The 4 Building Blocks of an Employer Brand Story

The following is adapted from Give & Get Employer Branding.

A world-class employer brand gives you the power to recruit willing advocates, ambassadors, and brand activists who knowingly protect, nurture, and proliferate your employee experience and the culture that fuels it.

Employer brand is critical, and story is the most essential gift we can give to an employer brand—to communicate it, to breathe personality into it, and to make an emotional connection with an audience. Story is how we make sense of the world; it’s how we make decisions and rationalize what’s happening all around us.

Effective employer brand stories contain empathy, affinity, change, and conflict. Let’s take a closer look at these four basic building blocks, and then we’ll look at an example of these building blocks in action.

Empathy

Empathy for the talent audience is the most essential ingredient to an employer brand story. Without it, you have nothing.

Before you begin crafting your story, start by simply thinking about your audience. What do they care about? What’s important to them?

Then, armed with that understanding, put something into your story that will allow your audience to empathize with the protagonist/hero. 

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat, argues that you must have your protagonist do something to demonstrate that they have a strong redeeming feature to their personality—some action that allows the audience to identify and emotionally engage with the protagonist. He calls this “saving a cat,” but the act of good can be anything relevant to the character or hero in your story.

Affinity

When crafting a story, eliciting emotion is the only game in town. Meaning produces emotion, so you must know why you’re telling the story in the first place to elicit an emotional response. If you can align the meaning of the story with a primary motivator or driver of your audience, you earn their attention and create empathy and possible affinity.

For employer brand purposes, you want to put the audience to a decision after you’ve created empathy. Does this empathy lead to an affinity between what your employer brand stands for and what your audience believes in?

Change

To keep people’s attention, your audience needs to see change. They want to witness your hero experiencing something new, learning and growing such that they have a different outlook on life afterward. The change can literally unfold in front of the audience’s eyes, or it can be recounted to them in an engaging way and achieve the same result.

Evidence of change is a powerful and crucial ingredient. Without it, the story is just a chance for your audience to passively glimpse into a window of your company and see what it looks like but not how it feels and not what’s possible within.

Conflict

The level of engagement to your story is directly proportional to the drama attached to the answers to these questions:

• How tough was it to learn the lesson at the time?
• What was at risk?
• What was the adversity faced?

If the change is easy and obvious, it’s not very engaging. In fact, it’s not interesting and it’s not a true story; it’s a linear narrative with limited impact.

Without conflict, there is no story. It’s impossible to engage an audience on a primal, basic, human level without leaning into the harsh realities, vulnerabilities, and gaps in your employee experience. Once this is accepted, understood, and embraced, these perceived weaknesses start to emerge as your key differentiators—your unique opportunities and quite possibly your superpower to find people who are perfect for your organization from a cultural perspective.

Empathy, Affinity, Change, and Conflict in Action: “People Like Paul”

Ph. Creative filmed a short story for Virgin Media called “People Like Paul” that shows all four of these building blocks in action.

The premise of the story was simple: you can teach an engineer to fit a TiVo box, but you can’t teach someone to care. Virgin wanted to communicate that they valued your character more than the skills you might have.

In the story, Paul is called to Patrick’s house to install a TiVo box. Early on, we get the “save the cat” moment of empathy: when Patrick explains he’s going to be alone at Christmas, we can see that Paul cares.

Then the conflict is introduced. Patrick’s TV isn’t working, but the problem is the TV itself. It is not Paul’s or Virgin Media’s responsibility, yet Paul still feels responsible to help Patrick so that he’s got a TV to watch over the holidays. Paul wants to help Patrick, yet he’s got a list of things to do for his wife and family if his own Christmas is going to go according to plan. He’s running out of time.

The change occurs when Paul goes from a person who feels bad about Patrick’s predicament yet sticks to the parameters of his job to a man who can’t live with the guilt of leaving Patrick high and dry. Paul spends his own money to buy Patrick a new TV. He goes above and beyond to do the right thing and visibly feels good about his generous decision.

Patrick is lost for words when Paul returns with the brand-new TV, and affinity is created with the audience. The audience is proud of Paul for doing the right thing, and the change witnessed in Paul is a value the audience can recognize in themselves. The audience can relate to Paul’s empathy, compassion, support, and generosity toward Patrick.

With this story, Virgin sends a loud and clear message that doing the right thing, with compassion and caring, is what Virgin values most from their employees. 

Tell Your Stories

Stories about your employer brand are invaluable to an audience trying to decide their future employment based on behavior, culture, and shared values, because stories can provide a real sense of what it feels like to work at a company.

The best part about the “People Like Paul” story is that it’s true. The team applied story principles and structure to create a story with maximum impact.

Within your organization, we guarantee that you, too, have real stories like this. Your job is to find those stories and then use the building blocks of empathy, affinity, change, and conflict in order to bring those stories to life.

For more advice on storytelling in employer branding, you can find Give & Get Employer Branding on Amazon.

Charlotte Marshall was named the 2019-2020 Employer Brand Leader of the Year and has successfully built and launched five Fortune 500 employer brands. She is an in-demand international speaker and the global employer brand lead at Danaher Corporation.

?Bryan Adams is the CEO and founder of Ph.Creative, recognized as one of the leading employer brand agencies in the world with clients such as Apple, American Airlines, GVC, and Blizzard Entertainment. Bryan is also a bestselling author, podcaster, creative strategist, and specialist speaker.