Corporate Branding | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Branding without an improvement process is a flash in the pan

Now that people realize that the traces everyone (businesses or individuals) leaves on the net impact their economic activities everyday more, “branding” is becoming a very trendy issue. First “personal” then, logically, “corporate”.

Then, things should be as perfect as possible in a perfect world. Everyone will be able to know everything about anyone, so will be able to make the best possible decisions, companies won’t make “casting mistakes” anymore and applicants will be sure to find employer they perfectly fit with. I don’t know if you share my opinion…but this seems to be too easy to be true…and efficient.

There is, according to be, a big misunderstanding on the starting assumption. Whereas some undestand “transparent information”, some others understand “the most positive information. I’d rather say that everyone want the most transparent information about the others but only want to give positive information about himself. This leads to a win-loose game where everyone looses for a simple reason. The mechanism relies on trust, so, at the very moment the information is biased, trust will disappear and everybody will come back to the usual “it’s useless, it doesn’t work, it’s a sham”.

I feel hard to believe that, even if in a perfect world it would solve everything, the social side of the process, that’s to say the validation of the information by third parties, will change anything. Because there are a lot of people that are not comfortable with all these things and because companies, even if they know people don’t believe them anymore, are still reluctant to make speak those who are believed.

Is it a flash in the pan ? Not at all. But communication in the large sense of the word has to be rethought as a lever in an ongoing improvement process and not only as a way to deliver a message.

Personal Branding is a very fashionable topic today. More than that, it’s a deep trend that is overdiscussed because of its yougness. A day will come that it will be so obvious that no-one will feel like arguing anymore. The purpose is to manage one’s reputation and professional brand in order to :

- those who are looking for informations about someone find what’s needed to assess his skills, his ability to do hold a defined job.

- this person appears as the “right person” when recruiters are looking for a defined profile without having any name in mind.

This may also help freelances to find missions but let’s admit it’s more about an applicant to recruiter relationship.

Being one of those who think that a good recruitement is more about bringing together people and companies who really fit the one with the other instead of making a selection, I think that the other side of the relation has to be improved too : the one that helps applicants to have a better undertanding of the company. Recruitment is like waltz or rock n’roll : you’ll never dance very long if you don’t get the right partner.

The current crisis that makes so many people look for any kind of job musn’t make us forget major issues that will happen in the future.

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