Employer Branding – how Virgin added ‘Virginess’ to Virgin Active
I love employer branding and when done well it can revolutionise Government Departments, large and even small businesses.
Always on the look out for businesses doing this well, I was excited to find this fantastic presentation by Elaine J0bson, where she shares the principles on how Virgin successfully took the old Health and Raquet club brand and changed it to be part of the distinctive Virgin family.
The key take aways for me from this presentation that can easily be applied to your business or department are:
1. Good is the enemy of Great. You can have a good business but unless you do something different and push the boundaries you will never have a Great business.
2. Culture is everything. People will be attracted to your business because of your culture.
3. Combine Employer Branding strategies. The service and people strategies need to be combined in order to create a great culture.
4. Create an over arching theme. For Virgin, they started by having an overarching theme that they called their Love Strategy with a goal to be the ‘Worlds Most Loved’. They then changed their language around each part of the employee process / experience. All employees were refereed to as humans and the Virgin brand was in a ‘relationship’ with everyone of them.
• The recruitment process is called Flirting.
• Falling in Love with the brand is the first 90 days.
• The Being in Love phase is where the employees are looking for substance – asking themselves, is this somewhere I would want to stay long term.
• Staying in Love – 12 months plus – is the brand taking their humans for granted?, are they still helping nurture learning and growth?
• Happily ever Active – is a place Virgin have created for people who are scoring a 9 or 10 promoter score and have been with the business over 12 months. It is a place where things just happen – random acts of love.
Very inspiring and very achievable. All we need to do is stop and define the strategy that will take our employer brand to the next level.
Yours in Employer Branding,
Belinda
