous as the name suggests. Starting out as a joke between friends, this low-budget TV movie, complete with bad special effects, terrible acting and a storyline that makes little-to-no-sense, somehow became a 6-part movie franchise.
It’s a great example of how content can take on a life of its own and go beyond the control of its creators. When you have teams across the globe using different agencies to create thousands of assets and marketing materials, it can be easy for something completely off-brand to slip through the net.
Save yourself a Sharknado by using a digital asset management tool to centralise all your marketing assets, making them easily accessible and adding extra layers of approval.
Our verdict: An unlikely recipe for storyline success
Stay one step ahead
What makes Marty McFly the hero in this movie is his ability to think on his feet and stay one step ahead of Biff, his arch-nemesis. He does this by keeping the past, present and future in focus and anticipating every move before it happens (or happened).
We also see Doc and Marty learning lessons from failure, adapting on the move, solving problems in the face of adversity and never giving up on their goals. These attributes wouldn’t look out of place in a successful marketing team.
If you don’t have access to the flux capacitor, then data is your closest thing to time travel. Having a way to collect, analyse and share data will help you predict industry changes before they happen and make those early decisions that will change the course of history for your brand.
Our verdict: Way ahead of its time – in a very positive way
Work smarter, not harder
While we can’t condone skipping school, we have to admire Ferris Bueller’s creativity, boldness and ambition to do things differently. Sometimes you can get more done by breaking the routine and allowing yourself more time for what matters.
Part of the Papirfly vision is to create a world where work doesn’t have to get in the way of life. With the right tools, there are more possibilities than ever to be creative and achieve more in less time.
So many leading brands are embracing employee empowerment by trusting their team’s expertise, communicating effectively, listening to their suggestions and removing the need for micro-management.
The result is more self-directed employees with a clear understanding of business goals and the confidence to deliver. This not only increases productivity, but creates an environment where teams are enthusiastic about their work.
Our verdict: A must-watch for an entertaining escape
The moral of the story
All great movies have a protagonist, a goal to overcome, and a resolve. This is where marketing and story-telling crossover to take your brand on a journey to discover its purpose, resonate with audiences and achieve your business goals.
As well as a great excuse to put your feet up and enjoy a good film, we hope our movie selection has brought you the insights you need to make your marketing memorable.
An exciting new era for Papirfly, with the same drive for excellence
Karl-Fredrik Lund
3minutes read
An exciting new era with the same drive for excellence
Empowering brands is what we do. Since Papirfly was founded back in 2000, our customers have received game-changing solutions to activate their brands on both a global and local scale. Our success has provided us with the wonderful opportunity to practice what we preach – to fully take charge of our future and activate our own global brand in a new, fresh and exciting way.
In March 2021, we created Papirfly Group as we merged the companies of Papirfly and Brandmaster – two brands born in Scandinavia, with the same global vision to transform marketing operations with innovative tech solutions. Having added Meriworks six months later, with the trust and support of our growth-investment partners, Verdane, we’ve been excitedly working behind the scenes. I’m grateful to everyone within the company, as they’ve all helped play their part in increasing our momentum as pioneers in the Brand Activation Management space.
We’ve recruited and acquired a great deal of new talent in these last few years. As we move forward together to serve our customers with one united vision, I’m proud to announce our launching as one brand identity – Papirfly.
Creating a look that matches our high standards
Evolving as a company and platform has meant that our brand has needed to catch up.
As you can see, our expert design team has created a new visual identity that recognises the legacy of both Brandmaster and Papirfly. Our common personality and professionalism is presented in a bright, energetic and unique style. Rooted in Scandinavian design, our heritage is woven into our DNA – remaining playful, innovative and passionate, reflecting the way we inspire and empower brands.
Our recent growth and development as a notably fresh brand does not change the level of delivery and drive for excellence at this next level of innovation – rest assured, that is business as usual.
In fact, working under one brand means that our teams are working more closely together than ever, creating solutions and developing personal relationships and collaborations with brand leaders. Our customers can still expect to drive their own brands to the next level and unleash the potential of talent within their global teams.
Specialising across various niches – corporate communications, employer branding and the mult-faceted aspects of retail, hospitality and consumer brands – our expansion and evolution benefits everyone. Helping brands build on their foundations to reach greater heights in the coming years. And in unpredictable times, keeping up with and being one step ahead of the competition has never been more important.
The future of brand management
I hope you like our new brand identity. Naturally, we used our own all-in-one brand management platform to manage our rebrand. Whether you’re launching a new brand, going through a rebrand process, or simply looking to achieve global governance and total brand consistency, we’re excited to serve forward-thinking brand teams at the start of their own new adventures.
Connecting your message across your own people is essential, as is staying on-brand and aligned to that message with customers at every touchpoint. Every person across your brand deserves to excel in their role. There’s a better way to empower your marketing teams – and with a fresh new look brand, we’re more ready than we’ve ever been to help you grow and succeed.
It’s that time of year again, as people up and down the country get their first glimpse of this year’s Christmas adverts. These highly-anticipated ads bring a welcome distraction from the monotony of the year and gently move us into the embrace of the festive season.
2021 has been no exception, as several leading brands have already showcased their holiday offerings…
John Lewis
For many, John Lewis is the benchmark for all Christmas ads in any given year. This year’s effort is everything you’d anticipate from them – a heartwarming story, loveable fictional characters and a goosebump-inducing soundtrack.
However, this ad has faced a fair amount of backlash and apathy in comparison to their previous offerings. A quick scan through their YouTube comments showcases this sentiment:
Nothing will ever beat (insert previous ad here)
I didn’t get any Christmas vibes from the advert
It was formulaic and melodramatic
Whether it is a case of previous years setting the bar too high, or the ad didn’t encapsulate the Christmas spirit as John Lewis has in the past, their 2021 contribution is undoubtedly polarising.
Boots
Boots leaned on a touch of celebrity for their advert, telling the story of Jenna Coleman and her magical #BagOfJoy, gifted to her by her nan.
It is a whimsical story that stays completely on the Christmas message, with Jenna using her infinite bag of gifts to treat her friends and family, with the final heart-tugging scene of her giving her nan her own gift.
Again, a scroll through the YouTube comments puts the spotlight on one word – ‘lovely’. That’s the Boots ad in a nutshell, a sentimental, traditional and uplifting tale.
M&S
Meanwhile, the M&S 2021 Christmas ad hones in on humour by bringing lovable character Percy Pig to life.
With great voice-over work by Tom Holland and Dawn French, this ad sees Percy revel in his first Christmas, with Dawn’s fairy showing him all of the delicious food on offer this year (conveniently skipping any pork products!)
While significantly shorter than the other two, this injection of humour and the adorable characters will be sure to capture the imagination of many.
The making of a classic Christmas advert
As these three distinct ads demonstrate, every year the stories that brands tell battle it out to become the one that resonates most with the general public.
But often the bid to stand out ends with very similar outputs. While Coca-Cola’s ‘Holidays are coming’ stands firmly in a category of its own, many other brands fall into the trap of producing repetitive narratives and production styles that have left the iconic Christmas ad format feeling a little tired and formulaic, such as:
An adorable protagonist
An acoustic cover of a well-known pop song
An unexpectedly touching ending
An accompanying product range for said protagonist
An original strapline to tie it all together
Many would argue John Lewis’s 2021 effort fits firmly in these parameters, which is maybe why it has received a middle-of-the-road response. And while there is undeniable creativity and effort that goes into these adverts, their stories may no longer be enough to engage audiences that have endured two years of real-life plot twists and an endless stream of emotionally-fuelled messaging from brands.
Below we’ve highlighted some Christmas classics that helped to lay the path for iconic holiday promotions, and what brands can do to take a leaf out of their book this year.
While internet shopping and mass closures plagued the brand, Toys R Us is set for a mini-revival thanks to Macy’s. Prior to all this though, their advertising was highly effective, and while this ad dates back over three decades, there’s still a lot it can teach brands of today…
What can brands learn from Toys R Us, Magical Place?
We briefly mentioned covers of famous songs as one of the strings brands have to their formulaic ad bow. But if you take a look at this advert, one of the first things that stands out is the original music.
Composing a jingle or song that sticks in the minds of consumers is of course an incredibly difficult task, but the lesson lies more in the level of commitment and effort that went into it.
Hiring someone to perform a cover, along with the legalities of using a well-known artist’s song doesn’t come easy, but it’s been done so many times before. John Lewis even managed to get Elton John to sing and star in their ad back in 2018.
So unless brands put a completely new twist on a song, they will only continue to out-celebrity each other with covers for so long. We know that music is an integral part of many Christmas adverts – usually resulting in the original or cover song re-entering the charts – so it’s important that agencies move away from the standard cover format if they want to bring something new to the table.
Change the words. Switch up the genre. Surprise people with its delivery. Give the opportunity to an unknown artist. Make it instrumental and let the story speak for itself.
How the delivery looks will vary from brand to brand, but one thing’s for sure – audiences will only react to acoustic covers of Oasis and Coldplay songs for so long.
Though Yellow Pages ceased printing in 2019, it’s a brand that’s still imprinted in the minds of multiple generations. Since going digital ‘Yell’ doesn’t need to release TV ads like they used to (they’ve had some great ones, you can watch them here), but this particular Christmas ad can teach brands some traditional and modern lessons.
What can brands learn from Yellow Pages, Mistletoe?
With the rise of TikTok, busier lives and shorter attention spans, short videos now make frequent appearances on social media. This advert from Yellow Pages is under 20 seconds, yet it tells a powerful story that highlights the product it is trying to push.
We learn that the book is so thick and comprehensive that the young boy is able to use it to gain significant height. It engages, it informs and it tugs on the heartstrings with its Christmas mistletoe spin, all with just 4 words of narration and 19 seconds of footage.
With many of the modern Christmas ads, we usually have to endure much longer sequences, not seeing any payoff or surprise until the last few seconds. A good strategic move for many reasons, but wouldn’t it be clever if a brand could tell their story and leave a great impression in much less than a minute?
Imagine a powerful series of shorts that stood out from the long-winding adventures of woodland creatures and animated vegetables to deliver Christmas messages that were concise, on-brand and equally as effective.
A brand needs to get across a lot, and with Christmas adverts usually being amongst the most expensive to produce, it’s understandable to want to say everything in one go.
Exploring shorter stories to create a connection, spark intrigue or encourage an action could help your brand stand out.
This wholesome TV ad effortlessly captures the spirit of Christmas in exactly a minute. Featuring many traditional elements of a holiday scene – Santa, Christmas tree, soft glowing lights – this was one of the most iconic adverts of its time. This advert, though over 30 years old, could still land well on screens today. Let’s explore why…
What can brands learn from Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Ho Ho Ho?
The power of nostalgia in advertising can never be underestimated (Sainsbury’s proved this back in 2014 with their ‘1914’ Christmas ad). Since the end of 2019 many doubts have been cast on the future by media outlets and politicians. Reminiscing about the past and simpler times is a great way to bring back hope and revive the Christmas spirit.
This could take the form of introducing a well-known character from the past, capturing the essence of particular decades, bringing back historic brand adverts, or simply encouraging a tech-free, family-focused season. The simplistic nature of the ad is what gives it such broad appeal.
And after a succession of catastrophic events, audiences will want to reconnect with times that have gone by in a way like never before, and feel hopeful about the future.
Which brands’ Christmas ads will stand out this year?
We expect to see some brands really push purpose and socially-driven narratives this Christmas. From saving the environment and the Christmases of the future, to taking brave political stances on global events, there is going to be some breaking of the traditional formula in more ways than one.
Brands and agencies that take this approach will need to be cautious of ‘purpose fatigue’, be creative and ensure that whatever actions follow the TV spots match their holiday focus.
On the other hand, we are likely to see brands wanting to inject happiness and humour into uncertain times. We therefore believe we will see some imaginative and borderline offbeat approaches that will thwart the traditional TV ads. Expect clever and curious direction, feel-good stories and optimistic stances on the future.
What audiences will engage with best remains to be seen, but as each person has responded so differently to the pandemic, it would be impossible for brands to hit the mark every time. There will be some people who want straight-talking sales and promotions ads, and others who crave humanisation and big-scale gestures from brands.
One thing that’s guaranteed is that brands across the world have a fantastic opportunity to round up the events of 2021 in a truly creative way, and set the tone (and bar) for 2022.
Attracting graduates: a new wave of employer brand
Papirfly
6minutes read
The graduates of today are the future leaders of tomorrow. So getting your company noticed at a pivotal time in the careers of these bright young prospects is crucial.
Gen Z and beyond have experienced turbulence much like any other generation. But when it comes to the outlook on careers, the environment and the future, they have been exposed to a much thicker wall of negativity, which employers will have a partial responsibility in helping them break through.
Employers need to not only work hard to bring their employer brand to this new wave of prospects – they need to inspire this generation into believing anything is possible once again. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a vital one to ensure that the right talent is nurtured, retained and driven in the right direction.
Overcoming challenges with graduates
There are typically two main scenarios employers are finding themselves in with graduates.
They are inundated with applications for certain roles
For more specialised roles, there is a smaller pool of talent and competition is high
First let’s look at the most common situation: receiving too many applications.
This can be a problem for a number of reasons that will affect your ability to recruit quality graduates…
Problem…Too many people with similar skill sets are applying and it’s difficult to distinguish who might be most suitable based on their application alone, suggesting there’s a flaw in the application process.
Solution…If you are using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), there should be options available to introduce more detailed screening questions. These answers should give you insight into an applicant’s personality, communication skills and general motivations for the role before considering their skill sets.
Your team should also set some common rules for what a good applicant looks like. For example: they must include a cover letter, they must have tailored their cover letter to your company, they must have a nicely presented CV – those kinds of things. This sets parameters that can help you weed out those who haven’t made the effort.
Additionally, ensure your employer brand’s mission and purpose are coming through enough on your job creatives – give candidates an accurate feeling of what it’s like to work for your brand, and they will likely deselect themselves if they don’t feel they are a good fit.
Problem…Too many applicants are under-qualified for the role they’re applying for – this may mean the application process is too easy or the information provided is misleading.
Solution…If you’ve been a victim of the ‘Indeed effect’, where applicants are just clicking apply to your role even if it’s not aligned to their skills, you can consider the following ways to reduce the amount of unsuitable applications you are receiving:
Consider promoting your roles on more specialist jobs boards, as this will prevent the vacancy from being accessible to anyone and everyone
Review your advertising creatives – are they giving out the wrong message about the roles? Is the company’s expertise shining through?
Make sure the essential skills, experience and qualifications are clearly defined in the job description or landing page
Problem…There’s no time to view the volume of applications coming through with any kind of detail – leaving you missing out on talent and those who don’t hear back feeling disconnected to your employer brand.
Solution…Again, this is where putting in some key filter questions can come in handy. You can use the answers to help determine the quality of the application before committing to reading the CV cover to cover.
For more high-level roles, you may ask the candidate to include a portfolio or include a short task as a first or second stage of application. Make sure this is clear in your job description, as plenty of people who don’t have the skills you need won’t want to proceed based on that request alone.
Lastly, ensure your ATS is set up to give automated responses to applicants. Make it clear that if they are unsuccessful they will not be contacted (providing that there’s no time to respond to each individual), but be sure to encourage them to apply for future roles again after 6 months, a year, or whatever time frame you choose.
Next, let’s explore scenario two: small or hard-to-reach talent pools for specialist roles.
This can also create an equally overwhelming amount of problems for your team.
Problem…Your specialist roles aren’t being filled because your offering isn’t strong enough.
Solution…Graduates in niche industry areas are likely looking for the role that’s going to benefit them and their careers the most.
When looking at your employer brand, think beyond just the salary and benefits. What are the candidates actually going to benefit from by being your employee as opposed to another brand?
Candidates need to feel excited about the future, not just the initial role they’re taking. Financial security and a decent roster of benefits are an expectation for many and alone are often not enough to inspire a big career move.
Problem…You may be losing talent to competitors.
Solution…When an applicant turns down your job offer for another opportunity elsewhere, it’s important to keep the window of opportunity open.
Ask them politely what your company can learn from their experience and what they could be doing differently, and add them to future candidate pools. Teams can then follow up in 6 months or a year via LinkedIn to make them aware of any new roles available.
Problem…You are not receiving a decent quantity of applicants.
Solution…Reviewing the media placements of your employer brand advertising should be your number one priority. Are your teams promoting the roles in the right places? Are they targeting aspiring developers with ads on Facebook instead of Reddit? Or hiring for a remote role in very specific locations?
Consider putting out an incentivised survey on LinkedIn or appropriate channels to gather first-hand insight into where someone might look for a specific role.
Problem…You are struggling to find the exact skills needed for your specialist roles.
Solution…Graduates aren’t going to come with the exact skills needed to join your organisation and hit the ground running from day one. In the longer term, it’s worth really thinking about how important these skill sets are to the business. Do they warrant creating a company-sponsored degree? Or an in-house training programme?
These kinds of opportunities help to mould prospects into the kind of employee your brand needs, and give them on-the-job training and experience. It’s a very time-consuming commitment, so you need to be sure that the investment is worth the outlay and disruption.
What are the priorities for graduates?
Depending on the industry and the individual, priorities for graduates will vary from person to person. A recent study by Bright Network did help to shine a light on what graduates as a whole are prioritising, some of which we’ll explore here…
They want to be upskilled
95% of members want to be upskilled directly by employers. Having a clear path of progression and training allowance can help graduates understand how your company can take their career to the next level.
They want a genuine commitment to inclusivity and diversity
Many employers preach about inclusivity but fail to live up to the reality. Having HR provide training on important subjects such as unconscious bias, celebrating a wide range of holidays, a commitment to fair pay and having dedicated strategic training programmes are all small steps every company can take towards becoming more inclusive and diverse. But a few gestures aren’t enough – the commitment must be ingrained in your employer brand.
They want to know that employee mental wellbeing is a priority
53% of Millennials were already burned out from work pre-pandemic, up to 59% today. Gen-Z is a close second, with 58% reporting burnout post-pandemic, up from 47% in 2020. While working from home orders and more flexible working have been introduced because of the pandemic, it doesn’t mean the workload has reduced in any way. Having a company show they put people before profit and prioritise mental health will be a key driver for many graduates.
They want to work for a company that’s actively reducing their environmental impact
If graduates are painstakingly separating their recycling each week, using metal straws and reducing their carbon footprint, they want to know that the company they work for is doing their bit, too. It’ll take more than an annual beach clean to impress candidates too – the products, services and practices your brand undertakes need to work hard to reduce short and long-term impact. This is increasingly becoming a dealbreaker for candidates.
Does your employer brand need to work harder to accommodate graduates?
With only 42% of students saying they feel prepared to enter the world of work, being there for them at this confusing time can help them build a stronger connection to your employer brand.
Make sure the application process is clear and uncomplicated. Don’t avoid questions about salary and progression. Have your company’s mission dominate your employer brand. They are the talent of the future, and in many cases the talent of right now too.
How you communicate your employer brand is vast – social media, emails, videos, adverts and more. Staying on top of your messaging and adapting your creatives with a constantly moving market can be a challenge – but BAM by Papirfly™ can help you digitise your employer brand, simplify your processes and help teams create infinite promotional materials every month.
Gå ikke glipp av en faglig ettermiddag i Oslo med eksperter fra Statkraft, Kantar og Papirfly! Start høsten med inspirasjon og konkrete tips til å bygge en sterkere merkevare. Etter faglig påfyll blir det mingling og noe godt i glasset.
