Point of View: Brand Activation in Hiring

I recently came across a company’s website that claimed to be a Brand Activation agency. The term ‘Brand Activation’ felt like a long-lost term in my memory, I read it in my second semester of MBA in Kotler.

Brand Activation space has changed over the years and has become a pivotal term in today’s market. Like all other mediums of Marketing, Brand Activation is important for marketers to register their brands in the consumers’ or prospects’ minds.

By the nature of its formation Brand Activation looks like marketing jargon but I find it quite relevant with the current hiring market and how companies are trying to attract the right talent. To start with, just a quick refresher on what does a Brand Activation mean –

What is a Brand Activation?

Brand Activation can be defined as a marketing campaign/program in terms of engaging customers with your brand. These activations are created through physical experiences and interactions, however as per my understanding, now brands must be employing digital engagements to be part of their marketing plans.

Further, Brand Activation campaigns are created with an overall brand’s mission in mind. This helps them in building brand awareness or reiterating their existence in the market. As the recent global pandemic has changed the lifestyle of the consumers, Brand Activation campaigns have moved from regular BTL marketing activities to highly engrossing Digital modes.

What is Brand Activation in Hiring?

As the definition of Brand Activation says it’s how you engage your customers with your brand. Similarly, in the context of hiring the talent, it is how you engage your future talent with your brand, overall mission and vision, the culture you carry, and the benefits they receive.

Shifting the Activation context from Marketing to Hiring

While marketing their brands to new or old consumers, brands employ a variety of ways to draw customers’ attention, make them first-time buyers, ensure repeat purchases, or even just try to give them a glance at the brand’s products and services. To achieve this, marketers use a variety of ways – arranging a photoshoot with brand ambassadors, distributing free goodies, providing a free subscription to their products for a while, or using social media influencers to achieve the desired engagement.

There’s an interesting similarity between how hiring managers are currently trying to attract the right talent. They want to grab future talent’s attention, make them a part of their current team, retain them for the long-term, or even just talk to them to register the company/brand in their minds.

While Brand Activation comes naturally to marketers, Hiring Managers need to understand how to market themselves and their company well to activate their brands.

How Brand Activation will work in Hiring?

Let’s take two examples here –

1. Joy went to a mall; she was interested in buying perfume and she knows which brand she wanted to buy. Still, she checked out a few stores, some of them provided me samples, some of the brands offer testers, and some of them were offering complimentary gifts. Since she has already made up her mind, she just picked the product and swiped the card. But she still remembers the brand that was offering her complimentary gifts and she made a mental note of it.
2. Similarly, Joy was looking for a job change passively. She gave a couple of interviews – some of them had lucrative salaries, but not culture. Some of them have a good team to work with but very odd hours. Some of them offer a high-paced environment and good growth. As she was talking to the hiring managers of the respective organizations, she was skeptical about how the organization would work from the inside, how the culture works, how the failure is accepted, and how quickly she can grow up the ladder.

While in the first example, everything is tangible and customers can make an informed choice, it’s not the same case in the second. Except for the salary part, there’s nothing tangible. While companies say good culture, the reality opens when the candidate steps inside the real work environment.

The discussion I would like to open here is about how organizations can activate their brands to sound them more lucrative. While there can be various ways of doing it – right from making employees your brand ambassadors on social media, promoting your company culture, telling how you value humans behind the titles, offering a platform to engage with other team members (even if they choose to deny your offer), and provide work-life balance.

And please, don’t write all these points in a marketing language on your careers page. Walk the talk. If your organizations promote a great work-life balance, keep no questions asked policy for family leaves, add 10 more leaves to your holiday calendar, help them find caregivers for their parents, kids, or pets. If your objective is to provide a great success ladder, promote people with the right skills and not the number of experiences, give them a chance to have a discussion with your leaders. If your idea is to provide an Innovation platform for beginners, fund an in-house start-up. That’s how you activate the brands in hiring. And yes, just like marketers, don’t leave any opportunity to show off these amazing stories.

Summing Up

I am sure I made a point that Brand Activation is not just limited to the marketing and branding teams. It’s about the overall organization – Brand Activation in hiring can benefit the organization by effectively demonstrating what they stand for and how employees can contribute to the overall mission by being part of it. Tangible benefits can increase the chances of talent considering the organization when looking for a job switch or career growth in the future.