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Employment branding in the

knowledge economy
Michael T. Ewing
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Leyland F. Pitt and Nigel M. de Bussy
Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia
Pierre Berthon
Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

For most of its existence advertising has focused on attracting customers. More recently,
enlightened organisations have recognised the need to expand their communications
efforts to incorporate all stakeholders, not only end-users. The marketing literature has
begun to address stakeholder theory, as well as advertising’s indirect and internal audiences,
but more as a secondary consideration or by-product of consumer marketing. However,
the anticipated permanent shortage of skilled workers in the new economy creates unique
challenges for knowledge-based organisations in particular, who will increasingly need to
differentiate themselves in order to successfully attract talented employees. As a result,
more and more firms may turn to advertising to create ‘employment brands’ and thereby
offer an enticing vocational proposition that is compelling and differentiated. In response
to this emerging trend, this article begins by introducing stakeholder theory into a
marketing framework. We then classify existing approaches to employment branding by
identifying three basic types of employment advertising strategies. In closing, managerial
implications are discussed, an agenda for future research is proposed and conclusions are
drawn.

INTRODUCTION

Brand equity has become a critical marketing performance outcome in

recent years, as organisations strive to build the value inherent in the
brands they create, grow, nurture and exploit. It has been defined as ‘a
set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand, its name and
symbol, that add to (or subtract from) the value provided by a product

International Journal of Advertising, 21, pp. 3–22

© 2002 Advertising Association
Published by the World Advertising Research Center, Farm Road, Henley-on-Thames,
Oxon RG9 1EJ, UK

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or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers’ (Aaker, 1991; see

also Aaker, 1996). Advertising has been the tool most prominently
utilised to build brand equity, and as a corollary, changes in the brand’s
equity are the metrics by which advertising’s performance has been (or
should be) gauged in many firms (Ambler, 2000). These views of
advertising, brand equity and the performance outcomes of firms are
critical and will remain so. However, we contend that as the knowledge
economy continues to evolve, these perspectives will also be
restrictive, and that managers will need to expand and broaden their
perceptions of the role of advertising, the nature of brand equity, and
the interrelationships between the two.
As most marketers and strategists understand advertising, its focus
has primarily been on present and potential customers. Its role has,
traditionally, been twofold. First, it can create awareness, interest and
desire among non-users, and ultimately entice them away from their
current brand/s (thus in a sense acquiring brand equity). Advertising
that is purported to work in this persuasive way has been described
with some poetic licence as functioning according to the ‘strong’
theory (Jones, 1992, 1998). Second, advertising reminds existing
customers of the brand’s presence, and thus reinforces their belief in
and use of it (thus retaining brand equity). This more defensive view –
the so-called ‘weak theory’ – is most commonly associated with the
work of Ehrenberg (1974, 1997). More recently, Vakratsas and
Ambler’s (1999) review of research into how advertising works has
exposed vast chasms in the body of advertising theory, leading
scholars and practitioners to rethink the role of advertising in the third
millennium. Of particular interest in the present context is
advertising’s potential to communicate to non-customer audiences. Of
course, advertisers have always had the option of targeting messages at
a diverse range of individual or multiple stakeholder groups. In
practice, however, the desire to reach customers – in particular
potential new users – has dominated both creative and media planning
strategies. As discussed above, the concept of brand equity itself is
commonly defined in terms of value provided to customers (Aaker,
1991). In this article we consider the salience of one particular non-
customer stakeholder group – present and potential employees – as an
additional audience of the firm’s advertising. We argue that the
concept of brand equity be expanded to encompass how a firm’s
brand, its name and symbol add to (or subtract from) the value
provided by the firm and/or that firm’s current and potential

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employees. This view of brand equity may be referred to as

‘employment branding’, and it can be either a separate construct of
brand equity, or perhaps preferably, a synergistic addition to overall
brand equity.
The article is set out as follows. First, we expand the notion of the
advertising audience. Second, attention is given to stakeholder theory,
discussing employees as stakeholders. Next, we review literature on
advertising’s internal audience. Then, using metaphors, we discuss a
number of exemplary cases that illustrate how certain knowledge-
based firms are currently using (primarily print) advertising to create
and sustain employment brands, and we categorise these into a basic
typology. We conclude by considering the managerial implications of
these issues, and by outlining a number of directions for empirical
research into this important and somewhat overlooked domain.

ADVERTISING’S ‘OTHER’ AUDIENCES: INDIRECT,

INTERNAL AND SOMETIMES SECONDARY

Recruitment advertising has been around for a long time. Indeed,

many newspapers and professional magazines would probably not
survive financially without the ‘Situations Vacant’ section. These ads
have the intention of attracting suitable applicants to vacant positions,
not to build or contribute to brand equity in any direct way. Most
individuals would easily be able to distinguish between the concepts of
the ad for a ‘Personal Assistant to Marketing Manager Required’, and
the Marketing Manager’s attempts to inform them of his or her new
product, to persuade them to try it, or to remind them of tried and
trusted alternatives. More recently, however, advertising’s audience
could be forgiven if, on occasion, they were not entirely clear about
whom the ad was targeted at, or what it was trying to say. Its message
might be recruitment, but its look and feel is brand (and visa versa).
Recruitment advertising is increasingly using the techniques of the
best brand-builders: it is big, it is bold, it is frequently clever and
creative. It is obviously trying to do more than simply find a suitable
personal assistant to the Marketing Manager. ‘Recruitment advertising
no longer is as simple as promoting available openings to job seekers.
Today recruitment ads sell the company’s image, promote its benefits
and often bear more resemblance to ads for products than ads for
jobs’ (Martinez, 2000).

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Advertising’s indirect, internal and ‘secondary’ audiences have

begun to receive scholarly attention (Duncan and Moriarty, 1998).
This may be due to the realisation that advertising is probably the most
visible, recognisable and memorable element of organisational
communication. As such, it has the potential to become a purveyor of
organisational symbolism and mythology and thus to be part of the
cultural, ritual and interpretive organisational fabric that is the thick
medium through which leadership creates climate and thus organised
action (Gilly and Wolfinbarger, 1998). However, in practice it has
historically had a narrow view of its primary target audience (non-
users) and its purpose (conversion). This outlook is now changing
with the growth in corporate brand-building campaigns aimed at a far
wider audience.

Current ‘other audience advertising’

Firms such as BP, Shell, Chevron, Boeing and DuPont have for some
time now been using mass media techniques to reach the wider
community – not necessarily to sell, but to educate, inform, remind
and communicate. More recently, new entrants to the technology
sector have used advertising to announce their arrival and generate
brand awareness. Agilent Technologies (a Hewlett-Packard spin-off),
Aventis, Infineon Technologies and Lucent Technologies all provide
good examples. In the area of professional services, the former
Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) redefined the role of adverti-
sing in one of the most traditional and conservative marketing arenas.
Following a succession of highly effective television, print and out-
door campaigns, the management consulting practice was rewarded
with a 60% increase in brand awareness and leadership in its industry
(Shimp, 2000).
Cynics and ‘old school’ marketers may accuse Accenture of
advertising ‘wastage’ – why broadcast a message to the entire North
American population, when your primary ‘target market’ is the top
four executives in Fortune 1000 companies? The answer lies in the
precise definition of ‘target audience’. Accenture’s indirect audience
might well be limited to 4000, but its indirect audience may be many
times that figure. An organisation’s indirect or secondary audience
might include shareholders, government, current employees, potential
employees, suppliers, competitors, stockbrokers, organised labour,
environmental and other lobby groups, and even the ‘person on the
street’
1 – in other words, all the organisation’s myriad stakeholders. While
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it is difficult if not impossible to determine which group of

stakeholders is most important to a typical ‘old economy’ organisation,
we will argue that current and potential employees are as critical a
stakeholder group as customers to knowledge-focused organisations,
sometimes more so.
One implication of this proposition is that in the future employees
may well come to be viewed as no longer a secondary audience, but a
primary one. At the time of writing, this prediction was borne out by
the launch of a new campaign for DaimlerChrysler in the international
business print media, which clearly targets potential employees as
the primary audience. The first page of the double-page spread in
question shows a number of DaimlerChrysler vehicles (including a
Formula One model!) positioning them not as consumer products but
as company cars – a potential benefit for prospective employees. The
headline on the second page, ‘Join the company with the most exciting
choice of company cars’, leaves no room for doubt as to its objectives.
Both the scholarly literature (see Mahroum, 2000) and the business
press (see Thibodeau, 2000; Whiteley, 2000) comment currently on a
permanent shortage of skilled employees in the knowledge economy.
Dell Computer would no doubt agree with this prognostication after
being able to attract only two Stanford MBA graduates out of a class
of 160 (Merritt, 2000). Most of the class, it would appear, have chosen
self-employment in Silicon Valley over a ‘traditional’ job with a
Fortune 500 employer. In fact, two-thirds of Stanford graduates are
now remaining in California, forcing respected companies such as
Goldman Sachs and McKinsey to resort to cold-calling students to fill
up their interview schedules (Merritt, 2000). The US Department of
Commerce estimates that 130,000 jobs will be added every year for the
next ten years in only three professions: computer scientists, engineers
and systems analysts. In the IT professional category alone,
somewhere in the region of 350,000 jobs currently go begging due to
lack of applicants (Hoffman, 1999).
It is fair to point out that these projections were made at a time of
unprecedented economic growth and prior to the events of
September 11 2001. The business cycle has certainly not been abol-
ished, and downturns of greater or lesser degrees of severity may be
expected. However, this does not undermine the central point that
top-quality knowledge workers are a scarce commodity and will
remain so into the future. Indeed, the skills of such employees will be
even more vital during downturns as firms endeavour to survive in a
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hyper-competitive environment. Technological savvy and smart

strategies are even more critical in hostile than benign environments. It
is a distinct possibility that in coming years competition for talent
among firms will be even more fierce than competition for customers.
Successful firms in the past have built brands that have enabled them
to survive and indeed thrive in the battle for customers. Now firms,
certainly those in knowledge-intensive markets, will have to build
employment brands that will enable them to endure and flourish in the
ongoing struggles for talent.

FROM CUSTOMER FOCUS TO

STAKEHOLDER ORIENTATION

Over the past decade in particular, the term ‘stakeholder’ has gained
increasing popularity in both scholarly and practitioner literature. It
can be heard regularly in business schools, in boardrooms, and in
political rhetoric. In terms of corporate governance, the stakeholder
concept implies the existence of a fiduciary duty to all groups and
individuals with a legitimate ‘stake’ in the activities of the firm – not
merely to the shareholders and other investors who own the enterprise
in the financial sense. Since the publication of R. Edward Freeman’s
(1984) landmark book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, the
stakeholder concept has become a central theme in the related
literatures of management, business and society, and business ethics.
In the decade following the book’s publication, more than 100 articles
and a dozen books devoted to the topic appeared in the management
literature alone (Donaldson and Preston, 1995). The term
‘stakeholder’ has been variously defined. Its origins in the management
literature date back to 1963 when the expression was first coined in an
internal memorandum at the Stanford Research Institute (Freeman,
1984). The term was intended to expand the conception of share-
holders as the only group to whom management should be responsive.
The Stanford Research Institute defined stakeholders as ‘those groups
without whose support the organisation would cease to exist’
(Freeman, 1984, p. 31). Freeman (1984) formulated a somewhat broader
definition, which, while not without its critics (e.g. Donaldson and
Preston, 1995), has become widely accepted: ‘A stakeholder in an orga-
nization is any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the
achievement of the organization’s objectives’ (Freeman, 1984, p. 46).
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There is little dissent among stakeholder theorists that customers

constitute an important stakeholder group. The academic and
professional discipline that focuses most specifically on customer
relationships is, of course, marketing. To date, however, it would not
be unfair to say that the contribution of the marketing literature to
stakeholder theory has not lived up to its full potential. Equally,
stakeholder theorists (generally affiliated to the management disci-
pline) have paid insufficient regard to potentially relevant marketing
theory. This is possibly another example of researchers failing to take
notice of work being published in separate but related academic
disciplines (de Bussy and Ewing, 1998). The marketing concept and
stakeholder concepts have much in common – indeed, the former may
be viewed as a somewhat narrower version of the latter.
In answer to the question ‘For whom should business corporations
be run?’, adherents of the marketing concept would answer ‘The
customer’. Followers of the stakeholder concept would respond that
all organisational stakeholders – including customers – have legitimate
rights, which corporations must respect and indeed reflect, in formu-
lating policy. Both concepts have strong normative and instrumental
assumptions: normative in the sense of this is what corporations should do;
instrumental in that corporations following the prescribed approach
will – other things being equal – ultimately enjoy greater success
including financially than those narrow-mindedly focusing on short-term
shareholder returns.
Perhaps one reason for the neglect of the marketing literature by
stakeholder theorists is that it is only in the past decade that
substantive empirical evidence of relevance to the marketing concept
has begun to appear. Considering its central importance to the
discipline, remarkably little empirical research was conducted over the
previous 30 years on the marketing concept per se, still less on its
implementation (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). More recently, the
emergence of relationship marketing offers possible insights into the
nature of stakeholder relationships generally. Here indeed, the
applicability of relationship marketing theory to non-customer
stakeholder relationships is worthy of further study. Hutton (1999) has
pointed out the potential wider applicability of Morgan and Hunt’s
(1994) model in the context of a discussion of public relations theory.
During the 1990s, marketers themselves began to recognise the
importance of non-customer stakeholder relationships to their disci-
pline. This view is evident in the emergence of the field of internal
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marketing (e.g. Greene et al., 1994). Duncan and Moriarty (1998) have
gone a stage further, developing a communication-based marketing
model for managing relationships with multiple stakeholder groups
including employees, suppliers, channel partners, the media,
shareholders, government regulators and the community, in addition
to customers. The potential for fruitful cross-fertilisation between the
stakeholder and marketing literatures is clear and, as yet, apparently
overlooked.

THE EMPLOYEE AS STAKEHOLDER

There can be little argument that employees are a key stakeholder

group for any organisation. Academic literature and practitioner
opinion from a wide variety of disciplines will at least agree on this
point. However, an examination of the literature reveals that this same
realisation seems to have dawned on people from different fields at
different times and in relative isolation. In particular, the term ‘internal
marketing’ has attained considerable prominence among both
marketing practitioners and researchers over the past ten years. The
thinking underlying internal marketing is that employees are viewed as
internal customers and jobs as internal products. Job products must
attract, develop and motivate employees, thereby satisfying the needs
and wants of these internal customers while addressing the overall
objectives of the organisation (Gronroos, 1990, 1993). Similarly,
Kotler (1991) defines internal marketing as ‘the task of successfully
hiring, training and motivating able employees to serve the customer
well’. In this respect it represents elements of good human resource
management (George and Gronroos, 1989).

ADVERTISING’S INTERNAL AUDIENCE

Marketing scholars to date have commented only on the impact of

advertising on (current) service employees (Zeithaml, 1990;
Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 1991), with little attention being given to the
impact of a firm’s advertisements on potential employees. For example,
a number of writers advise that service employees can be an important
audience for advertisements because they are responsible for
1delivering on advertising’s promises (George and Berry, 1981). In
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summary, the marketing literature on the effects of advertising on

employees (Gilly and Wolfinbarger, 1998) suggests that advertising can
have positive effects on employee morale and organisational
commitment by communicating that the organisation values
employees, clarifying workers’ roles in the organisation, and promising
customers only what employees can realistically deliver. The empirical
research of these authors suggests that employees evaluate their
organisation’s advertising on the dimensions of accuracy, value
congruence and effectiveness.
A possible reason for the dearth of scholarly marketing research on
recruitment advertising might be attributed to the fact that while the
marketing literature concentrated on customers and brand equity, the
literature in other business disciplines such as management and
strategy gave attention to the global construct of corporate image
(Belt and Paolillo, 1982; Fombrun and Shanley, 1990; Hooghiemstra,
2000). Indeed, concepts such as corporate image (Rynes and Miller,
1983; Rynes, 1991; Gatewood et al., 1993) and corporate reputation
(Fombrun and Shanley, 1990) and their effects on decisions to take
employment have received considerable attention in the management
literature.

EMPLOYMENT BRANDS AND

EMPLOYMENT BRAND EQUITY

A consequence of the anticipated permanent shortage of knowledge

workers referred to above is the need for companies to differentiate
themselves and to market the unique employment proposition they
can offer. Traditional strategies for attracting and retaining employees
will certainly need rethinking in the knowledge economy. Advertising
may become a critical tool in the efforts firms make to identify, acquire
and retain skilled employees in this economy. It will be used to create
what has in the popular business press recently been referred to as
‘employment brands’ (Sherry, 2000) – building and sustaining
employment propositions that are compelling and different. The
moniker ‘employer brand’ appears to have first been coined by Ambler
and Barrow (1996), who defined it as ‘the package of functional,
economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and
identified with the employing company’ (p. 187). The authors go on to
suggest that an employer brand has a personality, and may be
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positioned in much the same way as any other brand. Accordingly,

traditional marketing techniques, particularly research, should be,
mutatis mutandis, applicable (ibid.).
Employment branding is therefore concerned with building an
image in the minds of the potential labour market that the company,
above all others, is a ‘great place to work’. It is our contention that
employment advertising will grow in importance exponentially in the
medium term, to the point where it is no longer a secondary
consideration, but a primary objective tasked to simultaneously attract
new employees and retain existing staff. The DaimlerChrysler
advertisement referred to above is an early example of the genre.
Indeed, in many situations, it may be a lot easier to find customers for
the offerings of knowledge-intensive firms than it will be to employ
the skilled individuals who will deliver these offerings.
It is perhaps not unfair to characterise employer or employment
branding as another business buzz-word. Such terms abound in all
business disciplines, and in marketing more so than most. On
occasion, it may appear that many buzz-words are simply a case of
‘old wine in new bottles’ – ideas that have been around for a long time
are given a new label. While this may be an accurate observation, it
does not render a good buzz-word worthless – on the contrary. If ‘old
wine’ of genuine quality has been languishing for years in a neglected
cellar, putting it into new bottles in order to draw it to the attention of
connoisseurs provides a genuine service. Given the critical imperative
to attract and retain top-quality knowledge workers in the years ahead,
increasing awareness of the potential contribution of advertising in
this regard performs a similar function. Creating the label also
facilitates the development of formal research constructs and testable
research hypotheses.
Given the recency of employment brand equity as a formal
construct, there is limited prior research on employment advertising,
and theories are just beginning to emerge. In new research domains,
observation and classification are common features of initial
endeavours (Watson et al., 1998). Thus, in line with the pattern coding
approach of qualitative research, we sought overriding concepts to
classify employment advertising strategies. To understand how firms
distinguish themselves to employees, we reviewed marketing and
management research literature, surfed corporate websites and
examined print advertisements in major business periodicals, such as
The Economist, Time, Fortune, Newsweek and the like. After evaluating
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these sources, we used metaphors to label and group print

advertisements into categories. The categories are not mutually
exclusive, just as the underlying metaphors are not distinct categories.
Using the Young & Rubicam Brand Asset Valuator™ dimensions
(see Agres and Dubitsky, 1996) and Berthon et al.’s (1999) notion of
‘branding as serving a reduction function for customers’, we have
identified the following three categories:

1. TRANSNATIONAL, Inc:
Status & mobility (global network – big & successful)
We turn over $X billion, have offices in Y countries and employ Z people
In this instance, the organisation is essentially promising the
potential employee stability and mobility (within the organi-
sation). Using Berthon et al.’s (1999) branding as reduction
notion, advertising reduces the potential employee’s search
costs, while promising what Y&R BAV™ would call ‘esteem’.
The employment proposition here is, we’re big, we’re stable, we’re
multinational and we’re a respected and admired employer – why look
any further?

Examples include many of the banks and financial service providers,

for example, Allianz, Bayerische Landesbank, Commerzbank, Crédit
Agricole, UBS Warburg, HSBC, Perpetual, Pictet, West LB, UBS
Warburg, State Street, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Zurich, Credit
Suisse First Boston.

2. MISSION TO MARS
Excitement (new experiences)
What we do is exciting – join us and be ahead of the herd
Here, the organisation and/or industry is fairly new and
possibly not that well known. As a result, many potential
employees may not yet know the major players in the industry,
and even exactly what it is that firms in the industry do. The
branding challenge here is to create awareness (or what Y&R
call familiarity), and reduce any potential psychological risks
(Berthon et al., 1999) whereby potential employees might be
hesitant to work for an organisation that they or their peers
may not have heard of.

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Examples include the new technology spin-offs and start-ups, such as

Aventis, Novartis, Alstrom, Agilent Technologies, Aspira (from
Motorola), Lucent Technologies, Infineon Technologies, Intelsat,
Linde, Nokia, SK, United Technologies, Viatel, Headstrong, Hyundai
Electronics and management and technology consultants, Booz Allen
& Hamilton.

3. THE ‘LOCAL’ (pub)

Identification (source similarity)
See our (highly talented) employees – if you fit the profile
(or aspire to do so), join up
Our third category uses the tried-and-tested advertising
technique of source similarity. Here the employer uses current
employees in an attempt to lure potential employees. Immedi-
ately, this ploy reduces perceived risk (Berthon et al., 1999), by
offering a highly relevant (Y&R BAV) employment proposition:
‘These are the kinds of people who succeed in our orga-
nisation – if you’re of the same ilk, join us and succeed too.’

Essentially, the employment brand in this case reduces the risk of

making a bad decision, attempting to convince target employees that
they will not go wrong if they seek employment here. Examples in this
category include JP Morgan, IBM and Goldman Sachs.

The fourth Y&R brand equity driver is differentiation, but we would

argue that this is a generic when it comes to employment branding. In
other words, regardless of the employment proposition/employment
brand type, all advertising should attempt to differentiate the brand
from direct and indirect competitors. Indeed, we would suggest that
employment branding is the key to differentiated recruitment and
sustainable human resources management.
It is useful at this stage to consider further the construct we
identified earlier as employment brand equity (EBE). If the basic role
of advertising is to build brands, and similarly the fundamental task of
current recruitment advertising is to fabricate the employment brand,
then just as advertising may be evaluated by its effect on brand equity,
so may recruitment advertising be gauged by its impact on EBE.
Based on Aaker (1991, 1996), we may define EBE as a set of employ-
ment brand assets and liabilities linked to an employment brand, its
name and symbol that add to (or subtract from) the value provided by
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an organisation to that organisation’s employees. This definition has

far-reaching implications, and poses significant questions and
challenges to managers and researchers alike. For example, what are
the ‘assets’ of an employment brand that enhance its EBE? Does
‘liability’ mean that some firms would have negative EBE –
mentioning the name in a recruitment ad would put prospective
applicants off ? What are the effects of names and symbols, and how
do they interact to shape EBE? How should the value provided by an
organisation’s employment brand to its potential and present
employees be calculated? In other words, what are the components of
EBE and how can it be determined?

IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT

Currently, it is firms in knowledge-intensive industries that are facing

skills shortages, and have thus had to resort to employment branding
in order to deal with these deficiencies. As mentioned above, in many
of these situations, the struggle to recruit suitable knowledge workers
probably eclipses the traditional marketing problem of acquiring
customers. Just as marketers have argued that the real value of a firm
is to be found in its customer equity (Blattberg and Deighton, 1996), it
is becoming apparent that financial markets are valuing firms on the
strength of their human or ‘organisational’ capital (Cairncross, 2000).
However, if this trend continues, and, theoretically at least,
knowledge-intensive firms ‘scoop up’ all the best knowledge workers,
then all organisations will find themselves struggling to employ skilled
workers. Following this simple logic, competing for skills will be
something that managers in all organisations will have to do more
effectively. Building employment brands will be a critical initiative, and
EBE may be the metric by which these efforts will be judged.
If this scenario comes to pass, then understanding EBE will be one
more performance milestone that managers will have to develop a
deeper understanding of, measure and manage. Many firms are only
beginning to get to grips with issues such as brand equity and
customer equity, and are probably still struggling with the fuzzy
concepts of corporate image and corporate reputation. Confronted
with one more issue in the form of EBE, and perhaps believing it to
be one of the countless business buzz-words with which they have
been bombarded in the past decade, they might be forgiven for
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sidelining it. We would argue that they would do this at their peril if
they are to successfully compete for talent in an environment where it
may simply be harder to find skilled workers than eager customers.
Managers will also need to develop a greater understanding of how
the organisation’s communication efforts impact severally and jointly
on all its stakeholders. It is unlikely that branding strategies, attempts
to build and enhance corporate image, and employment branding
initiatives are seen by stakeholders as unique and separate messages.
More probably, customers are impacted upon by employment
branding efforts (‘they want to employ the best people, therefore their
products and services will probably be great’), and employees by
branding efforts (‘I would love to work for a firm that makes an
exciting product like that’). While there have been calls for more
integrated marketing communication efforts for some time, the
increased overall branding complexity created by employment
branding means that managers will now have to heed them, rather
than merely acknowledge their importance. Our example ads attest to
the possibility of confusion and problems in interpretation by target
audiences. While some are obviously ads intended to create an
‘employment brand’, others are less direct in their message and may be
susceptible to misinterpretation, or might even miss the mark entirely.
Almost certainly, management must be aware of this and anticipate
the consequences. Because employment branding is in its infancy, we
anticipate that it will evolve over time, and again, managers will need to
keep pace with this revolution.

A RESEARCH AGENDA

As we mentioned above, the notions of employment branding, and its

consequence, EBE, are novel, and as far as we are able to establish,
researchers have not yet formally recognised the concepts or begun to
study them seriously. As such, there is considerable scope for further
conceptual, theoretical, case-based and empirical work in this domain.
This article does little more than introduce the concept, ground it in
appropriate theory, and provide illustrative examples and
prognostications. It is intended to serve primarily as a springboard for
future researchers to build upon. In this section we identify some
additional avenues for research.
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1 The construct of the employment brand and its inter-

relationships with brand equity and EBE. In particular, there is
an exigent need to understand the antecedents or drivers of
employment brand value, and as a direct result of that, EBE.
Research in this area might take the form of exploratory or
qualitative research among potential skilled employees (for
example, final-year university students), perhaps leading to the
development of a scale to assess employment brand value.
Furthermore, work would have to be done to identify the
constituents of EBE, and a methodology to calculate it. It is
quite possibly closely related to brand equity; however, the latter
concept is heavily grounded in factors such as sales to customers,
market share, and the sales of unbranded similar products and
services. Furthermore, the jury is still out on brand equity
calculation, and there is still much debate over the appropriate
methodologies (Feldwick, 1999; Haigh, 1999). It is likely that
while brand equity work will give significant inputs to future
work on EBE it will not save it from the debate that it has itself
endured, nor should it.
2 Leading on from the above, it would be worthwhile to better
understand EBE and the consequences of employment brand
value by linking the dimensions of employment brands and also
EBE to appropriate outcomes in the form of various dependent
measures. These might include such variables as the likelihood of
seeking employment within the target employee market, the
attractiveness of the organisation as an employer, expected
employment package compared to other potential employers,
and the propensity to remain in the job (or, in marketing terms,
retention).
3 With specific reference to advertising and its effects on
employment brands and EBE, a fruitful avenue of research
would be to examine the effect of recruitment sources other
than advertising in terms of their relationship to the creation of
employment brands and EBE. These might include other
sources of information such as editorial media messages, family
and social contacts, recruitment specialists and other media such
as the Internet. In addition of course, it would be worthwhile
studying the interaction of other information sources and the
advertising used to create employment brands. The role of the
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corporate website in shaping employment brand value might

also be explored – perhaps by using content analysis, or even an
online questionnaire.
4 Future research would need to study employers and their efforts
to shape employment brand value. Such research would probably
have to solicit the perceptions of various individuals within an
organisation (for example, key decision-makers in the areas of
marketing management, human resources and public relations).
5 Case-based studies (of organisations such as those mentioned in
this article) would also add considerable value, particularly in this
early stage of empirical discovery.

CONCLUSIONS

We have attempted to highlight the problem of a skills shortage in the

knowledge economy which is likely to be permanent. There is
considerable circumstantial evidence that organisations, particularly
those that are knowledge based, are attempting to deal with the
situation by resorting to advertising that is directed not at the firm’s
customers but at potential, skilled employees. In doing so, they may be
said to be building employment brands (obviously with varying
degrees of success). We have proposed the concept of employment
brand equity, or EBE, as a measure by which the strength and value of
an employment brand may be adjudicated. The decisions that skilled
job-seekers will take in the future will undoubtedly be shaped in large
measure by EBE. EBE, in turn, will be forged by the employment
branding strategies that firms formulate and implement, as well as the
many tools they use to do this. These tools will include ever more
sophisticated recruitment advertising, but also a host of other specific
and general devices, such as the Internet (and intranets), use of
recruitment specialists, and, of course, the organisation’s overall
human resources policy.
Ultimately, we believe, the notion of EBE will need to be integrated
into the overall task of stakeholder management. An organisation’s
corporate reputation impacts on all stakeholder groups – whether
employees, customers, shareholders or the wider community – albeit
in different ways. EBE is a subset of the overall corporate brand. In
other words, EBE is that part of the corporate brand of salience to
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current and potential employees. In the Internet era, when stake-

holders can readily communicate with each other, targeting specific
messages at employees and only employees (or any other individual
stakeholder group) is an almost impossible task. We suspect, therefore,
that EBE is a complex and dynamic construct encompassing many
linkages with other macro and micro aspects of an organisation’s
reputation. The coordinated endeavours of practitioners and
researchers from the fields of marketing, public relations, human
resources and general management will be required to successfully
leverage this critical but potentially slippery concept.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael Ewing is a Professor in the Department of Marketing,

Monash University, Melbourne. Dr Ewing’s research focuses primarily
on advertising and web site evaluation, Internet strategy, cross-cultural
measurement equivalence, agency–client relationships, and brand
management. Amongst others, his work has appeared in the Journal of
Advertising Research, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the
Journal of Business Research, the International Journal of Advertising, Business
Horizons, Industrial Marketing Management and Public Relations Review. He
serves on the editorial boards of six journals, including the Journal of
Advertising Research and the International Journal of Advertising.
Leyland Pitt is Professor of Marketing at Curtin University of
Technology, Perth. His particular areas of interest in research and
teaching involve marketing and the new electronic media, the staging
of
1 consumer
Footnote. experiences, and marketing strategy. Dr Pitt is the author

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of over 100 papers in scholarly journals, and his work has appeared in
publications such as California Management Review, Sloan Management
Review, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business
Research, the Journal of Advertising Research, Communications of the ACM,
and MIS Quarterly (in which he also served as Associate Editor).
Nigel de Bussy is a senior lecturer in public relations in the School
of Marketing, Curtin Business School, Perth, Western Australia. He
holds an MA from The Queen’s College, Oxford. His current research
interests include the PR/marketing interface, the impact of new
communication technology, and stakeholder management. He has
published in the Journal of Marketing Communications, the Journal of
Communication Management and the Journal of General Management.
Pierre Berthon is currently Associate Professor of Marketing at
Bentley College. He has held academic positions at Columbia
University in the US, Henley Management College, Cardiff University
and University of Bath in the UK. He has also taught or held visiting
positions at Copenhagen Business School, Norwegian School of
Management, Cape Town Business School, and Athens Laboratory of
Business Administration. Pierre’s research focuses on electronic
commerce, marketing information processing, organization and
strategy, and management decision-making. He work has appeared in
journals such as Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of
Business Research, Business Horizons, among others. A number of his
papers have won awards in the US and in the UK.

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