Employer branding is a strategic activity that has grown in popularity over the past two decades. Much progress has been made in investigating aspects of employer branding; however, many facets of the process, as it has been conceptualised in the research literature, remain empirically unexplored. The aim of this thesis is to get a deeper, more grounded understanding of employer branding based on an investigation of employer branding processes in practice. Four papers are presented, each providing a new perspective. In the first paper, industry experts??? perceptions of the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful employer brands are used to arrive at a typology of employer branding success. The typology is managerially relevant, providing a means by which firms may assess their employer branding success qualitatively and quantitatively (based on metrics commonly used in practice). Further, theoretical contributions are made by establishing employer branding as a context distinct from corporate and consumer branding, and by providing a basis for assessing variance between employer brands. In the second and third papers, the mechanisms that shape and perpetuate employer brands are explored. Individual (employee) and firm-related mechanisms drawn from the literature are empirically validated in the second paper using qualitative within-case analysis of four employer brands. The firms are from a broad range of industries and are characteristically successful (a pharmaceuticals and a financial services firm) and unsuccessful (a transport firm and a semi-government public utility). The case analysis results in the discovery of additional mechanisms relating to industry-level factors, not previously documented. These findings are built on in the third paper, where cross-case analysis of the same firms is used to establish a set of conditions that support or erode employer branding success. Importantly, theory perspectives outside the traditional domain of marketing (i.e., human resources, organisational behaviour and strategy) are shown to be critical for understanding the process in practice. A taxonomy of generic market segmentation types is used in the fourth paper to investigate the application of market segmentation to employer branding. Market segmentation is shown to provide a useful link between employer branding and broader strategic planning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/273079 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Moroko, Lara , Marketing, Australian School of Business, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Marketing |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Moroko Lara ., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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