How to become an employer of choice: transforming employer brand associations into employer first-choice brands

Abstract

Being a first-choice brand is a valuable asset for an organisation, both for remaining competitive and for attracting potential employees. Despite the considerable research available on linking brand associations to employer brand attractiveness, research on how to become an employer of choice is limited. This article addresses the research gap by investigating employer brand associations that predict status as an employer first-choice brand (FCB_e), and by determining how these associations are transferred into preference. Research was based on university students’ evaluations of employer brand associations and identification of their FCB_e. Results indicate that work content and work culture of employer brand associations are drivers of being an FCB_e, with no support found for effects of salary, advancement opportunities, location or organisational reputation. Importantly, employer brand emotions emerged as a full mediator in the model, indicating that for an FCB_e, work content and work culture need to be linked to emotions. These results suggest that only if employer brand associations lead to positive employer brand emotions can an FCB_e be established. This study contributes to the literature by being the first to investigate drivers of employer first-choice brand, and to identify employer brand emotions as essential for establishing an FCB_e.

Keywords:

• employer branding
• first-choice brand
• preference
• employer of choice
• emotion
• structural equation modelling

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Kenning for helpful comments for improving the article. Also, I thank Isabell Welpe and Christian Opitz for their suggestions on designing the questionnaire and – together with Isabella Geis – for their support in collecting the data. Additionally, I appreciate the helpful comments of the editor of the Journal of Marketing Management, Paul Hewer, as well as the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers. Finally, I thank Deborah Nester for copy-editing. An earlier version of this article is part of the doctoral dissertation of the author.

Appendix A

Table A1 Sources, standardised factor loadings and Cronbach’s alpha scores for the final factors.

Appendix B

Table B1 Means, standard deviations, squared correlations and average variance extracted (AVE) for the final factors.

Notes

¹ An fMRI-study is used to investigate brain activation changes over a period of time. To do so, participants are placed in a scanner that captures changes in the magnetic field – for instance, in the brain of the participant. These magnetic field changes localised in the brain are used as a proxy for changes in the cerebral blood flow, which has magnetic properties (for an overview of the methodology, see e.g. Ariely & Berns, 2010; Kenning & Linzmajer, 2011).

² Previous research has shown that this procedure does not reduce the accuracy of the responses (Kenning, Hartleb, & Schneider, 2011).

³ This study is based on a sample first reported in Rampl and Kenning (2014). The paper by Rampl and Kenning (2014) had a different scope than the one reported here, and out of the eight scales investigated in this present work, only one scale (the employer brand emotions scale) was also part of the Rampl and Kenning (2014) publication.

⁴ The analyses were re-run as several logistic regressions, yielding results in line with the results from SEM.

⁵ Significance relates to 99% confidence intervals, which do not cross zero (see Table 1 for details).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linn Viktoria Rampl

Linn Viktoria Rampl is a doctoral scholarship holder at the Chair for Marketing at Zeppelin University, Germany. Her research interests include consumer neuroscience, branding and marketing. She has presented several papers at German and international conferences such as the Academy of Marketing Science World Marketing Congress (WMC), the European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC) and the Society for Neuroeconomics Annual Conference. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management and in the European Journal of Marketing.