新西兰marketing assignment—员工品牌战略研究

企业组织是一个全新的并有待改进的模型，这类模型被营销顾问和高管大力推广，这个新模型以加强一个组织在竞争市场的地位而盛名，帮助品牌加强生命力，加强内部组织的有效性,通过强调组织范围内员工参与品牌的积极性来加速品牌成长。像其他有进取心的组织一样，期望员工有主见，有上进心，能为自己的行为负责。因为他们追求组织的利益,而员工在组织里能够激励和自我调节，以便他们在日常行为表达中定义品牌的属性。促使员工对于项目品牌有更深的认知，完成员工品牌战略。通过员工品牌，员工需要吸收品牌认知，并对客户和其他组织有一定的项目品牌的认识，员工品牌的最终目标是让员工对品牌的认知合并到员工的自我概念中，这种自我认识为品牌变现力提供一种低调的动力，员工品牌是一种特定的身份监管组织，通过员工的定向开发自我形象和工作方向,被认定为管理定义的目标。
 

The Tactics Of Employee Branding Programs Marketing Essay
 

A new and improved model for the enterprising organization is being promoted by marketing consultants and executives. This new model, known as living the brand is advertised as strengthening an organization’s position in the competitive marketplace while enhancing internal organizational effectiveness, all by emphasizing organization-wide employee involvement in branding processes. Like other enterprising organizations that expect their employees to demonstrate initiative, self-reliance, and responsibility for their own actions as they pursue the organization's interests, employees at organizations that are living the brand are expected to motivate and regulate themselves so that they express in their everyday behavior the attributes that define the brand’s identity. To induce employees to project the brand’s identity, organizations engage in employee branding. Through employee branding, employees are expected to internalize the desired brand identity and to be motivated to project the brand’s identity to customers and other organizational constituents. The ultimate goal of employee branding is to have employees incorporate the brand’s identity attributes into their own self-concepts, so that self-concept related motives for provide an unobtrusive, unproblematic engine for brand-expressive behavior. Employee branding is a specific kind of identity regulation by an organization, through which employees are directed to develop self-images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives. Organizations attempt to influence how employees define themselves so that when employees express themselves at work they automatically make decisions that advance the organization’s goals. One common influence on employees’ self-definitions, and a well-known form of identity management in organizations, is organizational identification. Organizational identification is the ongoing process of linking one’s self-definition to the identity of the organization. It occurs through defining oneself as having the same attributes as those that define the organization and by experiencing a sense of personal connection with the organization. As employees identify with the organization, their interests become aligned with the organization’s interests because employees internalize the organization’s attributes, values and expectations as their own. Employee branding has a logic analogous to the logic of organizational identification. The goal is to induce employees to create a behavioral and psychological connection between themselves and the brand’s identity.

In many ways, employee branding is just like any other strategy through which organizations attempt to increase control by shaping employee identities and so it is problematic simply on those grounds. In addition, however, employee branding is a way that “marketing asserts itself as a dominant principle of organizing”. Employee branding is an internally-directed employee management program that takes its cues about how to define and create the ideal employee from the commercial practices of marketing. In order to assess whether employee branding is simply identity control in a new package or whether the assumptions it brings in from marketing create a different challenge for employees, organizational scholars need to look more closely at the practice and ethos of employee branding.

 

Although the potential benefits of employee branding have been advertised in a variety of managerially-oriented outlets, there has been little scholarly work to map out what employee branding really is, what it does, and what it assumes. To introduce organizational scholars to the issues involved in employee branding, I begin this essay by outlining some of the assumptions that undergird the enthusiasm of employee branding’s proponents. I describe the tactics and practices of employee branding to show how they differ in subtle ways from traditional employee socialization tactics. I draw on theories from marketing and organizational studies to define employee-brand identification, the psychological connection between the brand and the employee, and to develop a preliminary model of how employee branding programs could induce employee-brand identification.

 

Proponents of living the brand claim that “every employee should be involved in the care and nurturing of the brand”. They plainly state that employees must internalize the brand’s identity before they can project it to others. A brand is more than the name given to a product, service, or organization; it embodies a wholes set of physical and socio-psychological attributes and beliefs. Nurturing a brand requires attending to the brand’s identity, the tangible and intangible, functional and symbolic attributes that define the brand. Only recently have employees throughout the organization been expected to be involved in translating the abstract ideas of the brand into their everyday behaviors, decisions, attitudes and so on.

 

公司实践——Company Practices
 

At Volvo, employees use the brand identity to guide decisions that might even seem minor, such as creating the right “click sound” for the seatbelts. When every employee is involved in branding, the organization ought to be more effective at creating, sustaining and delivering upon the “brand promise”.

 

The UK sandwich chain, Pret A Manger. The recruitment process at Pret requires prospective employees that have made it through the interview process to work for one day in a Pret store. The employees of that store then make the final decision as to whether or not the prospective employee is hired or not. Why? Pret thinks this process not only ensures that employees have the “Pret” attitude, but also empowers existing employees. In the end, only about 20 percent of prospective employees make the cut. But the employees Pret has are indeed walking, talking brand ambassadors, part of the “Pret experience” that their customers have come to expect, and what gives them the edge over other High Street sandwich chains.

 

Procter and Gamble soap making technicians rotate through short stints answering the consumer 800-number feedback lines. Often, employees are encouraged to take the role of a consumer to experience how the brand identity is delivered.

 

Harley-Davidson employees must purchase their bikes from dealers, using the same procedures as non-employees, so that they know what it is like to be a customer and to interact with sales, shipping and customer service. These programs are intended to teach employees how customers experience the brand, so that employees can understand what customers expect of the brand and of the employees who represent the brand.

 

The idea that branding should be used on an organization’s employees is quite new. Employee branding programs are intended to impress brand attributes onto the work behavior of employees, who are then expected to infuse brand attributes throughout their work. Branded employees are expected to project the brand’s identity through all of their behavior, including their demeanor, appearance, and manner of interacting with customers. From a marketing perspective, behaviorally projecting the brand’s identity is known as “on- brand behavior”. From an organizational theory perspective, projecting the brand’s identity can be understood as brand identity work. Brand identity work is the range of individual activities intended to create, present, and sustain the appearance of being like the brand and projecting the brand’s identity. It is based on the construct of individual-level “identity work”, defined as the “range of activities that individuals engage in to create, present, and sustain personal identities that are congruent with and supportive of the self-concept”. Brand identity work includes behaviors, gestures, verbal statements, points of view, and emotions that reflect and project the brand’s identity attributes.

 

Although it is not uncommon for a subset of employees to engage in brand identity work when their formal organizational roles explicitly require them to represent the brand to customers, employee branding programs require every employee —those with customer contact and those without—to represent the brand through their personal behavior. Employee branding proponents argue that employees throughout the product creation chain need to engage in brand identity work because the behavior of each one is important for delivering an overall branded product. "Linkage research" that focuses on the relationship between internal organizations processes and customer satisfaction has shown that what employees experience in their work environment is correlated with the experiences they provide for customers. When employees with internal responsibilities and no direct contact with external stakeholders offer other employees “on brand behavior”, they provide important support to those who project the brand to external customers. “A company achieves its greatest advantage when employee actions and brand identity reinforce each other”.#p#分页标题#e#

 

员工品牌传播策略——Tactics of employee branding programs
 

Before the brand identity can be projected from one employee to others, the organization must create and instill the brand message in employees’ minds. So, the first step in employee branding is teaching each employee about the brand. Conventionally, programs designed to help employees understand the brand identity have taught employees about the brand’s identity and how to communicate it through marketing decisions about design, advertising, promotions, and packaging. These training programs maintain a separation between the employee and the brand, and treat the brand as the object of the employee’s efforts. In contrast, employee branding programs train employees to see themselves as connected with the brand and to treat themselves as the object of their own and their organization’s branding efforts.

 

Employee branding programs use four basic tactics: (1) teaching employees about the brand, (2) teaching them how to represent the brand in their behavior, (3) giving them opportunities to practice representing the brand, and (4) continually associating the attributes of the brand identity with the employees themselves. The first two tactics develop the employee’s behavioral connection with the brand, and the only difference between employee branding and previous forms of brand training is that every employee receives this training. The last two tactics develop the employee’s psychological connection with the brand, using the marketing logic of meaning transfer. Marketers build brand identities by teaching consumers to associate the brand with a set of brand attributes by consistently pairing these attributes with the brand name, product, packaging, imagery and so on through advertising and marketing communications. Because these attributes are shown as being attached to the product and brand, the consumer comes to see them as being part of the brand and as defining its identity. Once the meanings are associated with the brand, customers can acquire the brand’s meaning by consuming the product. In this way, consumers can use their connections with brands to construct their self-definitions.

 

Similarly, employee branding programs continually associate the employees and the attributes of the brand so that these attributes can be transferred from the brand identity to the employees themselves. This attribute transfer can range from a superficial behavioral accommodation where employees project the brands’ attributes in their decisions and behaviors without accepting these behaviors as being ‘part of them’, to something deeper- a psychological internalization of brand attributes into the employees’ self-concept. As employees behave like the brand, as they represent the brand to others, and as they are continually reminded that they are paired with the brand, they may come to see themselves as having acquired the brand’s attributes as their own. The employees may come to define their self-concepts through their connection with the brand.

 

By encouraging the behavioral presentation and psychological internalization of brand identity attributes, employee branding programs align employee behavior and bring the entire organization into the circle of enthusiasm and creativity that enables brand stewardship. However, the way that employee branding engages employees is by appropriating more of their personal selves. Through the incursion of the brand into individuals’ personal behaviors and then into their self-definitions, employee branding can encourage employees to regard themselves and behave as servants of the brand. In this way, employee branding subverts conventional organization-employee and product-employee relationships, ultimately putting employees at the mercy of customers’ preferences and desires.

 

员工品牌战略的实践——Employee Branding Practices
 

Employee branding programs are finely targeted socialization programs to get employees to conform with and accept an organizationally controlled set of attitudes and behaviors. Employee branding processes include brand education and brand interface training, formal human resource practices of recruitment, selection, appraisal, and rewards internal communications, organizational décor and artifacts, and informal socialization processes.

 

Brand training programs form the core of employee branding processes. Conventional brand education programs are augmented by training in “brand interfacing”, the ways that that the brand and customers ought to interact so that the customer’s relationship with the brand is enhanced. The content and reach of retail sales training are also expanded. Every employee is taught how to be the brand interface for customers and is given a chance to practice or role-play representing the brand to the customer. Employee branding programs take the additional step of taking employees outside of the classroom, putting them into direct contact with actual customers. For example, organizations may have every employee spend a few days working as a salesperson or customer service representative. In these strong situations, with clear behavioral expectations and an audience with high expectations, employees are able to project the brand identity and to get real feedback on their performance from consumers.

 

Employee branding programs also include opportunities for all employees “reconnect with the market”. Cross-functional teams of marketing and non-marketing employees might meet with customers, distributors, and retail sales people. Employees might also get involved in market research, helping to collect and interpret customer data and feedback. For example, Procter and Gamble soap making technicians rotate through short stints answering the consumer 800-number feedback lines. Often, employees are encouraged to take the role of a consumer to experience how the brand identity is delivered. For example, Harley-Davidson employees must purchase their bikes from dealers, using the same procedures as non-employees, so that they know what it is like to be a customer and to interact with sales, shipping and customer service. These programs are intended to teach employees how customers experience the brand, so that employees can understand what customers expect of the brand and of the employees who represent the brand.

 

In addition to training, other elements of the human resource system can be used for employee branding, especially for dispensing formal feedback and discipline. Brand identity work is treated as a competency that all employees ought to have, and expectations about on-brand behavior are incorporated into performance appraisal and reward systems. Organizations also use “brand champions”, employees who are willing to “proselytize on behalf of the brand” and demonstrate how one ought to enact the brand. Informal interactions with other employees, observations of colleagues, and other socialization processes in the larger organizational culture also contribute to branding.

 

Employees can be branded by organizational communication practices. Internal corporate press, new product launches, and participation in meetings in which the brand is discussed communicate brand attributes and suggest ways to promote them. Communication practices directed at outside constituencies such as brand advertising and public relations campaigns may also indirectly brand employees by encouraging employees to see themselves as representatives of the brand. Inside the organization employees are branded through “everyday brand exposure” to remind employees to exhibit on-brand behavior. For example, organizational decor and displays of brand-related artifacts that symbolize and communicate desired brand associations, such as art collections, furniture, color schemes, copies of print advertising, product prototypes, and promotional materials, can provide visual reminders or "identity cues" to prime employees to keep the brand in mind. Some organizations go as far as having a sample retail store set up inside their corporate headquarters. Employees receive and then personally display brand-related artifacts like key chains, mugs, and decorative accessories and clothing emblazoned with the brand’s logo. Brand-related artifacts and décor help to create and sustain “situation congruity” so that employees conform their behavior to situational cues. These tactics reinforce the desired associations between the product and its attributes and between the brand and the employee and also help to discourage the salience of employees’ other identities.

 

Accommodating the brand identity in behavior. Once employees have been taught how to project the brand’s attributes they are theoretically able to accommodate these attributes in their everyday work behavior, and they can accommodate the brand identity without accepting brand attributes personally or adopting them as self-defining. Making it easier for employees to accommodate brand identity in their behaviors is the presence of other employees who are also performing brand identity work. Other employees’ brand identity work demonstrates different ways to translate brand attributes into behavior. An employee can observe other employees, can mimic their brand identity behaviors, and adopt what works for them, expanding their own repertoire of brand behavior. In addition, being in a social context where other employees are engaged in brand identity work can help to keep brand attributes salient and remind each employee to engage in her or his own brand identity work.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Accommodating brand identity attributes in behavior is also positively influenced by the degree to which the employee’s organizational role requires brand identity work. Employees with significant contact with organizational outsiders are under more and more consistent pressure to represent the brand. For example, a retail salesperson will be likely to perform more brand identity work more often, because her role requires her to act as the brand’s representative to those outside the organization. Moreover, customers, stakeholders and others outside the organization expect her to project the brand’s identity. Thus, in an environment of employee branding, the visibility of the employee as an organizational spokesperson and the degree of customer contact in his role will be positively related to how much brand identity work he performs. Overall, employees who have been taught how to express the brand in their behaviors, who work in a context where other individuals are also performing brand identity work, and who have some experience acting as a brand representative will all be more likely to engage in brand identity work.

 

员工品牌和雇主品牌识别——The Challenges of Employee Branding and Employee-Brand Identification
 

The putative benefits of employee branding may be numerous and significant, but these practices carry long-range and potentially damaging implications for employees, organizations and brands. Employee branding makes simplistic assumptions about brands and about employees and considers only the rosiest of potential outcomes.

 

品牌假设——Assumptions about Brand
 

Marketing practitioners and scholars recognize that the idea of brand identity as a single belief set that everyone identifies with is an overly simplistic myth. Yet, employee branding assumes that the brand will translate in a consistent way to all of its audiences. First, there may be a variety of interpretations of the brand message, not all of them consistent with the attributes the organization intends to communicate. Gapp and Merrilees (2006) describe a hospital whose brand, “exceptional care, exceptional people”, meant one thing to the organization’s customers (patients) and another to the organization’s employees (doctors and nurses). For the employees, the word “exceptional” invoked overwork, stress, burn-out and impossibly high work standards. Second, a given attribute is not necessarily appealing to everyone. In the hospital, some employees found the attribute of "exceptional" to be quite unappealing, and a few even rejected it outright. As a result, some hospital employees projected the identity attribute of "exceptional care" in their work while others did not.

 

The assumption in employee branding that all employees will be attracted to a brand is inconsistent with a fundamental marketing practice. Marketers construct brands to appeal to the desires of a specific target audience. That target audience can be narrowly or broadly defined, but it rarely if ever includes everyone. Even so, employee branding proponents assume that a brand identity designed to appeal to a targeted subset of consumers will be just as appealing to employees, even though these employees may be quite unlike the consumers for whom the brand is originally designed. For example, brands are often targeted towards groups of consumers that are defined by their age, race, sex, class, orientation, and other categories. The marketplace is finely segmented by these categories. But employee branding proponents are silent about how these features of a brand's identity or an employee's age, race, sex, class, orientation, and so on might need to be addressed in employee branding.

 

In addition, employee branding assumes that all brands are equally useful as vehicles for shaping behavior and for defining employees’ selves. However, some brands are better able than others to communicate something about an individual’s identity. Brands that are high in symbolic meaning, brands that are publicly consumed, and luxury brands can convey more about people who use or possess them, and so these sorts of brands are more likely to be appropriated by individuals to construct their selves.

 

Brands are often partial or outright fictions. The symbolic attributes associated with the brand may be completely unrelated to the product's objective features. When employees are asked to project brand identity attributes that they know to be untrue or inauthentic, they may feel uncomfortable being asked to sell this fiction to customers or to each other. While some employees may be nonplussed by fictitious attributes, others might respond more cynically.

 

Employee branding assumes that brand identity remains fairly stable over time. However, brands change, as do the consumer needs and desires that brands are intended to fulfill. Changes in the brand identity will require identified employees to project new and different identity attributes in their behavior. Some employees may have to change their self-definitions to keep connected with the brand, and as the brand becomes more or less congruent with the employees’ self-concept, the strength of the employee-brand identification may change. Moreover, employees who are strongly identified with the brand may resist changes in the brand's identity because these changes would require them to change their self-definitions.
 

关于雇员一些假设——Assumptions about Employees
 

Marketing as a discipline asserts itself as participatory, responsive and democratic. When marketing practices are applied to employees, employees are expected, like consumers, to be willing, ready and able to ‘buy’ the brand. Employee branding programs ignore two important differences between employees and consumers: consumers’ brand identification is selective and volitional while employee-brand identification is behaviorally imposed and psychologically induced. Employees cannot be selective about the brands they are asked to connect with, and rather than being optional connecting with the brand is part of their job. Further, employee branding proponents have not addressed directly how employees themselves might respond to being branded, being told to project the brand's identity, and being expected to connect themselves psychologically with the brand. Instead, it is taken for granted that employees will be willing to assume the brand identity and that every employee will be excited about being given responsibility for the brand.

 

Despite the fact that some employees might be enthusiastic about employee branding, employee branding is first and foremost a strategy for "identity regulation". Employee branding regulates employees’ identities by encouraging them to present their selves in a way that is valuable to the organization, and that is subject to its authority. In the process of brand identity work and brand identification, employees must subordinate their own individuality and their own subjectivity. Employees are induced to internalize the brand’s ideological and normative stance, to bind their self-conceptions to the brand's identity and even to become emotionally attached to the brand. Employee branding regulates employees’ identity because it attempts to control what behaviors the individual can display, it subordinates the individual's autonomously-defined self, and it reduces the employee’s opportunities for self-expression.

 

Employees’ ability to execute brand identity work and to achieve employee-brand identification is also taken for granted. Brand identity work is treated as being important, but also as being rather easy. However, brand-identity work is work —physical, cognitive work and emotional. It takes effort to learn brand-appropriate behavior, make it routine, elaborate upon it, and so on. Moreover, this work is in addition to employees’ functional work responsibilities.

 

Employee branding places a burden on employees that may not be borne equally. Employees whose physical appearance, demographic group, psychographic profile, social identities and personalities are incongruent with the brand identity will be more constricted in their self-presentation, pressured to change more of themselves, and required to work harder than others to project the brand identity. For these employees, their efforts to project the brand might not even be recognized as such by their audiences. If their attempts to project the brand identity falter and receive negative feedback about their brand (self-) presentation, they may come to feel negatively about themselves. They may also experience psychological and emotional distress from suppressing their personal attributes and pretending to be something they are not.

 

There is another dimension of brand-related work that employee branding proponents do not mention, and that is the work related to un-branding and re-branding. The idea that an employee can become the brand fails to consider what happens when the employee needs to relinquish that brand or become an entirely new brand, such as when she or he changes jobs. Individuals will have to identify, de-identify and re-identify as they move from one brand to another. And, individuals’ job opportunities may be significantly limited if it appears that they are not enough “like the brand” to be hired, when employers look to hire people that already fit the brand identity.

 

Finally, consider the assumption that launched the idea of employee branding. Does the employee really need to “be the brand”, to internalize the brand’s identity or to become identified with the brand, in order to be effective at “delivering on the brand promise?” Truly skillful marketers, and even merely adequate ones, can understand a brand deeply and find ways to project the brand’s attributes without having to “be the brand” or even be like the brand. Yet, proponents of employee branding do not seem to trust that employees outside of the marketing function could develop adequate brand insight and ability without giving their selves over to the brand.#p#分页标题#e#

 

批判性评论——Critical Appraisal
 

This term paper has taken a simplified approach to describing processes of branding, employee identity construction, and identity regulation in an effort to establish a space for critically investigating employee branding as a practice and as an ethos. First, it is important to explore how employees themselves experience being branded, since their perspective is not addressed by employee branding proponents. Research should consider employees’ identity options within an organization that is pursuing employee branding, to see how they might respond to and resist identity regulation, and how they might sustain and shape their own identities in the process. For example, employees might respond with disentification, ambivalent identification, and neutral identification. Similarly, employees might develop conformist, dramaturgical and resistant selves. There may be important nuances in employees’ identity construction that shield them from (or make them more vulnerable to) the self-commodification implied by being branded. Moreover, employee branding is not the only strategy that organizations are engaging in to influence how employees define themselves at work. Simultaneously, employees themselves are engaged in identity construction at work and it is important to consider how employee branding programs interact with the other identity concerns and goals of organizations and employees.
 

A comprehensive and critical analysis of the employee branding paradigm could also consider employees’ collective options for resisting, co-opting or transforming employee branding. Group-level resistance strategies as well as a serious discussion of organization-level alternatives for employee branding could take the pressure off the individual resistant subject and challenge the managerial rhetoric that would otherwise adopt wholesale the incursion of the marketing paradigm into employee-organization dynamics. The rhetoric and rhetorical tactics of branding programs should be examined in greater detail, so that the full set of their assumptions and implications can be understood, research should consider the ethics of branding and further co modifying employees by branding them, as well as the ethics of putting the brand above the employees and organization itself.