3. Current conceptualisation of employer branding
Ambler and Barrow (1996) initially introduced employer branding as a research
discipline with an explorative study among UK companies of the relevance of applying
brand management techniques to HRM. Regardless of a certain empirical resistance to
introducing marketing vocabularies and practices to the HRM discipline, the authors
conclude that the employer brand concept is potentially valuable for organizations and
that applying brand management to the HRM function reinforces the strength of and
adds value to corporate equity from a customer perspective. Thus, it brings return to
both HRM and branding (Ambler and Barrow, 1996).