What Those Wal*Mart TV Spots Say About Employer Brands

You may have seen some of these "person on the street" spots for Wal*Mart, where a spokesperson asks passersby questions about an employer (which turns out, of course, to be Wal*Mart).

They ask questions such as, "Which employer gives quarterly bonuses, even to part-time workers?" The public, of course, is surprised to learn that the benevolent employer is Wal*Mart. The biggest-box retailer has received a lot of negative press about its employment policies in recent years, and was featured in the best-selling "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich, a book about how difficult it is to live on minimum wage in the U.S.

The lesson these spots teach us about employer brands is that employer brands matter. Wal*Mart is a multi-billion dollar global corporation, but they are known for watching their pennies. The fact that they would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars producing these spots (and, trust me, given the production values, the spots are in that range) says that management in Bentonville is concerned about how they are perceived on Main Street. Surveys done by Edelmann Worldwide corroborate those fears - how an organization treats its employees is one of the top criteria investors use to evaluate equities and one of the top three consumers use when selecting a vendor.

We have seen similar campaigns from McDonald's in the past, for much the same reason. That company even sued to have the slang term "McJob" removed from the Oxford English Dictionary because it was a pejorative that played on the burger chain's name.

So the next time someone in your organization questions whether or not the employer brand is important, share this blog with them. Ask them why large corporations would spend lots of money trying to improve their images as employers if it wasn't important to the bottom line.