What Role Does Brand Name Play In Terms of Past Experiences?

This post was triggered by a current MBA student at my alma mater. I really should get some recruiting dollars from my former employers. It’s amazing how many questions I get about my past, as a direct result of this blog.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to cover all of the ground as suggested in the title, but one item that came up from the soon-to-be grad was weighing the tradeoffs of going to one of two management consulting firms. One of the firms in question clearly had a better brand name (in terms of general recognition) than one of the firms I worked for, PRTM. One item of importance to this person was opportunities for advancement, potentially post-employment at one of the consulting firms and potentially as connected to brand strength.

In my opinion, brand name can play a role with future employers and with colleagues in an organization. This is just a fact of life. As a simple example, when I look through resumes, if it easier for me to identify with the companies that a person has worked for, I can often get a better sense of the context associated with that person. It’s just a matter of instant name recognition. Of course, when I spend more time on due diligence, I try to cut through all of that so that it doesn’t matter whether a person has past experience with a well-known brand or unknown brand company. All that matters is whether the person can do the proposed job, mix with the team, and flourish.

But fact of the matter in professional situations, like when I’m in a room introducing myself and there are brand names like Booz Allen and McKinsey at the top of people’s minds and perhaps sitting at the same table, people will often give me less attention until I back up my pedigree with actual experiences. Only then am I able to get myself ahead or on level ground. In some ways, it’s another level of explanation that I need to get through before I can get across the message of the "real me". Note that I’m not emphasizing ego here – simply the observation of how much communication time one may be allocated by others depending the initial impressions one makes based on brand name of past (or current) employers.

My original question was how much does brand name matter though? In worlds where first impressions matter more (which is not every world by any means), where there are numerous one-off interactions before people start formulating opinions or working relationships, where other people may talk about you (e.g., your boss’ boss) without having much direct working experience with you, I believe that brand weighs more strongly. So I have tendencies to believe that in things like startup and engineering environments, where relationships are more closely knit, organization structures are small, and where interactions are more frequent between people, the notion of brand name will not matter so much. In a larger company, however, there may be many more one-off interactions (in certain areas of a company like business development or consulting), and brand name of your past employers may matter "more".

But to put this in context, one does not have to use the brand of the employer to put forth one’s own brand. This was one of the reasons I was comfortable enough to take employment with a less well-known management consulting out of business school. It was easier for me to focus on fit, experiences that I desired, etc. as opposed to getting concerned with what company name was going to be on my resume.

When I sat down to write this post, I thought that I was going to conclude that people should put forth their own brands. At least I find that this seems to work for me, and it is probably the method I would suggest by default. But I have tried to open my mind some, and I have observed that there are some people that do quite well advancing the brands of their past employers before they advance their own brands. I have tried to think about why this may be so, and I tend to believe that the optimal path may depends on the environment in which one plays (e.g., as defined in terms of number of cold people-to-people interactions on a daily basis, the timeframe of an average interaction, the size of the organization, and the basic goals of an average interaction).