Positioning and brand story for EMBRACE

Hiring the right people and keeping them is already a matter of survival for every company. The talent shortage keeps getting worse. And the old recruiting playbooks don’t work in a digital world anymore. Everyone is looking for new answers.

That’s why the HR market is growing 6 to 15 percent a year for 2021 to 2030. In Europe alone, it’s estimated at 40 billion euros. No wonder HR tech is booming: new ideas and products hit the market every day, opening up smarter ways to do people and culture.

But in a market moving this fast, companies looking for talent lack one thing above all: orientation. There’s no lighthouse brand that brings inspiration, innovation and HR tech expertise together. A brand that gives companies the guidance and the courage to shape the digital future of people and culture.

Against this backdrop, and based on an extensive strategy project, Bertelsmann decided to carve employer branding specialist EMBRACE out of the Territory agency group and relaunch it as a standalone brand in the HR market, under the roof of Bertelsmann Investments.

As a standalone brand, EMBRACE brings together innovative offerings along the candidate journey. Bertelsmann Investments backs it with significant funding for strategic investments in HR technology and targeted acquisitions.

But going standalone raised new strategic questions: How should the new brand position itself? And what story should it tell in the market?

With Christian's help, we successfully positioned EMBRACE in the market at top speed. His storytelling-based approach to turning strategy into execution made us clearer internally and radically sped up our work with our agencies.

The task and the approach

When EMBRACE CEO Gero Hesse came to me at the end of 2022, the task was clear: turn the existing strategic thinking into an easy-to-grasp positioning narrative, fast. One that makes the new direction clear to the team, prospects and partners, and gets them excited about EMBRACE.

From that positioning, we then had to build a brand identity that stands out in the HR market.

We set up a three-step advisory process. It let us position the new brand along four strategic lead stories, so-called core narratives, and get it out the door in just 16 weeks.

That speed was possible because several factors played perfectly with my storytelling-based approach:

• Brilliant strategic groundwork on EMBRACE’s new direction gave us a crystal-clear frame.
• Gero Hesse led the project himself, so decisions happened fast.
• Working directly with Gero and the EMBRACE C-level team kept alignment loops short.
• Short written core narratives instead of complex PowerPoint decks made it easy to align every stakeholder.
• Interpreting the narratives and building mood boards early sped up agency selection dramatically.
• We worked with the agencies as equals, in short sprints with quick decisions.

The positioning we developed

The key idea behind the new EMBRACE positioning is a family of brands. It bundles innovative recruiting, retention and HR tech offerings for everyone pioneering a new world of work, and brings companies and HR tech pioneers together.

EMBRACE positions itself as a “family of B2B brands” with three strategic roles: as a catalyst, with its own festival and content for all HR pioneers; as an enabler of modern HR concepts for companies, with its own specialist agency; and as a new home and strategic investor for innovative HR tech products. A clear company vision ties it all together, along with the team’s mission to make the world of work more human, more tech-driven and more optimistic.

That pioneering role shows in the brand identity, too. It brings an optimistic, rebellious tone to the communication that speaks to HR decision-makers and startup founders alike.

The process: three steps to positioning and brand story

We developed positioning and brand in a three-step process based on the phases of story development: mapping, scripting and staging.

In the story mapping phase, we first boiled the extensive strategic thinking behind EMBRACE down to what matters for the brand.

Using a visibility hierarchy of all business units and offerings, Gero and I sketched the company’s positioning across three time horizons in a kickoff CEO workshop, then aligned it with the leadership team.

In the scripting phase, I derived four core narratives from the positioning, each telling it from a different angle.

Like a film treatment, these one-pagers make it easier to agree on direction, because real copy triggers an immediate rational and emotional reaction.

The written format also shrinks the room for interpretation that slide decks leave open, which quickly leads to misalignment. And the one-pagers give internal and external experts a concrete springboard to start executing with focus.

For this project, we focused on these core narratives:

• A positioning narrative for internal stakeholders. It makes the brand’s self-image tangible by spelling out what the brand says about itself to position itself.
• A brand story for external stakeholders: the story the brand tells from the market and its audience’s needs, so its presence is relevant and relatable.
• A draft boilerplate: a plain, factual description of the company for journalists. It mostly works as a test: does the business still make sense without industry jargon and buzzwords?
• A draft launch press release: written at the very start of the process, it creates basic alignment on what the launch needs to say, and therefore what needs to get built.

In execution, the staging phase, the four aligned one-pagers sped up internal alignment as well as selecting and onboarding the agencies, because every phase had a clearly written direction. That cut out long, expensive feedback loops and made the whole process significantly faster.

Based on the brand story, Hamburg design agency Rocket and Wink created a standout corporate identity and built the EMBRACE website together with digital agency the weavery.

At the same time, Berlin PR agency Hypr developed the launch communication from the draft press release and boilerplate. And the EMBRACE team uses the positioning narrative every day to bring the brand to life in their daily business.

With a clear positioning and storytelling put to practical use in written one-pagers, we got every stakeholder behind a shared vision quickly and launched EMBRACE as a standalone brand. The new corporate identity, the website and effective launch communication now help establish EMBRACE in the market every day.