The Brand Called "We Hate You"

Here is a question for a marketer. The question is "What would you think of an organization that put out its message to the population in such a way that 99 percent of the people reached in the campaign were made to feel angry and frustrated with the organization?"

You'd hear this question and think "What the heck? Who in his or her right mind would launch a campaign like that?"

But we do it every day! It's called employment advertising.

We run an ad, we say "We are great, come work for us." Then we blow off 99 percent, probably more like 99.9 percent, of the people who respond. We say "You are nothing to us. I know, we told you to write to us. But we're not writing back to you. You are dead to us."

You have to wonder, why don't the Marketing types in our organizations object to the fact that we HR types reach out to the general population in order to alienate and piss off people!

Why do they let us do it? In fact, why do we let ourselves do it? Why do we run ads knowing that we'll never respond to the vast majority of people who contact us? In the auto industry, we don't tolerate an assembly process that leaves 99 percent of car parts on the factory floor.

Why are we willing to make enemies? Do we think that the supply of candidates - not to mention consumers to buy our products and services - is infinitely large? Why is our front-facing marketing message so at odds with our rear-facing employment message? Does our CEO know about this?

It's an open secret. The branding goodwill we create through our print and online and broadcast advertising and our PR and community event sponsorship and social networking outreach etc. gets drained by the badwill we create via the black hole, the abyss, the nightmare funnel we create for job-seekers.

Has your company figured this out?