I was searching for something on Amazon when Wally Olins’ ‘Brand New’ popped up in my ‘You might also like…’ list. At work we’d just had a debate about whether Employer Brand and Corporate Brand were distinctly separate things or just one and the same. So I thought I would read the latest musings of this master of Corporate Brand – made all the more poignant by his passing last month just after it was published.

Whilst Olins doesn’t mention the concept of Employer Brand per se, a lot of what he talks about is highly relevant for those involved in attracting and engaging workers with a brand. Here’s my summary of his insights in that context:

Wally Olins’ take on brand is absolutely aligned with others currently looking specifically at the power of your organisation’s identity in relation to your employees. He starts off with his articulation of the concept of ‘Brand’ – making it clear that it is so much more than just a logo. Trust and authenticity are central. Creating an authentic ‘Talent Brand’ is a core component of Kevin Keohane’s model in ‘Brand and Talent’.

He then discusses the importance of how we consume a brand – largely through our experience of interacting with the people who represent it. This is the central idea in Ian Buckingham’s ‘Brand Champions’.

He then moves on to look at the level of scrutiny consumers are putting companies under. The sheer volume of data and behind the scenes insight available now makes it easy for customers to learn far more about a company than what the PR and Marketing departments put out. He cautions that the ease with which disgruntled customers can mobilise a mass movement online should act as an incentive to be more trustworthy and authentic. The same is true for employees. LinkedIn and Glassdoor make it easy for potential employees to connect with real employees and find out what the employment experience is really like – not just what the recruitment advertising promises.

Of course, companies can dig up similar insights or potential customers or employees – credit checks, social media following, etc. “Mutual exposure” is how he sums it up – “There’s just no point in hiding anymore.”

Despite how much employers and customers/employees can get to know about each other, he laments the fact that we seem to have less and less personal contact. The drive to automate, outsource and increase efficiency has put more distance between the ability of organisations to have meaningful social exchanges with people – a point which is just as relevant to a candidate wading through an impersonal online application process as it is to a customer trying to print a return label from a self-service help and support portal.

Having summed up his views on the current state on branding, Olins then comes to what is, for me, a great call to action for what we should strive for. Five short points that can help you do a superior job with your (employer) brand:

1. Knowing who you are
2. Talking, listening and being engaged
3. Showing who you are
4. Embracing everything you do
5. Managing it and making it work

His ideas for how we can get better at these five points are worth reading. It’s largely common sense – clearly not common practice – but expressed by someone with experience of what really works in branding and identity that few can match.

He brings these points to life with wit, insight and engaging stories that often reveal the ridiculousness of what branding has become. Everything from the automated text messages his mobile provider sends to pilots’ pre-flight announcements helps you see how lost many companies have become in their attempts to make us engage with their brands. The parallels in recruitment marketing, candidate experience and employment value propositions are all too easy to draw!

There’s inspiration here too for how we can become more imaginative in how we talk and how we act when trying to attract and engage customers or employees.

Olins then deals with two extremes – both of which are relevant from an employer’s perspective. He highlights how the errors big brands are making and the direction of travel for social media and online tools create incredible opportunities for new brands or challenger brands. They can exploit these opportunities to steal a march on their bigger competitors and occupy a space in the branding world that gives them a competitive edge.

The other extreme  is how lessons from Olins’ work on country and place branding can be applied to big companies. He was well known, and often derided, for his work for national and local Governments, helping them to brand their ‘place’. But if you think managing a brand for a large, complex organisation is difficult, imagine trying to do it for a whole country!

His ideas for how to engage disparate stakeholders, get everyone communicating the same messages and how to align behaviours and experiences behind what the brand stands for will make interesting reading for anyone trying to do the same in a big corporate environment.

The book then closes with his own thoughts on his career, and you have to wonder if he had a feeling that it would be the last book he would write.

He very humbly describes an illustrious career that pretty much set the standard for what good work on branding and corporate identify should be like. Wally Olins was one of the first people to just get what branding was about. His relevance to those of us focused on the employment side of corporate identity is summed up neatly in his description of what he realised after visiting different clients’ steel plants in India in the sixties. He was fascinated by how the environment and how employees behaved gave him a sense of what each organisation stood for, even though they all produced exactly the same thing:

“That is, looking back on it, when I began for the first time to sense that a corporation communicates what it is through everything that it does.”