MARS

What makes your campaigns instantly recognizable as belonging to your brand? When your employees talk about your brand online, do you know how and where? The Employer Brand Index helps identify what is being said, on what platforms, what the sentiment is, and most importantly, what you can do about it.

Kirsten Bethmann is Global Employer Reputation Lead for Mars, Incorporated. Mars has set an inspiring goal for itself: to become one of the most attractive employers in the world by 2025. Achieving this goal, Bethmann believes, requires a renewed focus on brand consistency.

And as Bethmann reminds us, “You cannot just use your consumer brands to bring your employer brand to life. M&M’S are loved for the great M&M’S characters, but that doesn’t mean we work with M&M’S characters in the real world!” Mars needed a unified employer brand distinct from its big-name confectionery labels.

Establishing a Shared Vision

A clear employee value proposition is the cornerstone of a consistent employer brand. For Mars, that EVP is built on three pillars: people, purpose, and development. The employer brand team took this EVP development a step further by adapting the Mars statement of purpose (“The world we want tomorrow starts with how you do business today”) into a tagline: “Your tomorrow starts today,” which personalizes and transforms the Mars mission into a call to action for its employees.

Standardizing Brand Guidelines

Companies that operate in multiple markets must walk a fine line between enforcing brand guidelines and empowering markets to represent themselves authentically. Mars began this work by creating a central platform for its guidelines, a “one-stop-shop” for learning how to use color, messaging, and more.

Leaving Room for Personalization

Within these brand guidelines, employer brand teams in each of Mars’ markets have the flexibility to make campaigns their own. Brand guidelines dictate certain standards for social media messaging, but Mars’ employer brand leaders recognize that messaging from sales employees may sound different from engineering’s messaging. Bethmann and her team welcome those differences.

Maintaining this delicate balance between unity and personalization has been critical to growing Mars’ reputation as an exceptional place to work. “Mars is a huge, global, international company that really takes good care of their people,” Bethmann says. In four years, she hopes, candidates all over the world will know that too.

To follow Kirsten Bethmann’s work in employer brand, connect with her on LinkedIn. For help measuring your employer brand, get in touch with us.