Employer Brand, Talent Brand, and Corporate Brand: What’s the Difference?

What exactly is a brand, anyway?

“Brand” is one of those words we all throw around without truly understanding the meaning of it. But we don’t have to. That’s because we can all recognize a good brand—a strong brand—when we see one. Think: Apple, Nike, Starbucks. 

And that in itself is the definition. 

What Is a Brand? 

A brand is more than just a logo and a name; it’s a set of perceptions, emotions, and associations people have with a particular product, service, or company. It’s a feeling, an ethos, the sum of all the different parts of an organization.

Put simply, a “brand” is what a prospect thinks of when they hear your name. It’s everything the public thinks it knows about your name brand offering—both factual and emotional. Your brand name exists objectively; people can see it. It’s fixed. But your brand exists only in someone’s mind.

Despite this intangibility, brands are extremely valuable business assets since the way a customer feels about a business influences their purchasing behavior—directly affecting the business’s bottom line. 

The Project of Branding: Different Messages for Different Audiences

To make matters more complicated, there are several different subgenres of a company’s overall brand. For example, organizations across the country are now spending time honing their online brand (how the company presents itself via its website, social media, and blog), executive brand (the public image of the C-suite), and product branding (when marketers introduce a product to the public with its own unique identity) to name a few. 

All these varied faces of branding exist largely because every company has multiple audiences—from customers to employees to candidates to investors to journalists and beyond. The project of “branding,” then, is all about narrowing the identity of your overall company brand to speak to a specific audience, an audience that is key to the success of your business. 

Perhaps the most critical audience for employers in this day and age is talent (employees past and present throughout the employee lifecycle, candidates, and potential candidates) since attracting and keeping quality talent is harder than ever before, and the cost of losing talent is higher than ever before. 

To answer the call and speak directly to talent, companies are investing in their employer brands and sharpening up their talent brands. But what exactly is the difference? And how do they relate to the overall corporate brand? 

Employer Brand…

While both focus on talent attraction, communication, and recruitment, your employer brand is who you say you are (and ultimately want to be). 

It’s about storytelling around what it’s like to work at your organization and sharing your value proposition with talent at every step of the hiring process. It’s about articulating your mission, values, culture, and personality to connect with skilled candidates who share your vision. This intentional storytelling totals up to form a positive perception of your organization from the outside. 

Employer brand is communicated through your careers site, job descriptions, job ads, company reviews, media, and social media channels. Today, organizations invest heavily in their employer brands because a quality employer brand can reduce turnover by 28% and cost per hire by 50%. 

…Vs. Talent Brand

Your talent brand, on the other hand, is who you actually are or how employees authentically experience your organization. 

While your employer brand is a story you tell, your talent brand comes from the voice of employees and candidates, past and present. 

Talent brand is centered on the all-employee experience and is generated through employee-generated content. It’s the highly social, totally public version of your employer brand that incorporates what talent thinks, feels, and shares about your company as a place to work.

Your talent brand is an “earned” image; it comes from providing employees and candidates with an experience they connect with and get value from and then pulling from that organic, positive experience when telling the story of who you are as a company. Most employer brands, however, are more of a projection of what a company wants to be—an idealized version of its current reality. 

Laddering Up to Corporate Brand

Corporate brand refers to a company’s image or identity and how it presents itself to critical stakeholders. Corporate branding contextualizes and promotes your company, not just a product or service. It represents the organization as a whole, both internally and externally, and serves as a guiding principle for its actions and interactions with stakeholders. 

Corporate brands are built over time through consistent messaging, ethical business practices, and a commitment to delivering on promises. They influence consumer perceptions, drive purchasing decisions, and affect an organization’s stock price. 

In essence, a corporate brand reflects the company’s overall character and what it stands for globally. It encompasses your brand logo, values, tone, messaging, purpose, offering, target audience, and market differentiation.

Included in that is how a company treats its employees, what kind of employees the company is made up of, and how company culture is reflected in the products and services it puts out (i.e., happy, well-trained, well-paid customer service employees are more likely to deliver a top-notch customer support experience). As such, your employer brand and your talent brand ladder up into your corporate brand—they’re vital inputs to a strong corporate brand. 

A clear, unified corporate identity can be critical to competitive strategy. It serves as a north star, providing direction and purpose. It can also enhance the image of individual products, help firms recruit and retain employees, and provide protection against reputational damage in times of trouble. 

Deep Dive Into the Talent, Corporate, and Employer Brand

For a deeper dive into employer, talent, and corporate branding, tune in for this week’s episode of America Back to Work. We’re sitting down with Marcus Body, an expert in helping businesses hone their employee value propositions. 

Body has worked on more than 100 employer branding projects for large and small clients in banking, finance, law, IT, telecomms, retail, fashion, engineering, medical/pharmaceuticals, governmental, non-profit, and more—and he’s taking his expertise to America Back to Work to help listeners like you get it right at your own companies.