Employer brand trust and affect: linking brand personality to employer brand attractiveness

Employer brand trust and affect:linking brand personality to

employer brand attractivenessLinn Viktoria Rampl and Peter Kenning

Corporate Management & Economics, Zeppelin University,Friedrichshafen, Germany

Abstract

Purpose – The importance of employer branding to attract talent in organizations is increasingrapidly. Brand personality traits, particularly, have been shown to explain considerable variance inemployer brand attractiveness. Despite such awareness, little is known about the underlying processesof this effect. The purpose of the authors is to close the research gap by drawing on a consumer brandmodel of brand affect and trust as a means of explaining employer brand attractiveness.

Design/methodology/approach – Students interested in working in the consultancy industrycompleted a survey designed to evaluate consultancy employer brands. Established scales for brandpersonality, trust, and affect, and employer brand attractiveness were used to test the conceptualmodel.

Findings – The results indicate that employer brand trust and affect are both influenced by thebrand personality trait sincerity. Further, employer brand affect was positively affected by the traitsexcitement and sophistication, while negatively affected by ruggedness. Together, employer brandaffect and trust explain 71 per cent of the variance in employer brand attractiveness.

Research limitations/implications – While the results show the importance of branding anorganization as a sincere, exciting, and sophisticated employer, future research is needed to identifyadequate marketing tools to achieve this goal, also in other industries besides the one investigated here.

Originality/value – This study is the first to apply a model that includes brand personality, trust,and affect to employer branding. By doing so, the variance explained in employer brand attractivenesscould be increased substantially.

Keywords Trust, Branding, Brand personality, Employee, Affect, Employer brand

Paper type Research paper

IntroductionFor decades, branding activities targeting potential customers and consumers havebeen core topics in marketing. Recently, however, the scope of marketing has

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The authors would like to thank Fabiola Gerpott and Inga Wobker for their very helpfulcomments and suggestions in developing earlier versions of the paper. Also, they thank IsabellWelpe and Christian Opitz for their comments on designing the questionnaire and for theirsupport – together with Isabella Geis – in collecting the data. The authors appreciate thecomments of the reviewers and participants of the European Marketing Academy Conference(EMAC, 2012) as well as the Workshop on Trust within and between Organizations (2012) of theEuropean Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) on earlier versions of thepaper. The authors would like to thank the Editor in Chief, Nick Lee, the Associate Editor, IanLings, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their comments to improve the paper. Finally,they would like to thank Deborah C. Nester for proofreading.

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Received 29 February 2012Revised 13 July 2012Accepted 25 July 2012

European Journal of MarketingVol. 48 No. 1/2, 2014pp. 218-236q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0309-0566DOI 10.1108/EJM-02-2012-0113

broadened to encompass other stakeholder groups such as suppliers, shareholders, thelocal community and, of particular note, employees (e.g. Hult, 2011; Maignan et al.,2005). Effectively branding an organisation as a potential or current employer, forinstance, helps a company compete in the “war for talent” (Axelrod et al., 2001;Chambers et al., 1998) by attracting and retaining talented personnel, which in turn isessential for delivering service quality to the customer. Labour market shortages,global competition for personnel, as well as employees’ willingness to change jobsmore often, continually intensify the competition for qualified talent to best serve thecustomer (Beechler and Woodward, 2009; Cable and Turban, 2003; OECD, 2006; ascited by Rampl et al., 2011).

Against this background, scholars, particularly during the last decade, have begunto investigate whether concepts and theories from consumer brand research are alsoapplicable to attracting and retaining employees. Previous employer branding researchconducted in marketing (Ambler and Barrow, 1996; Moroko and Uncles, 2009; Wildenet al., 2010), human resources (Edwards, 2010; Martin et al., 2011), (neuro-) psychology(Cable and Turban, 2003; Rampl et al., 2011), as well as general management (Lievenset al., 2007) indicate the increasingly broad relevance of this topic in the scientificcommunity. The concept of employer branding addresses the proactive managementof an organisation’s image as an employer, as perceived by current and potentialemployees, and, to a lesser degree, by the public (compare Rampl et al., 2011). Researchin this area suggests that employer brand attractiveness can be explained not onlythrough functional attributes such as compensation or advancement opportunities, butalso through brand personality traits (Lievens, 2007; Lievens and Highhouse, 2003).Brand personality traits, defined as a “set of human characteristics associated with abrand” (Aaker, 1997, p. 347), include sincerity, excitement, sophistication, ruggedness,and competence. They are recognised as “an efficient way to distinguish a brand fromits competitors at the symbolic level” (Sung and Kim, 2010, p. 640).

Although the application of personality concepts to brands is not unquestioned(Yoon et al., 2006), brand personality traits have been effectively used to explainresponses revealing considerable variance in employer brand attractiveness (Lievens,2007; Lievens and Highhouse, 2003). Applying social-identity theory, that indicatespotential for organisational membership to serve as part of a person’s social identity orself-concept, it becomes evident that personality concepts may be specificallyappropriate in an employment context. The suitability of a particular employer’s brandpersonality trait can easily be verified for consistency with a person’s own (desired)self-concept (Highhouse et al., 2007). Further, we argue that an employer brand that isassociated with a potential or current work environment in which colleagues,supervisors, or clients are central to everyday work life may be especially suitable forbeing characterised through personality traits. Because the work environment is, ingreat part, a product of the people associated with it, employees are central to theemployer brand image. Clients of the organisation, as well, are potentially allied withthat image. Consequently, personality traits may be more easily identified, and morereadily associated with an employer brand, by linking the personality traits of theemployees and clients to the employer brand image (see also Wentzel, 2009).

Notwithstanding these first findings and the fit of the brand personality concept toemployer brands, the underlying mechanisms leading to increased employer brandattractiveness are still unknown. However, recent consumer brand research

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investigating the effects of brand personality on brand trust and on brand affect mayprovide a seminal framework. Sung and Kim (2010), building on the model of brandtrust and brand affect from Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001, 2002), found that brandpersonality traits affect consumer brand trust as well as affect. Though this naturallyposes the question of whether the effects shown for consumer brands exist also foremployer brands, little is known about effects of branding across distinct targetgroups, such as consumers and potential employees. Employer brand personalityresearch suggests, however, that applying concepts from consumer branding to anemployment context is useful for increasing the variance explained in employer brandattractiveness (Lievens, 2007; Lievens and Highhouse, 2003). This conclusion supportsa view that, as is true of consumer brands, brand personality traits are related toemployer brand trust and employer brand affect, and the latter two may predictemployer brand attractiveness. Such findings, if proved true, could have directimplications not only for creating a theoretical model of employer brand attractiveness,but also for development in managerial practice. If employer brand affect and trust arerelated to brand personality traits, it would be useful to brand an employer throughpersons who are employed there, or who have an ownership stake in the company –giving the employer brand “a face” and thereby creating positive affect and trusttowards the organisation.

Against this background, our study aims to apply the consumer brand modelproposed by Sung and Kim (2010) to employer brands. Specifically, we test whetherbrand personality traits affect employer brand trust as well as employer brand affect,and whether the latter two in turn affect employer brand attractiveness for potentialemployees. Additionally, following recommendations of Keller and Lehmann (2006),we examine whether brand personality traits affect dependent variables (employerbrand trust and affect) differently.

Literature review and hypothesis developmentBrand personality and employer brandingConsumer research has had a long tradition of using personality traits to describeintangible aspects of brand image (Keller and Lehmann, 2006). Therefore, the recentapplication of human behavioural characteristics to employer brands is not surprising.From a theoretical perspective, the employer may function as a central factor in themake-up of an employee’s social-identity or self-concept. Highhouse et al. (2007),drawing on social-identity theory, could show social-identity consciousness(operationalized as concern for social adjustment and value expression) may be abasis for understanding the effects of brand personality on employer brandattractiveness. Therefore, the brand personality of a potential employer brand mayfunction as an agent through which a person communicates status as compared toothers (social adjustment), as well as conveying ethical values and moral standards(value expression).

A number of scholars have investigated the differential effects of brand personalityon employer brand attractiveness. Lievens and Highhouse (2003) were the first to applythe brand personality concept to an employer branding context. Investigating both thepotential applicants for a banking position and the bank employees as well, they wereable to establish that a slightly modified version of the brand personality traitsproposed by Aaker (1997) – most specifically innovativeness, competence, and

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prestige – could explain incremental variance over functional job characteristics, suchas compensation or advancement opportunities, and simplified differentiation betweendifferent bank employer brands. Several additional studies have confirmed theseresults in the military context as well. In these studies, however, the effects of differentcharacteristics of brand personality varied slightly in the military context, implyinggreater relevance of excitement, but also of cheerfulness and prestige (Lievens et al.,2005). Additionally, research indicates the greater importance of a sincere andcompetent brand personality for actual applicants and employees (Lievens, 2007), andthat brand personality traits best predict employees’ identification with the militaryemployer brand (Lievens et al., 2007). In line with the work of Lievens’s research teams,also Davies and colleagues have integrated brand personality in employer brandingresearch. Based on the corporate character scale developed by Davies et al. (2004),Davies (2008) could show that agreeableness, specifically, and ruthlessness, to someextent, are relevant characteristics for the work satisfaction and affinity of managers indifferent industries, while chicness and enterprise (e.g. being exciting and daring)predict loyalty. Competence was not identified to be relevant for employer brandattractiveness. Beyond applying brand personality specifically to an employerbranding context, brand personality has also been closely linked to general corporatereputation, namely when “reputation is assessed in terms of relevant stakeholders’perceptions or impression of the organisation rather than any financial figure orperformance” (Chun, 2005, p. 93). Here it has been shown that the corporate brandpersonality perceptions are suitable for measuring corporate reputations from theviewpoint not only of costumers but also of employees (e.g. Chun, 2005; Chun andDavies, 2006; Davies et al., 2001; Davies et al., 2010).

These first research results imply the applicability of the brand personality conceptin an employment context. However, little is known about the relationship of brandpersonality to relevant variables such as employer brand affect and trust, althoughconsumer research suggests that aspects of brand personality increase not solelyemotions (e.g. Biel, 2000) but also trust (e.g. Fournier, 1998; Louis and Lombart, 2010)towards a brand. This argumentation is in line with research which has distinguisheddifferent forms of customer brand relationships. In general, brand relationships can beconsidered to be multidimensional, and cover besides cognitive elements alsoemotional or relational dimensions. In their recent review Louis and Lombart (2010)show that brand personality perceptions affect cognitive aspects, such as the perceivedbrand quality (Ramaseshan and Tsao, 2007), can have relational consequences, such aspurchase intentions (Ambroise, 2006) or trust (see also Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001),as well as emotional effects, such as affecting brand attachment (see also Malar et al.,2011).

These findings may be used to build a theoretical model and, potentially, to enlargethe variance explained in employer brand attractiveness – the latter being a centralvariable for successful employer branding. This study, then, draws on the existingbrand personality model – brand affect and trust for consumer brands – to establishour conceptual model for employer brands.

A model of brand personality, brand trust and brand affectIn their recent study, drawing on the work of Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001, 2002),Sung and Kim (2010) propose a model in which brand personality traits predict


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consumer brand affect and trust – and in turn, loyalty. Brand affect, as applied toconsumers (or here to current or potential employees) is defined as “a brand’s potentialto elicit a positive emotional response” (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001, p. 82).Emotional responses have crucial importance in decision making and in guidingbehaviour in general (e.g. Bechara and Damasio, 2005; Naqvi et al., 2006), but also,specifically, for brand choice (e.g. Deppe et al., 2005; Pawle and Cooper, 2006),commitment (e.g. Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2002), or loyalty (e.g. Evanschitzky et al.,2006). First results indicate, that emotions are also relevant in employer brand decisionmaking on a physiological level (Rampl et al., 2011).

Brand trust is understood as the willingness of a customer to have confidence in thereliability and honesty of a specific brand (Moorman et al., 1993; Morgan and Hunt,1994). Consequently, “confident expectations and risk are critical components of adefinition of [brand] trust” (Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Aleman, 2005, p. 188).Trust does not only differ between people, but varies also “within a person and acrossrelationships” (Schoorman et al., 2007, p. 344). Therefore, organisations are able toproactively affect brand trust of consumers (and likewise also of potential and currentemployees). Trust in organisations differ from trust between people, as the former alsocovers “the organisation’s institutionalised processes and principles” (Searle et al.,2011, p. 1070). Similar to brand affect, brand trust is also recognised as fundamental forconsumer behaviour such as brand purchase behaviour (e.g. Luk and Yip, 2008),loyalty (e.g. Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001; Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Aleman,2001), and brand equity in general (e.g. Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Aleman, 2005).

For aggregated data of different consumer brands, Sung and Kim (2010) show thatall personality traits from their study are related to both brand affect and trust, thoughthe effects differ with respect to their magnitude. While brand affect was more stronglyaffected by excitement and sophistication, sincerity and ruggedness had a greatereffect on brand trust. Competence affected both constructs equally. In turn, brandaffect was recognised as a significantly stronger predictor of brand loyalty than brandtrust.

Hypothesis developmentAgainst the research highlighted previously, and based on Sung and Kim (2010) andChaudhuri and Holbrook (2001, 2002), we propose a model for employer brandpersonality, employer brand affect and trust, and – as a central outcome – employerbrand attractiveness. Employer brand attractiveness for potential applicants,understood as the intent to apply for and accept potential offers from a particularemployer, is one core measure of employer branding success (e.g. Cable and Turban,2003), and will therefore function as the major dependent variable. From thisframework, we establish our hypotheses for the specific paths between these fourconstructs, namely brand personality, brand affect, brand trust and employer brandattractiveness.

Trust is generally understood as belief in the sincerity of the second party(Moorman et al., 1993). Honesty and reliability have long been defined as core aspectsof trust (Rotter, 1967). Because honesty and reliability are attributes of the personalitytrait sincerity (Aaker, 1997), we conclude that organisational sincerity is related toemployer brand trust. The more practical attribute of competence relates to acompany’s ability to run the day-to-day business reliably and successfully. In their

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model of organisational trust, Mayer et al. (1995) name the ability of an organisation,which they relate closely to similar constructs such as expertness and competence, as acentral factor for building trust in an organisation. Therefore, we postulate thatsincerity also affects employer brand trust. Although trust may also have affectivecomponents ( Johnson and Grayson, 2005; Kenning, 2008), we argue that employerbrand affect is less cognitively driven than trust (Sung and Kim, 2010), and thatcognitive personality traits such as competence and sincerity are more strongly relatedto employer brand trust than to brand affect. Therefore, we derive the followinghypothesis:

H1. The brand personality traits sincerity and competence have a stronger effecton employer brand trust than on employer brand affect.

With regard to brand affect, we propose analogously to Sung and Kim (2010), thatbrand personality dimensions excitement, sophistication, and ruggedness are moreclosely related to affect than to brand trust. First, excitement can be understood as adimension of arousal, which is a core facet of human emotion and affect (e.g. Holbrookand Batra, 1987; Russell et al., 1989). Second, brands with a high sophistication level –with high prestige and with associations to “upper-class” lifestyles – are considered toprovide employees with higher status. Previous research suggests that organizationalprestige is an antecedent of employees’ affective organizational commitment(e.g. Carmeli, 2005). External prestige drives organizational identification, in which“the affective component (feelings of pride in being part of the organization or feelingacknowledged in it) is important” (Smidts et al., 2001, p. 1051). It is reasonable toconclude that an employer brand with a high sophistication level is associated withpositive employer brand affect. Third, ruggedness, as well, is a construct closelyrelated to emotions. For instance, Jakupcak et al. (2003) as cited by Sung and Kim(2010) found masculinity, which is an essential part of the ruggedness dimension, to beclosely related to emotions. Based on these findings we hypothesize:

H2. The brand personality traits excitement, sophistication, and ruggedness havea stronger effect on employer brand affect than on employer brand trust.

Brand trust, as well as brand affect, have been shown to positively influence brandperformance measures (e.g. loyalty) in consumer marketing, with a greater effect ofbrand affect than brand trust (Sung and Kim, 2010). Additionally, as trust was found toincrease commitment and motivation of employees already working for a company(Heavey et al., 2011), we assume that a high level of brand trust also raises themotivation to work for an employer. Therefore, we propose the following hypothesesfor employer brands:

H3. Employer brand affect is positively related to the employer’s brandattractiveness for potential employees.

H4. Employer brand trust is positively related to the employer’s brandattractiveness for potential employees

H5. Employer brand affect has a stronger effect on employer’s brandattractiveness for potential employees than brand trust.


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MethodParticipants and procedureTo test our hypotheses, we conducted an online survey with participants recruitedfrom the student populations of German universities, because students are one of themain targets for recruitment activities (Berthon et al., 2005). In total, 927 studentsstarted the online survey. Excluding those participants who did not completely finishthe survey, who did not pass a control question (controlled for answering all questionswith respect to only one specific employer brand), and whose response time differedmore than two standard deviations from the arithmetic mean, the final sample covered310 students with an average age of 24.39 (SD ¼ 3.43), including 204 males (seeGerpott et al., 2012a, b). Participants rated different aspects of one individually namedconsultancy employer brand. To achieve heterogeneity with respect to the employerbrand attractiveness across the brands evaluated by the participants, each participantwas randomized to answer the questionnaire with respect to either their most preferredconsultancy employer brand, or a consultancy employer brand that was not theirpreferred employer but was still attractive, or the consultancy employer brand theywould at least like to work for. Based on the one, individually chosen brand, the dataacross all participants covered a broad range of different organisations, specifically, 56consultancies. We focused on consultancies as employers because, first, inknowledge-intensive professional services such as consultancies, personnel is thekey driver of organisational success (Lusch et al., 2007), and because, second, the jobsof one particular area of consulting – management consulting – are very similar andreadily comparable. We assume that, similar to conditions of comparable products, theemployer brand is of particular importance for comparable jobs (Backhaus and Tikoo,2004; for further details see Rampl et al., 2011).

MeasuresIn order to identify the brand personality traits that are applicable for a consultancy asan employer, we applied a method previously used by Lievens and Highhouse (2003)and Lievens et al. (2005) to identify personality traits applicable to banks and militaryemployer brands. This approach identifies brand personality traits that may not havebeen suitable for describing the employer brand personality of a consultancy, and thatmay potentially result in an increase in missing values or dropouts. If a consultancyemployer brand cannot be described with traits such as “small-town” or “sentimental”,the degree to which the brand is either one or the other cannot be evaluated. Therefore,we conducted a pre-test of 50 employees from the consultancy industry (39 male, age:M ¼ 30.08, SD ¼ 6.11; work experience: M ¼ 4.30 years, SD ¼ 4.58), who rated theextent to which the 42 personality traits (Aaker, 1997) were descriptive for aconsultancy’s personality (1 ¼ not at all descriptive, 5 ¼ extremely descriptive). In linewith Lievens et al. (2005) for each of the five brand personality factors – sincerity,excitement, sophistication, ruggedness, and competence – the five attributes thatyielded the highest descriptiveness rating (and were not below an average score of 3)were included in our measure of consultancy employer brand personality.

Brand trust and brand affect were measured with items adopted for employerbrands from Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001) and Brakus et al. (2009). Specifically, thetrust scale consisted of four items (see Table I for the final items used for analyses), andthe affect scale comprised three items from Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001), as well as

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deviations, standardizedfactor loadings,

Cronbach’s alpha andAVE for the final factors


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three items from Brakus et al. (2009). Employer brand attractiveness was measuredusing four recruitment questions adopted from Taylor and Bergmann (1987). Allconstructs were measured using seven-point Likert scales (1 ¼ strongly disagree,7 ¼ strongly agree).

ResultsWe used structural equation modelling to estimate our path coefficients, applying themaximum-likelihood estimation using AMOS 18. The fit of our initial model(x 2 ¼ 2532.72, df ¼ 643, p # 0.001, x 2/df ¼ 3.94, IFI ¼ 0.85, TLI ¼ 0.84, CFI ¼ 0.85,RMSEA ¼ 0.10) was improved by using modification indices to pinpoint and excludeitems of misfit, resulting in a final model with three items per scale (see Table I) with anadequate fit (x 2 ¼ 634.62, df ¼ 230, p # 0.001, x 2/df ¼ 2.75, IFI ¼ 0.94, TLI ¼ 0.93,CFI ¼ 0.94, RMSEA ¼ 0.07), as well as acceptable reliability scores (Cronbach’s alphascores ranging from 0.75 to 0.96). Additionally, discriminant validity was given, becauseall average variance explained (AVE) scores were above the suggested threshold of 0.50(specifically ranging from 0.58 to .89), and because each respective AVE score wasgreater than the corresponding squared correlations (ranging from 0.01 to 0.71).

Our results (see Figure 1) show that sincerity had a significant effect on brand affect(b ¼ 0.44, p# 0.001) as well as brand trust (b ¼ 0.64, p# 0.001). Following Sung andKim (2010), we compared the x 2-statistic between the unconstrained model (the pathcoefficients were freed to estimate) and the respective constrained model (the two pathcoefficients of interest were fixed to be the same), to test for the significance ofdifference between the two path coefficients. Supporting H1a (see Table II), the effectfor brand trust was significantly greater than the one for brand affect (Dx 2 ¼ 4.58,p # 0:05). The effect of excitement was only significant for brand affect (b ¼ 0.36,p # 0:001) and, supporting H2a, significantly greater than the effect for brand trust(Dx 2 ¼ 14.36, p # 0.001). However, the latter effect tended towards significanceaffecting brand trust slightly (b ¼ 0.09, p ¼ 0.107). For sophistication, there was no

Figure 1.Conceptual model andpath coefficients

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effect on brand trust (b ¼ 0.01, p ¼ 0.86), but a significant result for brand affect(b ¼ 0.14, p # 0.05) was found. However, the difference between the two pathcoefficients turned out not to be significant (Dx 2 ¼ 2.34, p ¼ 0.126), leading to therejection of H2b. For ruggedness, a small significant negative effect on brand affect(b ¼ 20.09, p # 0.10), but no significant effect on brand trust (b ¼ 0.06, p ¼ 0.249),was identified. In line with H2c, the x 2-difference test revealed that this difference wassignificant (Dx 2 ¼ 4.61, p# 0.05). Competence was neither a significant antecedent ofbrand trust (b ¼ 0.09, p ¼ 0.12) nor of brand affect (b ¼ 0.04, p ¼ 0.54); therefore, H1bcould not be supported.

In line with H3 to H5, brand affect (b ¼ 0.72, p # 0.001) as well as brand trust(b ¼ 0.21, p # 0.01) had a statistically significant influence on potential employees’employer brand attractiveness, with the effect of brand affect being significantly greaterthan the one of brand trust (Dx 2 ¼ 33.87, p #0.001). Brand affect and trust togetherexplained 71 per cent of the variance of the ultimate dependent construct employer brandattractiveness, indicating a very good predictive power of the model (Cohen, 1988).

DiscussionThe objective of this study was to expand employer brand theory by drawing onprevious results of employer brand and consumer brand research. Applying aconsumer brand model from Sung and Kim (2010), this study investigated the chaineffect of brand personality traits as antecedents of employer brand affect and trust, andthe effect of the latter two on employer brand attractiveness of potential applicants.The presented findings provide empirical support for a significant link between severalbrand personality traits and employer brand affect, as well as employer brand trust.Therefore, support is provided for the conclusion that what holds for consumer brandsmay also be true for employer brands, namely, that certain brand personality traits areassociated with employer brand trust as well as employer brand affect and, in turn,with variables central for marketing success (Sung and Kim, 2010), here employerbrand attractiveness.

Specifically and as hypothesised, our results indicate a greater effect of sincerity onbrand trust than brand affect. However, because sincerity affects both variables,evidence is provided that sincerity may also be relevant for emotions associated with aparticular employer brand. This may be due to an effect of feeling secure when dealingwith a sincere employer organisation.

No. Hypothesis Result

H1a Sincerity ! employer brand trust is stronger than on employer brand affect S (þ )

H1b Competence ! employer brand trust is stronger than on employer brand affect RH2a Excitement ! employer brand affect is stronger than on employer brand trust S (þ )

H2b Sophistication ! employer brand affect is stronger than on employer brand trust RH2c Ruggedness ! employer brand affect is stronger than on employer brand trust S ( – )

H3 Employer brand affect ! employer brand attractiveness S (þ )

H4 Employer brand trust ! employer brand attractiveness S (þ )

H5 Employer brand affect has a stronger effect on employer brand attractiveness thanemployer brand trust S (þ )

Notes: S ¼ supported, R ¼ refuted; (+) positive effect, ( – ) negative effectTable II.

Hypotheses testing


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Excitement and ruggedness both had, as predicted, a greater effect on brand affectthan on brand trust. As the brand personality trait of excitement may be closely relatedto arousal, it is a central aspect often designated with emotions and affect (Russell et al.,1989). Excitement may be particularly useful for eliciting emotions associated with aspecific employer brand. Surprisingly, the effect of ruggedness was negative,indicating lower levels of positive brand affect with increased ruggedness perceptions.This result may be specific for employer brands, because ruggedness, covering traitssuch as “rugged”, “tough”, and “masculine”, may indicate an organisation with muchcompetition, tough aftermaths for mistakes, and potentially an overall rather roughtone. While a rugged consumer brand, such as, for example, Marlboro or Timberland,may be associated with ruggedness by simply using or wearing its products, a ruggedemployer brand may imply rather tough consequences for an employee’s everydaywork life, resulting in less positive affect. Although the effect size for ruggedness wasrather small and has to be interpreted with caution, these results are in line with thosefrom Lievens (2007) regarding the army’s attractiveness for actual applicants.

Despite the result that sophistication serves, as predicted, as a significantantecedent of brand affect, the difference from brand trust was not significant.However, a sophisticated “upper-class” and “charming” employer brand may result inpositive affect. In line with earlier research indicating the importance of a prestigiousemployer brand to create employer brand attractiveness for potential or actualapplicants (Lievens, 2007) or employee loyalty (Davies, 2008), the perception of asophisticated employer brand may provoke a feeling of pride in organisationalmembership, which has previously been identified as a significant predictor of jobpursuit intentions (Cable and Turban, 2003).

Surprisingly, the brand personality trait of competence was not identified as asignificant predictor of either brand affect or brand trust. These results are in line withresults from Davies (2008), who could show that competence was not retained in hismodel explaining employer brand attractiveness; however, this is contrary to thestudies of Lievens (2007), Lievens and Highhouse (2003), and Lievens et al. (2007), inwhich competence was identified as a significant antecedent. Potentially, the effect ofcompetence is specific to the industry and functions investigated. The weak influencein this study may be due to the fact that the investigated organisations, namelyconsultancies, are commonly characterised by high proficiency (Fink and Knoblach,2011). Therefore, this personality trait may not display a sufficient amount of variancegiven the present study’s industry focus to co-vary with perceived competence. This isalso reflected in the mean scores of the items of the competence scale, which were,contrary to the other scales, not positioned around the centre of the scale, but weremore left-skewed.

Finally, by explaining 71 per cent of its variance, our results indicate that bothemployer brand affect, as well as trust, are central for employer brand attractiveness.As a consequence, this study is able to increase the variance explained in employerbrand attractiveness, because previous studies have been able to explain about 40 percent of the variance in employer brand attractiveness (e.g. Lievens et al., 2005).

Theoretical and managerial implicationsThese study findings present several implications. Theorizing of employer brandscould be strengthened through integrating, in addition to the research already

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developed, employer brand affect as well as trust as central variables. By adding thesetwo aspects, more variance of employer brand attractiveness can be explained. From atheoretical perspective, employer brand attractiveness for potential applicants seemsto be mainly driven through employer brand affect and, though to a lesser extent,through employer brand trust. Likewise this study supported and expanded existingresults with respect to brand personality for employer brand attractiveness. Therefore,we propose the following two theoretical conclusions from this study:

(1) Applying consumer brand constructs (brand personality) and consumer brandmodels (brand personality ! brand affect and trust) has been shown to beuseful to explain variance in employer brand attractiveness. This suggests thatconstructs and models from consumer branding may also be applicable to anemployment context, supporting the notion that branding techniques maypotentially be “mutatis mutandis” applicable (Ambler and Barrow, 1996, p. 187).

(2) Integrating, besides brand personality and functional attributes (e.g. payment,advancement opportunities), also employer brand affect and trust in employerbrand models increases the variance explained in employer brandattractiveness.

Likewise practical implications for employer brand managers could be drawn, such asfocussing on building up a trustworthy but predominantly an affectionate employerbrand to attract talent. Particularly, the latter aspect may be constantly neglected incurrent employer brand management, since employment advertisements usually coverparticularly functional descriptions of the job itself. Understanding that employerbrand management could also cover establishing an own brand personality asemployer to generate affect and trust may help to guide practitioners to successfulemployer brand management. For instance, practitioner surveys such as the “GreatPlace to Work” studies (www.greatplacetowork.de) or the “employer brand surveys”(Hewitt Associates, 2008), could benefit from integrating brand personality scales, butalso measures for employer brand affect an trust in their questionnaires or interviews.It would also be valuable to see how these three variables are pronounced in employerrankings, such as the famous FORTUNE’s 100 best companies to work for(www.money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune).

Our results indicate that creating a brand personality consisting of sincerity may beparticularly useful since this is strongly associated with employer brand affect as wellas trust. This is an aspect which may not have been addressed by organisations withpriority in the past, as research on job advertisements has shown (Ewing et al., 2002).Establishing a sincere employer brand may be potentially established throughword-of-mouth of satisfied employees, that, for example, promises which had beenmade to them at the beginning of their career had been truly fulfilled. Potentially, itmay be also useful to give an employer brand “a face” and to strengthen positive brandpersonality traits through, for example, sincere employees or, at the core, a sincere andexciting owner or CEO, for example, along those lines: “I personally promise you thatwe will do everything for your career”. Personal, ideally emotional, experiences andinteractions with an organisation’s employees (for example in business dinners or thelike) could help to communicate favourable attributes of employer brands’ personalitytraits effectively, and increase in turn employer brand affect and thereby theattractiveness as an employer (see also Rampl et al., 2011).


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Positioning an employer brand as exciting and sophisticated may similarly bebeneficial, and should be fostered even more than it is already done today (Ewing et al.,2002). Finally, it should be taken care that the employer brand does not establish arugged personality, since this may result in a decrease in application intentions (seealso Lievens, 2007). Too much “masculinity” in, for example, competition amongemployees, may be destructive for employer brand attractiveness.

Limitations and future researchAs is the case for all research, this study has its limitations. Based on these limitationsand on research questions derived from our work, we propose a potential researchagenda for future employer branding research.

Although we investigated many different organisations, one limitation of this studyis that only one industry, the consultancy market, was investigated. Therefore, furtherresearch is needed to replicate these results for other industries. Additional insightsmay also be generated by comparing employer brand attractiveness across differentindustries, because applicants, business students, for example, may simultaneouslyconsider employers across different industries.

While this study focussed on potential applicants, it may be informative to applythe postulated model to actual applicants but particularly also to current employees. Itcould be valuable to investigate whether the relationship between employer brandemotions or employer brand trust and employer brand attractiveness remain on acomparable level when employees have been working for the organisation for a coupleof years compared to when they are not part of the organisation yet. These resultscould yield important insights into how employer brand management potentiallyneeds to be adjusted when focussing on retaining actual employees compared toattracting potential applicants. This is particularly important to yield consistency incommunicating brand messages of an organisation in general: “If a company hasdefined its corporate brand values, then the employees’ values and behaviours [sic]need to be aligned with these to reinforce the brand message” (Burt and Sparks, 2002,p. 196). While we did not explicitly distinguish between consumer brand or employerbrand personality, another avenue for valuable research is a comparison of specificemployer brand personalities to consumer brand personalities, to determine whetherpotential or current employees perceive the personality of one specific brand differentlywhen evaluating the brand from either a customer or employee perspective. Thisavenue for future research could also build on the work of Chun and Davies (2006), whoinvestigated the diverse effect of the perceived corporate brand personality scale oncustomer and employee satisfaction or differentiation.

One also has to note that the brand personality concept is not unquestioned (Yoonet al., 2006). The literature on corporate reputation suggests, that although brandpersonality provides one measure related to overall brand attractiveness, it shouldideally be combined with additional measures to be able to capture complex wholes,such as in our case employer brands (see, e.g. Chun, 2005). Therefore, another line offuture research is the integration of functional attributes such as compensation oradvancement opportunities in the proposed model, and to investigate their relationshipto brand affect and trust. Of particular interest is whether compensation or workcontent, both of which could potentially be perceived as exciting, are associated, forexample, with employer brand affect.

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Further, a useful research agenda would include studies that explore the rolesadvertising and marketing communication play in influencing the respectivepersonality traits. Employer branding research indicates that, for instance, publicity,recruitment advertising, or word-of-mouth have different effects on applicationintentions (Collins and Stevens, 2002). Future work, therefore, could investigatepotential differential effects on brand personality traits (and, in turn, on brand trustand brand affect), in order to identify the most successful techniques for branding anorganisation as an attractive employer.

Additionally, it may be of value to investigate gender, age, or cultural differences.Additional exploratory analyses of our data indicate no significant differences betweenmen and women regarding the postulated paths. However, because only one-third ofour sample was female – potentially due to the industry we investigated, which maybe more attractive to men – these analyses can only be seen as preliminary, and inneed for future investigation. Effects across age and/or different cultures may provideadditional insights in whether, and how, positioning an employer brand needs to beadjusted with respect to different target groups.

Finally, we would like to highlight that our quantitative research conducted here isan example of positivistic research. As positivism is only one out of many philosophiesof science, we would like to point out that it is not uncriticised. Since one central aspectof positivism is the statistical analyses of quantitative data which “exists, is (already)there, [. . .] [while] the task of the researcher thus becomes to gather and systematizethem” (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009, p. 17), it may also be useful to follow other,rather qualitatively oriented philosophies of sciences. Here, in future studiespotentially social constructivist approaches may be particularly valuable, sinceemployer brands – as perceived by potential employees – could be regarded associally constructed (for a critical review of positivism see, e.g. Alvesson andSkoldberg, 2009).[1] Presumably, preferences for employer brands evolve during aprocess why methods which are able to capture the processes underlying decisionmaking, such as verbal protocols or eye-movement tracking, may be helpful tools infuture employer branding research (see also Weber and Johnson, 2009).

ConclusionThe aim of this study was to apply and test, in an employment context, a modelof brand personality, brand trust, and brand affect that was originally postulatedfor consumer brands. Based on the present findings, we can show that brandpersonality traits are related to employer brand affect and trust, and that the lattertwo significantly predict employer brand attractiveness. We conclude thatemployer brand affect is positively associated with sincerity, excitement andsophistication, while ruggedness has a negative effect. Employer brand trust seemsto be mainly associated with the brand personality trait of sincerity, whereasemployer brand affect was identified as having a significantly stronger associationwith employer brand attractiveness than employer brand trust. The summaryobservation is that organisations hoping to obtain a competitive edge in attractinghighly talented professionals, and marketing scholars desiring to enhance employerbrand theory, will profit from increased attention to applicant perceptions ofemployer brand personality characteristics that foster employer brand affect andtrust.


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Note

1. We thank one anonymous reviewer for bringing this topic to our attention.

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About the authorsLinn Viktoria Rampl is a doctoral scholarship holder at the Chair for Marketing at ZeppelinUniversity, Germany. Her research interests include consumer neuroscience, employer branding,brand emotions and brand trust. She has presented several papers at German and internationalconferences such as the Academy of Marketing Science World Marketing Congress (WMC), theEuropean Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC), and the Society for Neuroeconomics AnnualConference and has published in the International Journal of Retail and DistributionManagement. Linn Viktoria Rampl is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:[email protected]

Peter Kenning is a full professor at the Chair for Marketing at Zeppelin University, Germany.His overall research interests are consumer behaviour, consumer neuroscience, retailing, andmarketing management. His work has been published widely, for example, in ManagementDecision, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Journal of Economic Psychology, and ManagementInformation System Quarterly (MISQ). He has presented papers at a number of conferencesincluding the American Marketing Association (AMA) Conference, the European MarketingAcademy Conference (EMAC), and the Association for Consumer Research (ACR). For his work,he has received several best-paper awards and grants from the German Government.

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Employer brand trust and affect: linking brand personality to employer brand attractiveness