The Hindu Business Line : Am I a brand ambassador?

Thanks to traffic congestion from Kollam to Thiruvananthapuram, I missed my return flight to Chennai necessitating an unscheduled overnight halt at a 3-star hotel owned by the uncle of one of the students. With compliments of course!

With great reluctance, I accepted an invitation to a reunion of MBA alumni drawn from diverse backgrounds and schools of management that evening. The ‘war stories’ drawn from their accumulated experience of five-plus years since their leaving college yielded an interesting pattern for me that I quickly labelled along the coordinates of:

The brand equity of the employer they served (X-axis); and

The value perception they held-out for their employers in the role they claimed to perform (Y-axis).

Interesting pattern

I am the brand: The most colourful, humorous and spontaneous accounts emerged from a few who felt wanted by their employers. They saw themselves making a visible difference to the lives of their customers and colleagues by virtue of living the ‘brand promise’ held out by their employer, at daily work.

Disengaged lot represented some of their fellow-colleagues who found no significant purpose being served by them. Perhaps they felt the ‘brand promise’ implied by their employers to be a mere ‘hype’. Apprehensions of being passed up by the former were not hard to detect. They felt vulnerable in their roles and nursed doubts in private about the appropriateness of continuing with a branded employer on engagements that progressively questioned their importance or eroded their self-worth.

Eclipsed segment felt that the responsibility they shouldered was disproportionately higher than the importance the industry and company attached to them. They had elected to be a big fish in a small pond. However the ‘joy’ was no longer sustainable because of the threat to their positions arising out of an impending takeover by bigger rivals or conceding hard won market share to branded upstarts.

Oblivion characterised the lot whose roles meant nothing meaningful for the employer and the employee alike. They were passive and perfunctory in their participation through out an otherwise ‘spirited’ evening!

Employers embarking on a search for premium talent are under pressure to be explicitly articulating the ‘employer value proposition’ held out by them. Wonder why the subject of ‘employee value proposition’ does not merit an equally serious consideration.

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