The Employer Brand: Bringing the Best of Brand Management to People at Work

Preface

Books like this tend to get written for two main reasons. One is when the approach is new and the creators believe they have a missionary role to introduce a new point of view that will change the way everyone thinks. The second is when the area is well established but the writer wants to add a new dimension to a subject. This book combines aspects of both. For many this will be the first time they have come across this way of thinking. For others, the concept will be familiar, but its scope of application will be uncertain. Whichever camp you inhabit, we hope that this first book on the employer brand leaves you clear about its meaning and motivated to put the thinking into practice.

Given that I spent years in the advertising business before my work in human resources, here is a story about two books that have acted as models for this one. The first is Rosser Reeves’ classic Reality in Advertising , a book that changed the way in which advertising is assessed and measured.^1a Years ago at the Players Club in New York I met Charles Roman the copywriter who created Charles Atlas who gave hope to ‘97-lb weaklings who had sand kicked in their faces’ on the basis that ‘you too can have a body like mine’. Roman showed me a battered copy of Reeves’ book in which the master had written: ‘to Charles Roman who has been practising reality in advertising all of his life.’

David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy and Mather, wrote a different kind of book about the same subject but it ...