S2 | Episode 1: The Power of Employer Brands with Frans Mahieu, Kimberly-Clark
About the Episode
Today we’re going to talk about branding and how it relates to both customer and employee experience.
Branding can be a lot of things to your audiences. It is not only how you communicate visually and through words with your customers and employees, but it encapsulates your mission and values. These values are increasingly important to both consumers and employees as there is an increasing amount of choices available. A key differentiator for many is the experience they have with your brand, whether that is the customer experience or the employee experience. How experience and branding ties together can have critical impacts on a business.
To help me discuss this topic, I welcome Frans Mahieu, Global Marketing Director at Kimberly-Clark and a pioneer in employer branding.
About Frans Mahieu
Frans Mahieu is a Global Marketer with vast experience in Employer Branding and CPG and B2B marketing across the world.
As Global Director Employer Brand for Kimberly-Clark, he is responsible for Kimberly-Clark’s internal and external employer brand and worldwide recruitment marketing. His responsibilities affect the engagement of Kimberly-Clark’s 41,000 employees and the hiring and employer perception of the company’s 200,000 applicants each year.
Frans joined Kimberly-Clark in 2007 as Global Marketing Director for K-C’s Health Care Business Unit. Before joining Kimberly-Clark, Frans spent 17 years as a global marketing executive with Novartis in Switzerland and the U.S. Prior to that he was a marketing manager at Ralston Purina and Ogilvy & Mather Advertising.
Frans earned a MBA from the University of Georgia and a BBA from Nyenrode University. His work has been featured in Forbes, Ad Age and US News and World Report
Transcript
Please note: This transcript was created with the help of automated transcription. Please forgive any errors or inaccuracies in the transcription.
Greg Kihlstrom: My name is Greg Kihlstrom and I'm the host of the agile world podcast. Today we're going to talk about branding and how it relates to both customer and employee experience. Branding can be a lot of things to your audiences does not only how you communicate visually and through words with your customers and employees, but it also encapsulates your mission and values. These values are increasingly important to both consumers and employees as there is an increasing amount of choices available. A key differentiator for many is the experience they have with your brand, whether that's the customer experience or the employee experience, how experience and branding ties together can have critical impacts on the business. To help me discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome Frans Mahieu, global marketing director at Kimberly-Clark and a pioneer in employer branding. First, why don't you tell me a little bit about what you do at Kimberly-Clark?
Frans Mahieu: Hi Greg. I'm the marketing director in HR, the global marketing director. And my responsibility is the employer brand for Kimberly-Clark. And that is as well the brand for our employees as well as externally for potential candidates. We have over 40,000 people working for us and we attract about four to 5,000 new people to our organization every year globally. So it's very important for us that we have a clear brands and a clear culture for our employees and potential a new employees, our company and my job as being to set that strategy. what are we as an employer? And also then executed throughout the worlds and working closely with our recruiting partners. attracting the right talent to our company.
Greg Kihlström: Well, let's start by talking about the connection between branding, marketing and customer experience. So how would you define a great customer experience and what does a brand's role in it?
Frans Mahieu: Well, I think a great customer experience is an experience that delights a customer, not just meet their expectations, but it should exceed their expectations or actually like even thinks they might not expect and say, wow, that was a great experience. And, I think nowadays this is as important as any other marketing things you do. And it should really be part of the whole marketing journey is what is the experience of your customer, throughout the process. And we look at it the same way for our, our employees and for new employees or candidates. What's their experience with Kimberly-Clark and how can we make it the best experience from the first touch point throughout their contact with Kimberly-Clark.
Greg Kihlström: And you've done a lot of great work in employer branding. So how about for the audience? Can you explain the difference between a corporate brand and an employer brand?
Frans Mahieu: Yeah, that's accurate. Very simple. A corporate brand is really who is Kimberly-Clark and why should I buy products from them? An employer brand is who is Kimberly-Clark and why should I work for them or why should I stay working for them? So it's a matter a difference between buying from Kimberly-Clark versus working for Kimberly Clark, but a lot of the same values are whether it's an employer brand or corporate brand.
Greg Kihlström: At Kimberly Clark it sounds like you created its first employer brand ever. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, how that, what that process was like and you know, how you also incorporated, you know, customer experience tied those things together?
Frans Mahieu: Absolutely. I was leading a global marketing and communications function for one of our business units and they tapped me on the shoulder because they felt like we do need to do the same things for our employer brand as how we treat our brands like hookers and Kleenex. It's the same methodology and we need to bring that over to HR and apply those, those same marketing methodologies to the employer brand. So when I started this function, we did not have an employer brand. We did not have an employee value proposition. So we did the same thing you do on the consumer, a regular consumer brands. You look at a consumer insights. And in this case we did research with our current employees. We did research, it's external people, external candidates, and we defined what is the Kimberly-Clark brands, what are our values?
And then also we looked at what this aspirational, where we are not yet, but where we like to be as a brand. And we use those insight to, to develop a brand and then also reframe the brand from a employee perspective. And I think that's where really the customer experience comes into play. So we didn't, we did not use HR talk, but we actually used empathy language. Let me give you this an example. So all the things that we offer to employees and new employees, we put it in a so-called people philosophy and values. And instead of using traditional HR corporate jargon, we made him very friendly for employees and potential employees. So we talk, for example, when you do onboarding and, and people come on, onto the company new, we call that welcome.
All the things we do to help people, think about their career and career movements. like individual development plans, new new opportunities, to move jobs. We call that dream. And when we talk about learning and development, we don't call it learning in the film and we put it in a book at that school grow. How can you grow your development? How can you grow top talent? When we talk about performance management and the values we have, we do not call it performance management. We'd be called wind. So what are the things that make us a leading company? What are the targets that we have as a company and how you as an employee can be part of that winning culture. And maybe we talk about compensation and recognition. We call it celebrate. When we talk about all the work life balance areas that we provide as a company like, fitness classes, days off working from home safety, which is very important in our plans. We call it lift well and then we are very strong in terms of giving back to the community and also in terms of sustainability. And we call that give back.
Greg Kihlström: That's really interesting. Yeah. So, I've heard a recent statistic that says this one was about Starbucks in particular, but you know, saying that a lot of the consumer support for that company is based on how people perceive how they treat their employees. There’s a lot of thought that, that really went into the, the employee experience and the employee brand. Do you see that as a strong connection between how customers perceive your brand and, and is that a, is that part of the value proposition of, of really creating that, that great employee brand?
Frans Mahieu: Yes. There are definitely a couple of touchpoints that, that you look at as a business, right? So if your employees perceive a consistent culture and live it, and it's, this is not something you can create artificially. People really have to be authentic. But when customers see that, and that is, and that's also consistent throughout our touch with your company. For example, with us, when they talk to our sales reps or when they're on the line a bit customer service or just how we treat returns, it's very important that that's consistent. So that's one thing. It's like, what is this company doing? Also, what, what are we doing from a sustainability perspective? Like how are we trying to be a better steward of the planets? It's very important for our consumers.
Our employees are one of our biggest refers of open job. So if there's an open job, if day refer a friend or family to this job, that's very powerful. It means that we actually get better talent because they have already done their own screening. And we rely on referrals from our employees. About 30% of our incoming talent. So it's important from that perspective. And I want to give you one more example of why employer branding is important. We touch about 2 million people at candidates each year. Between over a half million people calling to our career side, we have over 700,000 people following us on linked in, close to a half million on Glassdoor. So these are all people, that's our candidates, potential employees that are touching us even before day apply, right?
Frans Mahieu: So there's 2 million people and now when they apply, we have about 200,000 people globally that apply for jobs and out of those 200,000, only 5,000 people will get a job. The other 195,000 people don't get a job but we want to treat them the same no matter whether they get the job or not, because they will also buy our products. They might go back the next day when they didn't get that job. They might be in the market for Kleenex, for Huggies or for some, or depends for any of our products. And we want to make sure that they feel good about, about our company, even if they didn't get the job. We've looked at our revenues and we've seen that if we negatively affect the perception of a candidates and it affects their consumer behavior, their buying behavior of all our products, that's a lifetime value of about $30,000.
If they believe it’s a good experience and, but we also believe from it from a cultural perspective. And we always like to do the right thing. So we like to treat people right by people. Show an interest in your product. And you do the same thing for consumer brands, right? Even if they might not buy you or you want to make sure that their purse, their interaction with your brand is positive. So we have an a lifetime value of if you look at 30,000 people and if we can affect their behavior better, you know, improve it by 5%, we put a $300 million price tag on, that's over their lifetime. So it's, from a business perspective, it's very important that we do this right. And it's important for every company.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, that's a really interesting statistic. I mean, certainly, you know, I've heard a lot about, you know, the cost of employee turnover is, you know, any, anything up to 30% and sometimes even a little bit more the of someone's salary. But you know, that's a really interesting way of looking at things of the lifetime value of a consumer particular for particularly for the more, you know, consumer facing brands. So that's really a really interesting way of, of looking at things. So, you know,
Frans Mahieu: I think you're touching on a great point that we can do a great job in recruiting new people, but if we can do a better job in making sure that our employees are happy working for Kimberly Clark or for any organization, that's the best thing. And if we have satisfied employees that are doing a great job, we've want to keep them, we don't want to lose them. And, and again, that's why the internal branding is so important to it that our employees see that we are doing the right things and especially when we now look at centennials and millennials is like, it's very important that they feel good about the company. Also what we do in terms of sustainability and community involvement. So we've ought to make, that's why the internal part of employer branding is just as important as the external parts. Trying to recruit new people since I would rather keep all my good people and not lose them to the competition. There's a big cost if you know, when we have to fill new jobs.
Greg Kihlström: Absolutely. There's a lot of focus on employee branding, and employee experience. Certainly, my firm Cravety does a lot of work in the space and you know, we've even started out in the customer experience space and, you know, because of the demand and an employee experience, we're putting a sharp focus on that. Do you see this as something that is this a product of unemployment being low right now? Do you see this, do you see this focus on employee experience going away? You know, is this a fad or do you think it's going to continue, even if the economy changes or, things like that?
Frans Mahieu: Well, it's definitely gotten more attention since there's such a war for talent. In general, the unemployment rate for professionals with a degree is, you know, 2% or less. Now I believe. And then when you look at certain areas like engineering and it, professionals, it is a real war for talent. So we do a lot of things actually specifically for dos areas where when we, opened a new center in Poland for it and in Bangalore, India, and we do completely customized marketing campaigns, branding and attracting people. So at our size, there's a very sharp pinpointed focus too. and we, and I think it will continues and I think people are understanding the value of a retaining employees and and also the costs if you are too slow in filling jobs.
Frans Mahieu: So even if the war for talent becomes less in the future and there are more people, fallible on the job markets, I think it will continue because if you can do a better job in branding, then you can fill open positions quicker. And when you fill an open position in your company, you can do your business, right? Right. So there's a huge cost in, in having open positions, that you cannot fill. So, from a business perspective, it's just the right thing to do. I think it was just a forgotten part of human resources, frankly speaking and it's now being fixed. And you see in a lot of companies, they are hiring people from visit with a true marketing background to help them with employer branding.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And that, that leads me to the next question is, you know, I, I've seen certainly, I mean I come from a mix of backgrounds, but so I come from a marketing background. Several other people I know that are in the first they got their feet wet with customer experience, came from this marketing background as opposed to things that may be more, traditional like customer service or other things. It really seems like, in talking here to employer branding, employee experience, customer experience and marketing, all of these things, not only do they require, you know, experience requires a lot of other skills as well, but it also, it definitely requires a communication. And empathy. I think that there are a lot of communicators needs to have to be successful. Do you see as the customer experience, profession grows and, and the employee experience grows as well. Do you see the, the shift from, you know, marketers changing careers continuing to grow or where, where do you think the, the talent is going to, is going to be coming from? As you know, these are not brand new professions, but they're relatively new.
Frans Mahieu: Yes, when I started this role at Kimberly Clark Durham, it may be companies hired five to 10% of their employee brand advocates or leaders came from marketing. And I would say now it's about 60%. There are companies that are smaller that cannot afford a dedicated team of employer marketers. And they often, they, you know, they will do consulting work. They will hire people to help them with it. So, so people, sole thing that that's, that needs in different ways. Which is, you know definitely, it will continue. You will see more and more marketers are doing employer branding and it's, it's a great, it's a fantastic marketing position because if you really love your company, it's a great thing to be able to sell and market your company every day. And, and that's, that's one thing that I always advise people is like, don't do it for something. You don't feel good about it. You've got to have a passion. And if you don't have a passion that's, it's just the same for product marketing. If you don't have a passion for your brands and products you are not going to be that successful.
Greg Kihlström: So why, why do you think a lot of companies struggle to provide great experience? Whether it's customer or employee? You know, what are some of the things that get in the way?
Frans Mahieu: Yeah, I think they don't look at it from a customer or employee perspective. That's not their first perspective. And so it's sometimes comes as an afterthought. We map out a customer experience for all our consumer brands as well as for our employee brand. So for example, on the bookies, we look at a potential customer even before the mother is pregnant and then they start thinking about having a baby. It's like how can we touch them when they know they're going to have a baby? We help them with devices to like, you know, tools like come up with baby names. We help them with planning the baby shower. So versatile, trying to touch that consumer even before they need our products. And then of course, throughout a process, we helped with our product, but hopefully they, and we do a lot of this now digital and you start building a consumer experience and relationship throughout a process.
And that's why you really have to get into the skin of the consumer to understand that we do the same from a employee a branding perspective or potential for candidate experience. We recently looked at that experience and what we found out is that we did not, we had improvements areas for timely communication with potential candidates. we also discomfort or we knew that the, the day of interview is a very important, it's not just a, it's, it's a very emotional day for that candidate also. So we looked at things, what can we improve to make that that day that they come into your office and, or a vendor on a video and doing interviews to make that as positive as possible. And then just simple things in following up at our candidates as quickly as possible and in a very professional way and consistently.
So we want our candidate experience awards among all the other companies here in, in, this was in North America. But based on looking at those touch points where we can make a difference and improvements and we've really made, made those improvements. So it's a process to look at the customer experience.
Greg Kihlström: What are some of the internal hurdles? Working with organizations, when you do just marketing, you're working with the marketing team. If you're working on only technology, you know, generally you're working with it or something like that. Experience is one of those things that it seems to touch a lot of departments, divisions, so on and so forth. And internally, how do you kind of get around, nobody owns the entire, you know, every single touch point or every single part of the touch point in, in experience. How do you get around some of those organizational, let's call them silos?
Frans Mahieu: Yeah. I think, and then that starts really at the top. When we did our work, we did a tremendous amount of work and in terms of stakeholder management, so we made sure that the business, not just HR and not just our HR leaders, but our business unit leaders, our general managers bald into the, the concept also that they bought into what our people strategy is that they understood why it's so important and then providing them and also the employees with tools to, to understand what the culture is all about. We, for example, we introduced new company behaviors that are most important. And we introduced them by means of engaging tools. So, not just, hey, these are our new behaviors. We provided workshops. We provide interactive digital tools that were fun, where they could fill in like, Hey, this behavior, this is how I live those behaviors.
So, by doing these things, people start seeing this is the culture and this is how we're living this culture. And then it becomes much more consistent throughout, the company. And we've been very successful as a global company in launching these new cultural aspects throughout the world. And that's, that's one of the nice things to see too. And you see things that you're creating centrally but in coordination regions and then you see it in different languages and with their own Flay for popping up throughout Asia, throughout Latin America. And that's the same satisfaction you see when you create a brand that you see take off throughout the worlds. And he's like, wow, that's cool stuff.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, definitely. And I think that's what I find so satisfying about employee experience and customer experience. But you know, particularly employee experience is, you know, people work so hard, they work every day and you know, you're making their lives a little bit better. It's not always, you know, saving the world, but it is, if you can make someone's eight-hour job more enjoyable and, and more beneficial to them and stuff like that, it's some good work. So I, I think that's it's a beneficial practice.
Frans Mahieu: Yeah, I totally agree. I'd like better that person is working in an office and when they leave at whatever time, six o'clock they get into their car or whether they are working from home and are logging off for the day, you want to make sure that an employee feels like they made an impact. They feel good about themselves, that they are respected and it's very important. And, and managers play a key role in that too. And some they are the leaders and that they provide a feedback to employees and supports. So that's, they truly feel that they are respected and are bringing value to the organization. So you have on, you know, you, you spend a little time at work, you want to make sure you feel good about that. And if you're not feeling good about it, you probably should be looking for another job.
Greg Kihlström: Well, one last question before we wrap up here. With marketing, customer experience, employee experience, continuing to involve, what's your advice for someone that wants to keep up and, and really, you know, figure out what area they'd like to go into or even just, you know, learn more if they're, if they're getting started?
Frans Mahieu: Well a couple of things, like I said earlier, you like, you have to, you have to love what you do or do what you love, right? And so I think you always need to look at the categories that, that you like determining who you're going to work for us. And I think you need to have passion in whatever you do as a marketer, especially since as a marketer, you are a leader. You're leading your company. You might be leading and a research and development group. You might be leading a sales force. I mean you are presenting your new plans to a large sales force. You've got to be passionate about that. If you don't, if you are not the champion of your brand, people will feel that immediately. So passion is, is very important in my mind. In terms of staying relevant, I like to look at all the categories and get ideas from other categories.
Frans Mahieu: I like to look at trends. For example, we introduced an engagement vehicle with the new candidates that is a Buzzfeed quiz that helps them determine what their original thinking style is. And it's a fun quiz and people really like it, but it was just, it was more engaging than other quizzes that we've seen. It's just an example of looking at other categories. And, and then I think the other thing is, is you have to immerse yourself in your target markets. I look at centennials and millennials. I'm lucky that I like craft breweries. I like indie rock, so I'm often right with my target audience, but it helps me better understand, that target audience. Since I also follow the same social media vehicles, I have the same interest as them. And so this gives me good insight is how the different target audiences communicates.
Frans Mahieu: And especially now with all the new digital platforms, you’ve got to stay relevant and understand how you can best communicate. So those are just some of the things that I think are important, and just be eager to learn, learn new things, new skills, and there's so much online learning available now, free online learning. So do that and you know, and thinks like you guys do like, you know the books you write about marketing and customer experiences, read them and pick up, pick up a couple of good ideas and then apply them to your job.
Greg Kihlström: Wonderful. I'd like to thank Frans Mahieu, Global Marketing Director at Kimberly-Clark for joining the show.