Creating a Strong Service Brand Through Talent : The Relationship Between Corporate, Internal and Employer Branding

Branding has long been a way to differentiate your offering from the competitors’ and new definitions have been added to the branding vocabulary. Employer branding and internal branding are two of those, and are often used in human resource management. Companies are focusing on finding and retaining the right people in the company, and when it comes to service industries, customer-facing staff has the opportunity to either make or break the brand. Employer branding has offered tools in attracting the right people, and internal branding has been used in retaining them. The purpose of this thesis was to look at the relationship between employer branding, internal branding and corporate branding in the Nordic financial services, as well as the importance of core values in this process. Two research questions were proposed1. How can the relationship between corporate branding, internal branding and employer branding in service industries be described?2. How can the role of corporate values in the process of internal branding and employer branding in service industries be explained?This thesis is mainly descriptive that uses a qualitative and deductive approach. The strategy chosen for this study was embedded case study that uses FOREX Bank AB as its object of study, and the data was collected through interviews at different levels of the company: from HQ to customer-facing staff. The data suggests that core values have gained a much greater importance during the past decades, and people are finding out more about the symbolic meanings of a company than before. The data also proposes that companies should work on establishing a consensus of the core values, and reinforce them through branch managers, training and other meetings.It could also be seen that the external employer brand should be worked with internally, and that not only employer branding and internal branding, but also overall corporate branding should be worked with together, with common goals. This is due to the fact that the customer-facing staff is what makes the corporate brand for the customers. Surprisingly, unlike some research considers, the data suggests that multiculturalism and international atmosphere do not cause problems for core value behavior and internal branding, but rather can work as a unique selling point for the employer brand.