Employer brand attributes: a comparison of the perspectives of prospective employees and expert opinion

The first branding papers emerged in the 1940s, and research since then has been concerned with the differentiation of products and services in consumer markets. The concept of employer branding has emerged relatively recently in the academic literature. This paper is concerned with advertising agency brand image among prospective employees. Specifically this exploratory study reports the first use of Kelly’s Triads to elicit attributes of advertising agencies deemed salient to graduating students of an undergraduate advertising major. Underpinned by Personal Construct Theory, Kelly’s Triads is a structured qualitative technique developed over 50 years ago that has proven effective in
understanding how individuals differentiate a competitive set of brands, but which has been underreported
in the brand literature. The differences between the salient attributes elicited from students,
opinions of an expert panel, and the employer brand scale developed by Berthon, Ewing and Hah
(2005) highlight the value of engaging in an inductive stage identifying context- specific consumer
input to supplement universally accepted attribute lists for use in structured surveys measuring
employer brand image and positioning.