The Real BS :: Brand Strategy for HR Pros

From Marketing Insider To HR Advocate

• Brand Culture Association • Season 1 • Episode 2

Share episode

What happens when a passionate brand strategist realizes the biggest brand builders in any company aren't in marketing at all? After 20 years immersed in marketing, I discovered we've been building brand backwards all along. The truth? HR teams sit on untapped brand power that most organizations completely overlook.

Brand isn't just marketing, it's who you are and why you exist...while marketing is how you promote that brand. This fundamental misunderstanding has created artificial walls between departments that should be working in harmony. Throughout my career, I witnessed the frustrating disconnect: marketing campaigns promising experiences that disengaged employees couldn't deliver, HR teams lacking resources to build strong internal cultures, and leadership failing to see how deeply interconnected these elements truly are. Whatever you promote to customers, your employees must be able to back it up, and yet marketing and HR rarely collaborate effectively.

My journey took an unexpected turn when personal tragedy collided with workplace reality. Caring for my terminally ill father forced a stark choice between family and career when my leadership insisted my physical presence at work mattered more than being with him in his final moments. That experience crystallized everything wrong with workplaces that say "it's about the work, not the people." (Yes, this really happened to me).

We spend most of our adult lives at work, and if we work in a toxic environment it will affect our health, relationships, and well-being in profound ways. And life is way too precious and short! This realization transformed my mission: to help HR professionals leverage their unique position to build powerful brands from the inside out—creating workplaces people are proud to be part of rather than environments they dread. 

Subscribe now to discover how brand culture can become HR's secret strategic advantage and transform your organization from the inside out.

Brand isn’t marketing’s playground anymore, it’s HR’s secret power move! 

The Real BS is the podcast flipping brand strategy on its head, hosted by Jaclyn Scrivens—brand strategist, experienced marketer, and the HR hype woman you didn’t know you needed. 

With each episode, get bold insights, no-fluff strategies, and straight talk on leading brand from the inside out. Because when HR owns brand, people stay, talent chases you, customers notice, and the who

That’s a wrap on this week’s Real BS! 

If you loved it, hit subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a little brand boss energy. For more, visit BrandCulture.org or head over to LinkedIn and follow Brand Culture Association, or connect with me personally. I’d love to keep

~~~~~~~

Brand starts with HR, not marketing.
On The Real BS podcast, we cut through the fluff and get real about how culture shapes the brand more than any campaign ever could.

Hosted by executive leader, brand strategist and experienced marketer - Jaclyn Scrivens - you’ll hear bold truths, fresh strategies, and no-BS conversations designed to help HR professionals and leaders step up as strategic brand powerhouses to change the game inside your organizations.

If you're ready to flip the script on brand and elevate your HR and leadership role, you're in the right place.

>>> Explore more information at www.BrandCulture.org.

>>> Don't forget to subscribe, share with a colleague, and keep building the brand from the inside out.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

Here's the truth. I walked away from marketing because I realized we were constantly building brand backwards and no one was talking about or even helping the team sitting on the biggest untapped brand power in the business HR. This first episode is a little different. I want to share my story and why I made the leap from marketing insider to HR outsider. Because I know I'm an outsider coming into a new world. I guess I would say I'm not walking away or turning my back on marketing. I'll always be a marketer at heart. I've spent 20 years of my career in nothing but marketing land and I even still consult on marketing today. But if there is one thing I could point to that did bring me frustration over the years, it is the constant misunderstanding that brand is marketing, and I mean this is a major misunderstanding most people have and it's holding companies back like no other. I'll dive into this more in future episodes and there truly is more to brand than what I'm about to say, but for the sake of this episode, I'm going to oversimplify the difference. Brand is who you are and why you exist. Marketing is how you promote your brand. It's how you tell your story. They are two different things that are interconnected and they do need each other, but they are, in fact, different.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

I fell in love with brand strategy and I'm talking real brand strategy early on in my career, and it was something that just clicked for me. It came natural to me, and I truly enjoyed the work. When I would be working on a brand strategy, it actually did not feel like work to me. I loved connecting all of the pieces. I loved thinking deep and wide and honestly beyond marketing, because it truly is a business strategy. So, from the get-go, I really started honing in on brand as my area of expertise, and that's what I became known for throughout my career, but I continued to get boxed in time and time again With every brand communications or strategist manager and director role. I always lived on the marketing team. I worked through it, though, and good thing. I like a challenge, because it was definitely full of challenges as a true brand strategist.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

You can't just create marketing like a new product introduction or customer acquisition or loyalty campaign or, yes, even a good old fashioned brand awareness campaign, without including some kind of internal component. What do I mean by this? Whatever you say, promote or market to your customer, your employees have to be able to back it up. So let's say it's a new product launch. Do your employees know about it? Are they excited about it? Can they talk about it? Can they answer questions? And even if it is just a campaign to promote the brand, since your employees are your biggest representation of the brand, do they know about it? Do they feel energized and excited about the brand? Would they naturally share positive word of mouth either to potential customers or even potential candidates to come work for the company?

Jaclyn Scrivens:

It always felt like a fight to add the internal component to a brand strategy because it didn't belong in marketing. It was HR's responsibility. I found myself constantly educating leadership on why it's important and the impact it will have on our marketing, either negatively or positively. I'll give you a couple of examples. We were running a multimillion dollar marketing campaign and the call to action was to call the call center. And I kept saying as a brand strategist, you have to think through it from beginning to end. So my question was OK, we have the most beautiful creative, we launched the campaign, we spend all the money on the ads, we drive traffic to the call center. What's the experience going to be like when they call the call center and I was told by my leadership that does not matter, you are in marketing, do not worry about the employees. Okay, well, I am going to worry about the employees because it's going to impact my ROI and the performance of this campaign, but again, I was told do not worry about it. We ran the campaign, we spent millions of dollars and guess what? Their performance was not good at all. As we dug into you know we do kind of a post campaign evaluation what went wrong, lessons learned we discovered the employee engagement scores in the call center were horrible. So, if you can imagine, you have employees sitting there who aren't maybe engaged, who feel underappreciated. When that prospect called the call center, they did not have the best experience. So this is why brand strategy is all the way from A to Z and why employees matter. The experience those call center reps gave to prospects and customers was a brand moment, and yet not marketing. This is why brand is bigger than marketing.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

Another example say you are at a cookout, holiday party gathering of some kind and you are either talking to someone you haven't seen in a while or maybe you're meeting someone new. What happens in typical conversations like that? At some point in time your job comes up, the company you work for comes up. In that moment, what is the employee going to say? Are they going to say something positive about the brand they work for, or are they going to say something negative about the brand they work for? Or are they going to say something negative about the brand they work for? That is a brand moment, again, more than marketing. So, if you're thinking from a recruiting perspective, if I'm an employee, am I telling other people it's a great place to work, or am I not? This is classic word of mouth, and word of mouth happens for customers just as much as it does for employees. And word of mouth is so heavily influenced by brand it's hard to see, feel and touch, but it's the truth.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

So, like I said, I constantly found myself educating leadership on why it's important to connect internal to external. Some leaders got it and some didn't. Sometimes it became a fight to partner with HR, which still blows my mind to this day. I heard a presenter the other day tell HR professionals to align with and become friends with their marketing teams like it was critical in their work, and I couldn't agree more. It's just easier said than done.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

Marketing doesn't always play nice with HR. Regardless of whether I had leadership support or I didn't, I found myself working alongside HR teams all the time, and man talk about a group of passionate people who truly care about others, and that's what we need. That's what we need to energize a brand and rally people around something exciting. It's not just lip service. With an HR team and since HR leads culture and the employee experience, I really had to lean in on them to make things happen from a brand standpoint. The problem with this HR needed marketing resources and budget to really make things happen, and most times I couldn't give it to them. As a marketing leader and marketing strategist, I couldn't give it to them Seriously. Multiple times I got my hand slapped because I was swimming outside of my lane. I was told that's HR's job. It's not in our goals. Get back to focusing on the customer. What leadership failed to understand is they were only thinking about brand as a one-sided thing, but it's very much two-sided. It's customer and employee, and it starts on the inside. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

Because of this lack of support for alignment between marketing and HR, I found myself more times than not supporting HR behind the scenes and outside of work hours. I just couldn't let my leadership know about it. Isn't that ridiculous? Again, my mind is still blown to this day. I saw time and time again that HR got the short end of the stick when it came to having the right resources, the partnerships and budgets to deliver what they're all on the hook for. Deliver what they're all on the hook for Things like culture, employee experience, the candidate experience or recruitment, marketing, employee value proposition, all the things, and all of that matters to me as a brand strategist, because all of that is brand.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

So as the years passed, I was feeling more and more unfulfilled working in marketing and I wanted to make more of a difference. I kept thinking about HR. Here is a team who really needs brand and marketing support but doesn't get the love like they deserve. And this isn't just a one-off experience in my career. It kept happening time and time again with different brands. So since I know firsthand how to build brand from the inside out and the HR professionals truly are the most influential brand builders in a company, I'm going to say that again HR is truly the most influential brand builder in a company.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

I started thinking what if I create something dedicated to helping HR professionals leverage the power? I know brand has Not to add to HR's plate I know HR has enough, but to use the strategic edge that's been hiding in plain sight. And, of course, I know the budget constraints HR faces. So what if we could do this in an extremely affordable way? So HR has all the expertise, the tools, the resources they need and they don't have to fight for help from internal resources or pay for high-priced consultants or outside agencies. Trust me, I know the price tag of those outside agencies. I used to be that outside expert. So I guess you can say this is my first reason as to why I decided to really lean into helping HR.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

I was exhausted from always fighting and I was feeling more and more unfulfilled. And then life happened. My dad was fighting cancer for quite a while and he was hanging on but was starting to go downhill, and pretty quickly. He was all by himself and just lived a few minutes from my house, so I was really his caretaker. I had to be there for him. I had let my leadership know for about four months that things seemed to be declining and he wasn't doing very well.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

My leadership at the time was how do I say this? You know how sometimes in your career you have a boss you absolutely love, who you feel so supported by, and they're just a standout in your career. Yeah, my leadership wasn't that. It was quite the opposite. My views on putting people first didn't quite align with theirs. In fact, I will fully admit. They questioned me and my philosophies as a leader. They told me I have it backwards because it's actually quote about the work, not the people. You heard that right. Those were their exact words. It's about the work, not the people. That goes against every belief I have as a leader and in brand building.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

So at that time my dad was admitted into the hospital and we knew we were coming to the end of the road. He looked at me and asked me not to leave him. He didn't want to be alone. So I called my husband and my three girls and I told them to pack me a bag because I wasn't leaving this hospital until dad was. We had just launched a huge brand strategy at work, so I was working around the clock from the hospital when dad was sleeping and there weren't nurses or doctors in the room or he wasn't, you know off taking a test or getting some kind of treatment. I had my laptop open day and night so I was still able to work.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

Toward the end of dad's hospital stay. There was nothing more that could help him. The doctors wanted to admit him into an inpatient hospice facility full time. Like that was it. We were at the end. Dad was so against this. Thankfully, I have the most amazing husband who fully supported and said bring him home to us. So we did. We packed him up and we moved him into our house, with hospice nurses coming multiple times a day.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

As an executive leader, I knew we had the freedom and flexibility to make decisions like this, because just a month earlier I had a team member whose mom went into hospice and she had lived like an hour and a half two hours away and he did not have that much vacation time. He came to me and I said go, you've got to go be with your mom. You will never get these days back. This work will be here when you get back. So you go, work full-time, remote as much as you can, and when you can't work, you'll take PTO and we will just be in touch every day to see what you're working on what we can do to support you. If we need to take things off your plate, like, let's just do that, let's stay in communication. So I knew this was a possibility. Also, I told my boss I would be way more accessible now that I was home and out of the hospital. We didn't have doctors and nurses coming in and out all hours of the day and night. Dad was just home, sleeping and fully sedated. He was basically sleeping 24 hours a day. I just had to be next to him in case something happened. But I was told no, my job was way too important and I needed to be in the office.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

At that point I was forced into a choice my dad or my job, my job that I sacrificed so much for for years. I mean to tell you I put this job before a lot of things I should not have in life and it meant so much to me. But I quickly realized they didn't really care about me. So the choice was easy and I'm glad I made that choice because I was able to hold my dad as he took his final breaths in life. I told him it was going to be okay. I told him I would make him proud and I would do whatever I could with my skills and expertise and knowledge to really help people make a difference. And then he left and had I not chosen my dad, I would not have been able to do that, and that moment changed me forever. Sorry if my voice is a little shaky, but I haven't relived that in quite some time. So I guess already feeling unfulfilled in marketing and being more and more frustrated by the fact that people misunderstood what brand was about and here brand strategy was like my heart and soul, my passion and my DNA and then experiencing firsthand how quickly life can just be over in a matter of minutes, I decided to make the leap. So here I am. I am so extremely passionate about helping as many people and as many companies as I can create workplaces people are proud to be a part of and don't dread walking into every day.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

We spend most of our adult lives at work and if we're having a bad time at work, it affects so much in our life. Our health is impacted both physically and mentally, and in a big way, and we absolutely bring it home to our families, even if we don't think we do. Trust me, I lived through this. My health was affected. Even my doctor told me twice that I needed to find another job at one point in my career because of the impact it was having on my health, and I know there was an effect on my family, and I will never be able to get those years back.

Jaclyn Scrivens:

Since life is so extremely precious and short, we need to do better. We need to make the hours and the days count. I know we can change things for the better. We need to make the hours and the days count. I know we can change things for the better because the power of brand can do amazing things when brand belongs to people, not marketing campaigns. In the next episode, we'll break this down even more and share what brand culture really is and why it's HR's untapped secret power. It truly is a different way to think about your work. You won't want to miss it.