Branding…it matters.

For loyal readers (I’m guessing we’re about to break into double digits at this early stage!) who’ve been waiting patiently for the next installment of “RPO Myths”, or any installment for that matter, and whose keen eyes have noticed that there is a significant difference in our look and feel (again), you are witnessing the birth of a blog in progress at a major U.S. multinational corporation.  Branding is something these organizations take very seriously, and when middle aged rule-breakers like John Hassett and I go off and start sharing our expertise and throwing our own logos and colors and such up on the Internet, well…let’s just say there are some people who get paid to point out that we may have veered slightly off course and were quickly heading for places that didn’t exist on the corporate GPS.

The defining event was when this blog started showing up pretty high in a Google search around RPO and blogs. Anyone who’s set a Google alert for anything being published anywhere that has the word “Aon” in it (which by the way includes an awful lot of things written in Gaelic), also gets alerted when something appears in a blog, and among the recipients of those alerts would be pretty much the whole of the marketing team here at Aon.  That’s when the phone calls started.

The good news is that they love the blog.  Love the concept, love the content, and love the initiative we took to create something that really doesn’t exist in the marketplace. The bad news is that we’d pretty much violated every branding policy that Aon’s published. Like all of them. Ever. And while I may not find the Aon branding and colors to be exactly what I’d have come up with, it dawned on me after several dozen emails, a few conference calls, and some face time with some of the marketing leadership that my opinion in this case is irrelevant — and that’s ok.

Now my opinion being irrelevant is a fairly common occurrence around my house. For example, my wife will ask what color we should paint the bedroom, I’ll say “cinnamon” or “hunter green”, she’ll say “desert sand” and anyone who’s happily married knows what color that bedroom is going to get painted.

But this epiphany of irrelevance came when I was going through some articles the other day around employment branding and how absolutely key that messaging is to creating a successful world class recruiting strategy. Recruiters don’t set that message or that branding — Marketing does.  And a good branding strategy needs to be enforced, or that carefully crafted message gets muddied right quick.

Like when recruiters go off and create their own blogs.

And it goes without saying that anyone who’s spent any time at all in recruiting has seen more examples of how not to do employment branding, than how to do it right.  Its impact on an organization’s ability to attract the best talent is profound, and a consistent message is the cornerstone of any successful branding strategy.

So while all this was getting sorted out (and no, we’re not done yet), we decided we’d take a break, lest a decision get made that wouldn’t let us keep all the existing content or would force us to do an inordinate amount of cutting and pasting into a new domain. Sounds disorganized? It’s not.  It what major companies that really care about their message and their brand do. What is extraordinary, however, is that this company that I’m proud to work for is letting this “sausage making” take place in public.

Why?

Because while it’s important that we project the right brand and the right message in a way that makes sense in a larger marketing context, it is even more important that we can share with our clients and future clients some of the insights and process expertise we can bring based on several hundred years of combined experience I and my Aon RPO colleagues have in this space.

Your business is really is our business, and your success truly is our success. Those aren’t just marketing slogans.  They’re what we live and breathe every day. And that trumps colors, look, and feel any day.

– Michael