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Make them want you – before you want them
There is an exciting new frontier for Brands that I think will be
the most critical for your business in the coming years. It is their
power to attract and retain the best employees in the face of our
worsening labour shortage.
Canada’s workforce is rapidly shrinking because the boomers
are hitting 60 and our birthrate is decreasing. PricewaterhouseCoopers
reports that 62% of Canadian CEOs say a shortage of skilled workers
"is slowing the growth of their business." How is your
organization dealing with it?
What would the Brand Coach coach?
 First
of all, you must recognize that a Brand isn’t the logo, the
website or the advertising. The only synonym for "Brand"
is "Culture." Attracting and retaining the best employees
is a matter of communicating an inspiring Brand Vision of what that
Culture is, of where you’re going as an organization, and how
you’ll know when you get there. Then tell your employees, over
and over again, how their everyday work contributes to reaching
the Vision.
Consider Starbucks. Their employees buy-in to the Starbucks Purpose:
To provide an uplifting experience that enriches people’s
daily lives. They proudly tell others where they work, and why
– attracting like-minded new employees in the process. A critical
mass of Vision-aligned employees takes shape, building awareness
of the Brand outside the company. Now, workers are proud to say
they work at Starbucks because the people they tell are impressed
by it. Recall that the Starbucks Brand has been built in Canada
with very little advertising. It’s mostly been word-of-mouth
– from customer to customer, worker to worker.
Starbucks plans to open 40,000 stores worldwide (10,000 more than
McDonald’s has today!). They’ll only get – and keep
– all the warm bodies they need by continuing to live and breathe
their Brand to potential employees, as they now do with Love
what you do. Share it with others. These words appear on recruitment
signage, at the bottom of your receipt and in employees’ Green
Apron Book, a passport-sized document that is the barista’s
bible.
Southwest Airlines, the only US airline to turn a profit for 34
consecutive years, has its own version of the Starbucks approach:
Make them want you before you want them.
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Stay tuned for two things: My article in Marketing magazine
(on newsstands March 19) and upcoming book – BRAND: It Ain’t
the Logo (It’s what people think of you™).
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Adobe Acrobat
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