The Law of Localization 🗺️📍 EBH

All branding is local

I feel like I’ve been talking about my employer branding workshop for a year (technically, it’s been 11 months), but I am super excited to launch this new and even better version. Why should you care?

1. More activation support

2. Improved resources and materials

3. Money-back guarantee

All the details are here, but if you’re wondering if the class is right for you, let’s grab 15 minutes and I can answer any questions you have about the class.

+++++

1. The Law of Strategy

2. The Law of Focus

3. The Law of Perception

4. The Law of Ownership

5. The Law of Impact

6. The Law of Desire

7. The Law of Quality

8. The Law of Fit

9. The Law of Clarity

10. The Law of Subjectivity

11. The Law of Localization

Let’s wave our magic wand (what, do you not have one? That’s unfortunate) and *poof* we have an employer brand. Whether it is an EVP, a brand promise, a brand direction, or some other variant or shape of a “brand,” it now exists. Just check your deck. There it is. Yay!

So is everything better? Are your recruiters attracting more of the people they want? Is your career site supporting more compelling job postings? Do people in every appropriate field now think of you as an interesting employer?

Probably not. I mean, it’s still just a slide in a deck. Maybe 20-30 words. It isn’t a spell. It isn’t magic (I’ll take that magic wand back now).

Remember what the brand is trying to do: connect people to companies and roles that will serve them. All too often, we think of a brand as a “company-sized” thing. And while it starts that way, being company-sized only solves part of the problem: It might attract people to the company but ignores the more local issues of how it helps set expectations around what the role will offer.

As a concept, a brand is too broad to be useful. So in order to begin to extract its value, we have to put it through the process of localizing it to various audiences.

There is a pro and con to this level of abstraction. The nice thing is that as an abstract concept, anyone can look at it and see what they want to see in it. The bad thing is that when everyone sees whatever they want to see in it, it eliminates any value of alignment. Having been told what the elephant looks like, the blind men are free to think of the elephant as whatever they are touching.

Localizing takes the various ideas within a brand and decides which makes the most sense for that audience, translating those ideas into their language while preserving some sense of the central idea.

So if you have an EVP with four pillars (a relatively common situation), the brand-and-pillar-one might best apply to nurses, and the brand-plus-pillar-two would attract more of the doctors you want. 

Here, the overall brand serves as a kind of anchor to all candidates, allowing the pillar (or pillars) to connect that anchor to that person. This is being specific to your audience’s motivations while still creating alignment with the larger brand idea.

But the last step is to wrap those ideas in language. Once we know which parts of the brand we want to communicate, we translate those ideas into the local language. 

Let’s say you have an innovation message to share. To developers, you might talk about the amazing tools and tech they will have access to and the expectation that they will be expected to push themselves and create something new. To the salesperson, that message might be about how you have an innovative product to sell or that you’re comfortable with innovative approaches to generating leads. To the QA team, that message might be that the QA team is completely integrated into the development process and doesn’t exist as the “last step in delivery.” To a recruiter, that message might be that this company has invested in employer branding and the training to make that brand useful. Same ideas, expressed in different ways to different audiences.

Every company needs to localize its brand differently. At a massive multinational company, the idea of localization will often involve culture and language. How you express innovation to the team in Chicago will be different than how you express it to the team in Copenhagen and Chennai.

But this is where the brand’s abstract nature becomes a positive. Because I am translating “innovation” (the idea) rather than “innovation” (the word), I am allowing local teams to consider the idea and interpret and express it to their own audiences.

+++++

Wow! I’ve never had such a reaction to a class before!

My “build a strategy from scratch” course has had more signups than all my other webinars combined! $25 to learn a career-supporting skill. Check it out!

***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***

-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]

###