Chapter 13
Translation, Validation and Adaptation
‘Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other.’
Amara Lakhous
My employer brand education began with the Nuba tribe. It started with a degree in anthropology, and an extended stay in the Sudan as a teacher, actor and freelance anthropologist. It led to a passionate interest in organizational culture and brands. What I learnt in the Sudan was that the world is incredibly diverse. Of the roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world today, over 100 are native to the Sudan. I also learnt that it gets a lot easier to communicate in the marketplace when you speak a ‘lingua franca’, or ‘bridging’ language. In the Sudan there were two bridging languages, Arabic, which I became reasonably fluent in at the time, and English, which I'm still struggling with.
Negotiating lunch in the marketplace was relatively straightforward compared to some of my other bridging challenges I had to deal with. I joined an English theatre tour playing Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, which we soon learned to over-act, as we realized from the audiences' reactions that their understanding largely depended on body language. I then taught English with a major helping of Shakespeare. Macbeth is a magnificent play but seemed an extremely remote and foreign text to teach to young African teenagers. While the language was often difficult, they grasped the plot very quickly. They loved the dark deeds and the final retribution. The finer points of the language followed. I remember being feeling somewhat concerned but also immensely proud when I overhead one of my pupils muttering: ‘something wicked this way comes’ as I entered the classroom. It made me realize why Shakespeare is so translatable across cultural and historical divides. The characters, stories and insights into the human condition are timeless.
My most challenging venture was to attempt a short study of the Nuba tribe. I'd seen a photo of a magnificently noble Nuba wrestler shot by the Magnum photographer George Rodger in the late 1940s.1 This was my idea of anthropological heaven, adventurous, romantic and deeply insightful. It was a disaster. I understood very little. It was enormously uncomfortable. I lost a lot of weight. I caught malaria and nearly died, but I did learn a lot about what different cultures share and what sets them apart.
A company's brand values and identity can be seen as its lingua franca. It can enable diverse groups of people to communicate and cooperate more effectively, but there always needs to be some give and take to establish understanding and commitment. There are three levels on which this translation generally needs to take place.
- Language. Many multinational companies have established a common ‘business language’ and currently that language tends to be English. However, while there may be a common business language for managers, it is generally the case that the majority of employees at lower levels within the organization only speak the local language. This clearly needs to be taken into consideration, in terms of both research and brand communication, especially in major markets like China. There are also many multilingual companies, like Santander, whose example we will turn to later in this chapter.
- Symbolism. The power of brand communication to make an impact often depends on the use of metaphorical language and symbolic imagery. While undoubtedly rich and powerful in meaning within the right cultural context, it can be difficult to translate the sense of what is intended outside the home culture. Jerome, who translated the bible from Hebrew into Latin in 405 AD is credited with establishing a very important distinction between literal translation and free translation, ‘not the word for the word, but the sense for the sense’.3 Returning to Africa, to provide an example of what this means in practice, the phrase ‘tip of the iceberg’ would make very little sense to someone born and raised on the equator. A more effective translation of the sense would be ‘the ears of the hippopotamus’.
- Substance. Research suggests that body language represents the most important influence on an audience's trust and affinity towards the person communicating. Likewise, the credibility and appeal of marketing messages will largely depend on the actions that accompany the promises. It is therefore very important to establish the degree to which brand promises made from the centre of the organization are currently reflected in local experience (and expectation). It is also important to check what would be required for people in different target groups to believe the brand promises are being fulfilled.
INTERNAL VALIDATION
For the above reasons, it's generally important to validate both the EVP and creative assumptions with local target groups before you finalize your employer brand platform. A typical format for this kind of validation research would be focus groups held with key employee segments in a variety of different local markets. The aim of this research is to discover:
- How attractive/compelling people find each EVP pillar (and core positioning option).
- The perceived relevance/importance of these EVP elements to each target group.
- How credible these pillars would be in describing the current employment experience (both every day and in relation to the company at its best).
- What more would need to be done for the EVP to credibly describe the organization.
- What if anything people feel is missing from the proposition.
The same focus groups can be used to test the relative appeal of different creative ideas and presentational styles, using stimulus boards to illustrate different concepts or mocked-up advertising layouts (sometimes described as adcepts).
In addition to running these sessions with employee groups, you can also use the same materials to consult and invite feedback from local functional teams (e.g. HR, marketing and communications) and key senior stakeholders. This serves an important purpose in winning the engagement and support of these key stakeholders, in addition to the additional insights gained into the EVP components and creative routes.
Another important function of these local validation sessions is to collect additional ‘reasons to believe’ and related stories that can be potentially used to support content marketing.
EXTERNAL VALIDATION
Depending on the potential availability of your external target audiences, it may also be possible to run similar sessions with potential candidates as well as current employees. The external focus group option is generally very expensive (particularly for highly sought-after mid-career professionals, when you will usually need to pay handsome incentives to get the right people to attend). The alternative is to run an online survey using a variety of sources to identify and attract the right participants (e.g. existing ATS contacts, search agency contacts, LinkedIn invites and employee referrals). The last option requires a greater communication effort, but is generally the most cost-efficient and effective, if your ATS falls short. These surveys are necessarily short; however, assuming a number of preceding questions to identify membership of the target group, you should be able to get a response to the following:
- How important would the following factors be in attracting you to a new employer (list of key EVP pillars and attributes)?
- How familiar are you with the company in question?
- For each creative concept (displayed visually in adcept format):
- How impactful do you think this overall creative approach would be in attracting you to join the company in question? (5 point scale)
- How credible do you find these claims? (5 point scale)
- Which elements of this creative approach do you like? (open question)
- Which elements of this creative approach do you dislike? (open question)
GLOBAL LOCAL TUNING
The validation results should help to confirm whether the EVP pillars you have selected work across the local markets and talent segments, and the degree to which different attributes and messages may need to be ‘tuned’ up or down to match local employment conditions and target group preferences. The EVP can be thought of as a distinctive ‘brand chord’, with each pillar representing a separate note that can be played louder or softer, and more or less frequently, depending on its relative local importance. It's also useful to suggest to people that they can add further notes if they feel they are of particular local importance (as long as they are not discordant with the overall brand proposition). As David Henderson, Chief Talent Officer at MetLife, puts it:
‘The umbrella brand should be sufficiently broad to capture all employees from top leadership talent to front-line employees but the accents we place on certain aspects of the offering will differ. It's a bit like the controls on an expensive music system – the music that is playing is the same and all the variables that impact the sound quality are in play – but the dials can be changed according to the preferences of the listener. What motivates one segment of our audience might not be right for another so if you land on an EVP, that level of agility needs to be part of the design.’
Local managers will often tell you that a global solution will never work, because their market is different. There are always some important points of difference. In practice, however, you are likely to find that local differences are far outweighed by global similarities. Employees will often give the notes relatively equal status (if they've been well researched in advance), and few additional notes will be added (Figure 13.1). The important thing is to let people discover this for themselves. An imposed solution, however brilliant, will never be accepted as fully as a solution people have reached themselves.
Figure 13.1 Tuning the EVP to local markets.
An example of a situation in which an additional pillar was identified for a specific target group, was an employer brand development conducted for a major power company. It was found that ‘flexible working conditions’ were rated of very low importance to the majority of employees in their conventional nuclear and carbon fuel generated power plants, and it was not selected for inclusion within the overall EVP. However, within the company's renewable energy division, where the average age was at least 15 years younger than the rest of the company and the working patterns very different, it was found that flexible working was one of the most important elements within the employment deal. It was therefore included within the local EVP or local ‘target value proposition’ (sometimes referred to as a TVP).
There is often greater variation in the response to creative concepts, visuals, taglines and messages, particularly if they carry cultural associations (as most pictures and taglines do!). An example of this was the response to a core tagline that we were considering for Bacardi's employer brand: ‘Latin Spirit, Global Mind’.
LOCAL MESSAGING FRAMEWORKS
Where an organization does find significant differences between target groups, it may be useful to provide what TMP calls a ‘messaging framework’. When Monsanto rolled out its global EVP a number of years ago, it provided guidance on choosing the most effective messages for a number of the company's key target talent groups and geographies. There were three core components provided for each target audience. The case study example below describes how these components were defined, and provides an example of the guidance for one of Monsanto's designated target groups.
SUMMARY AND KEY CONCLUSIONS
- A company's brand values and identity can be seen as its lingua franca. It can enable diverse groups of people to communicate and cooperate more effectively, but there always needs to be some give and take to establish understanding and commitment.
- Before an EVP and creative approach is finalized, it should be tested across different market environments and key target groups.
- Internal consultation should seek to validate the credibility and appeal of the EVP pillars, creative presentation and claims.
- External validation of an EVP and creative concepts is generally more challenging, but is often necessary to provide the confidence to invest in new recruitment marketing campaigns.
- It's important to recognize the difference between the ‘sense’ that you are meaning to convey through your brand communication and the ‘words’. This may mean that different headlines and taglines may be required to evoke the same desired response.
- While a consistent set of EVP ingredients should be present across the full range of employer brand marketing activities you deploy, the degree to which you emphasize different pillars and communication themes can be tuned up and down to better match the needs and preferences of different target groups.
- Messaging frameworks provide a guide to the weighting of communication to different target groups, as well as the most relevant local ‘reasons to believe’.
- Bland uniformity is the antithesis of brand vitality. If your objective is to enliven your brand, you need to continually flex your brand content to adapt to diversity and change.