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Why are human resources professionals important? The Society for Human Resources Management hopes to answer that question with its new marketing campaign. William Maroni, SHRM’s Chief External Affairs Officer, talked about the “more balanced and interwoven” campaign at the recent SHRM conference in Chicago.

“It’s an education and awareness campaign about the value and importance of the HR profession,” he said. “This campaign is not about selling memberships, it’s not about trying to get people to come to our conferences or getting them to buy some of our e-learning tools. This is about elevating the image and reputation of the HR profession among those target audiences.”

Maroni said through the campaign, SHRM is trying to show that HR plays an important role in many issues facing the workplace, including immigration, healthcare costs, work-family balance, finding the right people for the right job and transferring knowledge from older workers who are retiring to younger workers.

To achieve its goal, SHRM has secured a spot for the new ad during CNN’s upcoming presidential debates, and the company will be sponsoring three to four forums at the Democratic and Republican conventions.

“If we do the ads right, then people are going to make the connection between the ads and HR and what they’re tuning into,” Maroni said.

The campaign ads also are running on NPR, the Fox Business Network, Business Week and The Harvard Business Review.
Maroni said SHRM also is looking into running an ad in Fortune Magazine.

“The strategy is … that we need to start by talking about issues that people care about,” he said. “What is it that keeps the CEO up at night? What are business leaders really thinking about, worried about, putting their energy into? And a lot of those issues are HR issues, they just don’t think of them as HR issues.”

Maroni said while no quantitative research has been completed on the effects of the campaign, word-of-mouth rates it well.

“Nobody’s complained about it,” he said. “People have praised it. People have said it’s made it easier to make a case for attending conferences like this with their employers. It’s opened doors when our members go and meet with a governor or meet with a state official, suddenly the SHRM name is recognized or they have a little bit of understanding of what HR does or HR’s role.”

So where does SHRM go now? Maroni said as the campaign is more than ads, the company needs to continue moving forward with its message.

“Advertising is only going to reinforce the other parts of the campaign, a big part of which is our earned-media,” he said. “We need to be talking to bloggers like yourself and other kinds of journalists, and people who are writing about business issues, and really educate them and help get interesting newsworthy stories out to them. We need to be doing more activities with prestigious groups. We need to be sponsoring certain kinds of high-profile events.”

SHRM, an organization representing individual human resources professionals, has two missions, said Maroni. The first is to serve the professional by helping them improve their career, being a career partner, helping them grow, and giving them tools, education and training. The second part of SHRM’s mission is to advance and promote the profession to non-HR professionals.

This isn’t SHRM’s first stab at promoting the HR profession, and the organization has previously sponsored PBS shows, events and award shows.

Maroni said when conducting research on previous efforts, the organization looked at three target audiences: the “c suite” or CEO, CFO and other people touched by those positions; people that may be in the “c suite” in five years and opinion leaders

Maroni said through focus group research, SHRM learned the messages being used to advance the profession with non-HR professionals didn’t resonate. He said people’s views about HR are usually personal, ingrained and sometimes negative. “HR is a very low interest issue,” he said. “It’s not like Iraq or abortion or the Supreme Court or water boarding. It is not an issue that resonates. It’s not an issue that people think about.”