Let’s Stop Getting Bored With Our Employer Brands

There’s a specific moment in every employer brand cycle where someone, usually from the TA or early careers team, asks: “So what are we doing this year?”

It’s a reasonable question. There are new grads to reach, a new campaign to plan, maybe newly evolved pillars to bring to life. But underneath the question is an assumption that’s worth unpicking: the idea that this year’s employer brand activity needs to be different from last year’s.

Sometimes it does. If the business has changed significantly, if the EVP itself has evolved, or if the previous campaign genuinely didn’t perform, then yes, a rethink makes sense. But more often than not, the urge to change things comes from somewhere else entirely. It comes from boredom.

The team that built last year’s campaign has been looking at it for twelve months. They’ve seen the creative a hundred times. They know the strapline by heart. And because it feels so familiar to them, they assume it must feel familiar to everyone. But it almost certainly doesn’t.

What consumer brands already know

Consumer marketing figured this out decades ago. The brands with the deepest recognition are the ones that committed to consistency and stayed with it, sometimes for generations.

Take Mars. The Mars Bar’s red, black and gold colour scheme has been essentially the same for nearly a century. The wrapper design barely changed from the 1950s through to 2002; over fifty years of the same look on the shelf. The “Work, Rest and Play” strapline ran for roughly forty years, from the mid-1970s to around 2015. And over 95% of the UK population has eaten a Mars Bar. That’s not despite the consistency, it’s because of it.

Recognition doesn’t come from being clever or surprising. It comes from being there, looking the same, sounding the same, meaning the same thing, over and over again, until you’re part of someone’s mental landscape. Mars didn’t need to reinvent itself every year. It needed to keep showing up.

What happens when you don’t stay the course

On 4 October 2010, Gap replaced its iconic blue box logo. The blue box had been in use for 24 years, since 1986. The new logo was a clean, modern Helvetica treatment with a small gradient square tucked behind the “p”.

Within 24 hours, a parody Twitter account called @GapLogo had 5,000 followers. Over 14,000 parody logos were created. More than 2,000 negative blog comments appeared in a single day. Marka Hansen, then President of Gap North America, acknowledged it publicly: “We made a mistake. We’re bringing the old logo back.” The whole thing was reversed in six days. The redesign reportedly cost $100 million. Hansen stepped down four months later.

Gap didn’t change because the brand was broken. They changed because someone inside the organisation likely got bored with it. The customers hadn’t, and their reaction shows that.

Then there’s Twitter. On 23 July 2023, the platform was rebranded to X. The Twitter name and blue bird logo had been in use for seventeen years. According to YouGov research from June 2024, 69% of UK adults were still calling it Twitter and 79% of daily users were still saying Twitter.

A year and a half on, and the old name was still what people were reaching for. That’s how deep recognition runs when you’ve been consistent for long enough. You can change the name, change the logo, change the entire visual identity, and people still think of you the way you used to be. Consistency creates a kind of brand gravity that’s genuinely difficult to undo, even when you’re trying to.

Why familiarity works in the brain

There’s a name for this in psychology: the mere exposure effect. First identified by Robert Zajonc in the late 1960s, it describes something quite simple but powerful: the more often we encounter something, the more we tend to like it. Not because we’ve evaluated it. Not because it’s earned our trust through some rational process. Just because our brains process familiar things more easily, and that ease of processing feels good.

Psychologists call this perceptual fluency. When something is easy to recognise, it feels safe, reliable, known. And that feeling of familiarity translates directly into preference. It’s why people prefer the brand they’ve seen before, even if they can’t remember where they saw it.

Every time someone sees your EVP messaging, your visual identity, your tone of voice, their brain gets a little faster at recognising it, and a little more favourably disposed towards it. Change it all, and you reset that process back to zero.

The data backs this up

In 2024, System1 and the IPA published a study called “Compound Creativity”, analysing over 4,000 ads from 56 brands across 44 categories over five years. The finding was clear: the most creatively consistent brands (the top 20%) achieved 28% more very large business effects, including sales growth, profit gain and market share.

The least consistent brands had to spend significantly more to achieve the same level of growth. System1 estimated the cost of inconsistency across the brands they studied at £3.47 billion over five years.

The principle isn’t complicated: consistency compounds. Every time you stay the course, the brand works a little harder for you. Every time you change direction, you’re paying to rebuild recognition you already had.

The annual campaign trap

Employer brand teams run into this every year, often without realising it. The usual suspect is the grads campaign. It goes out in September and it performs well. Applications come in, hires get made, everyone’s happy. Then the following year, planning starts again, and the question lands: “What are we doing this year?”

The implication is that it needs to be something new. A fresh concept, new creative, maybe a different angle on the EVP. Because doing the same thing again feels, well, lazy.

But let’s think about who we’re talking to. Last year’s target audience has largely moved on. They’re tucked up cosy in their grad schemes, getting on with the job. This year’s audience is mostly seeing our employer brand for the first time. To them, our “old” campaign isn’t old at all. It’s brand new.

And for the smaller number who did see it last year but didn’t apply (maybe they wanted a gap year), seeing it again isn’t a problem. It’s frequency. It’s recognition building. It’s the brand working harder because someone has now seen it more than once. In consumer marketing, that’s exactly what we want.

The boredom sits with the team, not the audience. And that’s a really important distinction.

Consistency isn’t standing still

None of this means we should never evolve. Mars has tweaked its packaging, updated its strapline, refreshed its advertising. But the core of the brand, what it stands for, how it looks, how it feels, has stayed remarkably stable. The evolution happened around the edges, not at the centre.

The same principle applies to employer brand. We can refresh the creative execution. We can try new channels, test new formats, experiment with how the EVP pillars come to life in different segments. We can and should keep the content feeling current. But the proposition itself, the core of what we’re saying about what it’s like to work here, needs time to land.

If we change the message every year, we’re essentially starting from scratch every year. All that recognition we built? Gone. All the familiarity we earned? Reset. We’re back to being an unknown entity competing for attention against organisations whose brands people have actually heard of.

That’s an expensive place to be, and sadly, it’s unknowingly self-inflicted.

How to know when change is warranted

There are genuine reasons to rethink an employer brand. The organisation has gone through a significant transformation, a merger, a restructure, a fundamental shift in strategy. The EVP itself no longer reflects the actual employee experience (which is a say-do gap problem, not a branding problem). A major talent competitor launches a bold new multi-channel campaign and you need to respond. Or the brand simply isn’t resonating with the right people, and the data shows it.

But “We’ve been running the same campaign for two years and the team is getting a bit tired of it” is not one of those reasons. Neither is “The new Head of Talent wants to put their stamp on things.”

If the fundamentals are working, if the EVP is sound, if the recognition is building, the best thing you can do is keep going. Refine the execution, not the proposition. Let the consistency do what consistency does.

A practical starting point

Next time the “what are we doing this year” conversation comes around, try asking a different question first: “What do we know about whether last year’s approach is landing?”

Look at your metrics. If the right people are engaging, if the proposition still reflects the experience, if the applicant quality is good, then the answer might be, let’s keep going. Hold the line on the core message, and put the creative energy into how it comes to life this time around.

Mars didn’t need a new wrapper every year. They needed the same wrapper, year after year, until it became impossible to forget.

Vicki Saunders

Founding Director, The EVP Consultancy

With over 17 years in employer brand and EVP strategy, Vicki works with organisations to build employee value propositions that are honest, distinctive, and have impact. She’s the creator of the 8-Dimensional EVP Framework and The EVP Edit newsletter.

vicki@theevpconsultancy.co.uk