What if you elevated your employer brand to business strategy using the story-driven employer branding methodology?
Here’s a bold question for all you founders, CEOs, and business strategists:
What if your employer brand isn’t just about hiring?
What if it’s actually the missing half of your business strategy?
This episode is going to flip your thinking.
Because if your strategy is struggling to stick, if your people aren’t aligned, and if your leadership vision feels like it’s not quite landing… you’re not alone.
Most businesses suffer from a silent disconnect between strategy and culture.
That’s where story-driven employer branding comes in—not as HR fluff, but as your new strategic powerhouse. Watch this episode on YouTube or listen to it on your favorite podcast player (links below) to learn how to expand your strategic mind from employer brand to business strategy.
Episode 194: From Employer Brand to Business Strategy – Why most business strategies fail and how storytelling fixes it
Hello my friend, and welcome back to the Story-Driven Business Podcast—where we decode what it really takes to build a magnetic business from the inside out.
I’m your host, Susanna Rantanen, known as the world’s leading modern employer branding expert and strategist, and your personal guide to story-driven leadership and branding.
In today’s episode, I’ll take you on a walk to the park where business strategy, company culture and employee experiences become united making why you do business and what value you generate internally and externally totally transparent to your people and customers.
The methodology I will talk about is the one that I started to build already in 2015 and wrote a book about after 10 years of testing, iterating and fool-proofing it.
It is a story-driven methodology called the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™. It applies the science of persuasion and the science of story to bridge the gap between your people and your mission to inspire and empower your current and future employees deliver your customer promise just the way you want them to.
I’ll explain you how aligning strategic company culture, employee experiences, and communication with storytelling transforms your employer brand into a scalable business asset.
If you’re ready to stop shouting your strategy and start living it—this one’s for you.
Find Story-Driven Business podcast on your favourite podcast app
Subscribe to this podcast on your favourite app, and you’ll never miss a new episode about modern employer branding!
Better yet, if you love this podcast, make sure you rate it on your favourite podcast app!
Here are some of the platforms where you can find this podcast.
SOUNDCLOUD | SPOTIFY | APPLE / ITUNES | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE PODCASTS | AMAZON MUSIC
Strategic Company Culture – The Operating System of Success to go from Employer Brand to Business Strategy
“Culture is the personality of your organization—the ‘how’ of everything you do.”
A strategy without a defined culture is powerless.
What we need is Strategic Company Culture—where leadership style, organisational behaviour, and communication all line up to push your business goals forward.
Most companies have culture by accident. What you want is culture by design, strategic design.
When your culture matches your strategy, execution stops being chaos and becomes natural momentum. This is the foundation for elevating your employer brand to business strategy.
When your business applies the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™, you don’t need to ‘motivate’ people—they know what success looks like and how to contribute to it daily.
And because, through your story-driven employer brand messages and marketing, your hires all know about this too, and become productive employees faster after starting their employment in your company.
And, for the same reason, your story-driven employer branding clarifies you are not the right option for those who cannot relate with your goals, KPIs, ways of work and customer promise helping you to make your hiring more efficient and resulting in less hiring mistakes.
That’s how powerful defining and turning your strategic culture into employer brand, and employer brand to business strategy – the essential half of it – will be.
There are four archetypes of strategic culture directly linked to the four most popular business strategies in the world:
- The Collaborative Specialist Culture is linked to specialization strategy requiring advanced expertise: A close-knit, family-like atmosphere prioritizing trust, mentoring, and collaboration. Ideal for nurturing employee loyalty and development.
- The Innovative Agile Culture is linked to innovation strategy aiming to challenge existing market norms and practises: Focused on innovation, agility, and risk-taking. Perfect for startups and scaleups aiming to disrupt markets or foster creativity.
- The Results-Driven Competitive Culture is linked to competition and market strategy with the aim to dominate or secure a leading market position driven by profitability, loyal customers and strong brand: Targeted on results, competition, and measurable achievements. Often suits companies with aggressive growth goals or high sales focus.
- The Process-Oriented Control Culture is linked to the efficiency optimization strategy striving to deliver services and products with mazimized cost-efficiency: Structured, process-driven, and stability-focused. Crucial for industries where precision and predictability are non-negotiable.
A typical business is a combination of one or more of these strategy & culture combos, but what is key is to recognize who you are as a business and how near or far the ideal culture type is to your default culture.
Incorporating strategic culture along with your mission, purpose, values and beliefs with your employer brand enables creating an environment where employees, leaders, and teams can thrive—even in the face of change.
What you need is clarity on your dominant type, or you’ll confuse your people—and confused people don’t execute well and I have a light self-assessment worksheet on a free PDF explaining strategic company cultures, if you are interested in it.
Employee Experiences – The Proof in the Employer Brand Pudding
“An employer brand without great employee experiences is just a pretty façade.”
This part really flips the mindset [giving you the asset to go from employer brand to business strategy]
Think of your culture as your blueprint, and your employee experiences as the ‘product reviews.’
If your people don’t feel what your brand says—trust me, the market will find out.
This is specifically true in the age of Glassdoor and LinkedIn rants. Your current and former employee and candidate experiences are the proof of your brand vision.
If your audience cannot agree with your brand vision and tales, you create a lot of mistrust and your audience stops believing you.
When your people feel proud, seen, and purposeful delivering your strategy, they become your marketing, your talent magnet, retention machine and customer success generator.
But if they don’t? No employer brand campaign can save you.
Check out the previous episode “Employer Brand and Leadership – A Strategic Opportunity
The Master Plan – Clarity Before Content
“It all starts with the Master Plan.”
This is where we make it strategic so that we can define what success should look like, what we focus on and what we say no to.
The Master Plan includes:
- A Transformative Employer Branding Mission Statement
- Strategic goals and KPIs
- Clearly defined and segmented talent audiences
- The Modern Work-to-Life Promise™
- Desired perceptions and Key Story Themes.
When you have the Master Plan, you’re no longer guessing what to post.
You’re designing a full-funnel marketing strategy that emotionally, intellectually, and aspirationally connects your people to your mission.
Messaging Through the Talent Journey – The Communication Engine
“The Talent Journey of the Information Era™ is your Magnetic Employer Brand communication framework.”
This is the heart of execution. Think of it as your buyer journey, but for talent – internally and externally.
It has four phases:
- Winning Sustainable Attention
- Growing Employer Awareness and expanding your organic audience
- Building Brand Affinity
- Converting Brand Value to the business – ROI – return on investment
When you [the business] turn your employer branding actions into a communication process and relevant weekly routines, you’ll stop publishing random acts of content and start crafting messages that serve the right purpose in the right phase.
What makes this different is also moving your audience forward on this journey with your company, not pushing out random content with no purpose, meaning or relevance to the target audiences’ painpoints, desires and needs.
You know exactly what to say no to and what to focus on, and the Key Story Themes are endless sources of content ideas [differentiating your company and business from the competition].
You don’t need to guess what to say anymore. You guide with stories that move people—and that’s what I teach in this methodology.
The ROI and Business Impact – Why especially CEOs Should Care About Elevating Employer Brand to Business Strategy?
“The real power of ROI in employer branding? It goes far beyond applications.”
Most leaders ask: ‘What’s the ROI?’
If you’re only measuring it by the number of job applications, you’re missing the big picture.
With this method, ROI can mean multitude of things, depending on your business strategy and what kind of leverage it can benefit from employer branding.
Some examples of the Return on Investment from The Magnetic Employer Brand are:
- Lower turnover and time-to-hire
- Faster productivity leap for new employees
- Greater internal alignment to cultural expectations and expected organizational behavior
- Higher engagement to delivering goals
- Smoother transition during mergers and acquisitions and other significant business transformations
- Improved customer experience and sales impact
Because when your people are aligned, confident, and storytelling with purpose, customers feel it too.
Your brand becomes contagious.
If you want to transform your company into a magnetic employer brand that powers your strategy—not just your hiring—this methodology is your blueprint.
Listen, I’ve only scratched the surface in this what less than an hour episode. When I read the entire book it made 7 hours and 9 minutes of audio.
The full methodology, the templates, the frameworks—they’re all in the book.
And trust me, once you read it, you’ll wonder why you ever treated employer branding as a recruitment campaign.
👉 “Grab your copy of Story-Driven Employer Branding on Amazon or visit storydrivenemployerbrand.com to learn how to turn your employer brand to business strategy connecting the dots between your strategic culture, employee experiences and purpose.
If you found this valuable, share it with another leader in your network. Because this isn’t just about branding. It’s about building the kind of business people want to follow, work in, and buy from.
Thank you for listening!
My name is Susanna Rantanen, and I bring you story-driven branding in a world where attention is no longer a default.
Until next time, keep leading with purpose, stay story-driven and turn your employer brand to business strategy!