Employer Branding / ING

A tale of true brand identity

The beginning

With an organisation as large and diverse as ING, it is quite a challenge to ensure consistent messaging to the increasingly international recruitment market. ING’s international employer branding team felt that a consistent, recognisable and adaptable employee value proposition would unite ING’s brand across different countries, markets and businesses. With a shared global identity, the individual characteristics of every business could shine.

The middle

Understanding is the basis of every relationship. So our research specialists spent several weeks getting under the skin of ING. Through a mixture of face-to-face interviews and focus groups with actual and prospective employees, we were able to identify common traits, perceptions and behaviours.

This approach was combined with the brand team’s own work in exploring the DNA of the business. The results were three core brand pillars of the wider organisation: an unpretentious, can-do mentality, delivering results, and being connected to the bigger picture.

Then the creative team came into play. They explored the data, the messages, the challenges and the perceptions and linked these to ING’s corporate social responsibility agenda. This resulted in the statement “Doing well by doing right” that was later confirmed by stakeholders across the business. Since graduate messaging was ING’s most immediate need, our team also delivered a series of advertising concepts and created guidelines for recruitment advertising.

The end

We presented the finished package to the assembled global Junior Talent team at their annual conference. In a very real sense, we passed the baton to them and it became their job to take the guidelines and thinking to the wider business. Since then, third party agencies have used the core brand pillars and proposition to develop their own successful ING work.

For ING, the result is a consistent brand identity that works everywhere in the world. Today ING’s global employer brand has been activated in over 18 countries, and it’s growing. First results are very promising and demonstrate increased numbers of high quality applications, enhanced site traffic to ING career sites and a steady climb in the ‘Ideal Employer’ rankings across every continent.