Monster recommits to branding and marketing to keep up with competition

Following a decade and a half of leading the pack in online job markets, Monster rested on its laurels, and found itself falling from grace.

The company had stopped innovating on its core product and pumped all marketing spend into low-funnel media at the expense of its brand. At the same time, new competitors emerged with different approaches to the market.

“If you look at how we were engaging with audiences, a lot of that is part of the story,” said Monster CMO Jonathan Beamer. “We got really enamored with the lowest-funnel attribution tied to media. We stopped advertising above the line. We stopped reaching out to passive candidates in a meaningful way.”

As LinkedIn, Indeed and other challengers appeared with different features and value propositions to job-seekers, Monster’s audience began to skew older and less active.

“Those folks are less likely to be entry level,” Beamer said. “That kind of bent the cycle.”

Beamer began consulting for Monster in 2017 and joined the company as CMO the same year. His first course of action: Revive the Monster brand. That required loosening its grip on attribution, reaching out to new prospects and measuring against higher-level brand metrics.“We know we still have to harvest our customers, but we’ve shifted focus to make sure we’re reaching out to the rest of the population,” Beamer said.

Monster also fine-tuned its messaging. In mid-April, the company launched a video campaign with its agency, MullenLowe, that highlights some of the challenges of finding a job. Monster built the campaign to appeal to younger job seekers, catching them first with in-feed or pre-roll video and then running look-alike models to find similar audiences.

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