About the importance of corporate branding

Article published in French on the 2nd of July 2020

In times of crisis, one of the first services to suffer is that of communication: considered as support functions, these professions are often misunderstood and denigrated. However, the image of a brand, with customers but also with employees and possible future employees, is essential for its survival and sustainability.

Any company’s goal is to sell: a product, a service, an idea. To fulfill this goal, you need to make yourself known. But not only that! It is also necessary to work on this knowledge. In other words, it is essential to polish the brand image.

Especially today, people are sensitive to the values that the brand conveys. That’s why we no longer sell a product or a service but values. How will my client benefit by buying my product? He will have a functional object that meets a certain number of criteria, sometimes more, with added value compared to the competition. But that is what the customer expects: he comes to you for these features. What will tip the balance in your favour is this little extra: are you green? Great, the customer pays attention to their carbon footprint and your commitment is in line with their values. Do you favour equality? Great, he’ll feel good about buying products from your brand. Your employees are happy and show it? Even better, they might even want to come and work for you.

And here we are putting our finger on something very important: the values of the brand, not as a seller, but as a possible employer. Like it or not, the strength of a company lies in the people who make it up. And in order to attract the best people, the brand image must be impeccable. Offering a decent salary and a few benefits is no longer enough to convince someone to work for you, and, above all, to retain a good employee. He/she must feel in harmony with his or her environment: well-being at work has never been so important and it means feeling good about the company you work for.

You are an environmentally friendly person, a very important aspect of your life, but you see tons of discarded paper, mountains of burnt products in your workplace… At first, you may be able to disregard it because the job is interesting, the salary is good and your colleagues are nice. But soon it will weigh on your brain, which is not a fan of contradictions.

You are in favour of equality between men and women, and you constantly see men taking the place of women for promotions, with equal skills (or even doing better)? How can you continue to work for a company that betrays one of your fundamental values? It won’t last…

And so on and so forth.

If LinkedIn is one of the most important networks today, if we see many HR sites being rolled out, it’s not for nothing: people want to know more about a company before they join it, they want to be sure that they can feel good about the place they’ll be visiting every day for years to come.

The cost of turnover is all too well known, and if a company wants to avoid paying for it, it has to work on its brand image and specifically its corporate branding. Of course, the company has to be ready to be in line with this image, so that the employee does not feel betrayed: you can be a purveyor of dreams, but if it’s all lies, he/she will not stay…