Salt and Pepper, Cornish Fish and Chips, Hugs and Kisses, and Gin and Tonic. Just a few fabulous combinations. For all kinds of reasons, I'd add Marketing and HR to that list. Not quite as well established as fish and chips perhaps, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that they should be. At Let's Reset, we believe that Marketers and HR specialists need to work harder to benefit from their respective levels of expertise. Recently, at our Power Up Festival, one of our key advisors, Harriet Hounsell, explained why.
At the most fundamental level, both disciplines deal with people. HR departments everywhere can learn a considerable amount from marketing about developing relationships, engaging audiences and influencing behaviour. In the end, HR exists to influence the way colleagues perform, engage and promote the organisation of which they are a part. We've moved from a world where companies and brands tell their stories to one where their people do that for them. We all know in a second nowadays when a company mistreats anyone or doesn't live its values. If Marketing and HR work together on the flip side of this, it's transformational. Training and working with employees to positively promote the company's vision and values will have a more significant impact than almost any marketing campaign. Importantly, it's way more authentic too.
Authenticity is critical when it comes to those vision and values, and so is measurement. For years, marketers have practised what they've preached through treasuring what they're measuring. HR and Marketing working together to measure how a company's values are delivered is a marriage made in heaven. A brilliantly crafted vision and set of values being produced externally and internally, with measurement criteria in place for both. Who wouldn’t want that? The only way to truly deliver that in the most effective way imaginable is for Marketing and HR to work hand in glove.
I've met too many organisations over the years that believe they have an employee brand because they've crafted some clever words to describe how they want people to behave. It's only through Marketing and HR working together that we can genuinely bring these employee brands to life. Use those skills that marketers have to create the right employee brand with brilliant content in the proper channels. Work hard to put innovation at the centre of keeping your brand values alive in your organisation. Use creativity and innovation to think not how you can keep your customers but how you can keep your people because, without them, your company's heart and soul doesn't exist.
Between them, Marketing and HR cover the most exciting areas of any organisation, and that's people; how you engage them, how you keep them, how you inspire them and how you persuade them to tell your story. If these two functions both work harder to work together, the benefits are enormous. Because, in the end, as I heard someone say recently if you want to go fast, go alone. If you're going to go far, go together.
