Companies spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how customers, media, influencers, investors, and other external audiences experience their brands. But there is another audience experiencing the brand every day: the people who work there.
Your workforce is the most important group of brand ambassadors you have.
I'm not suggesting employees should become an unpaid sales force, memorize the corporate elevator pitch, or start reposting company content on LinkedIn. Real brand ambassadorship starts much earlier than that.
Employees need to understand what the organization stands for. They need to recognize how their work contributes to it. And, perhaps most importantly, they need to see those values reflected in how the company communicates with them and treats them on a daily basis.
During my time at Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies, we approached that challenge in a couple of very different ways.
Sometimes you put a cape on your brand ambassadors
We wanted to inspire engagement within our commercial organization and recognize people demonstrating the kinds of behaviors that helped the business succeed.
We could have sent a congratulatory email.
Instead, we turned them into superheroes.
Our Commercial Heroes campaign created custom-illustrated characters around real employees and their contributions. The stories celebrated behaviors such as breaking down silos, improving processes, supporting sales, seeing opportunities across the product portfolio, and building meaningful customer relationships.
There was Silo Buster, recognizing someone who brought teams together and looked at customer needs differently. There was Process Transformer, recognizing work that streamlined an inefficient process. Captain Cross Sell celebrated someone who looked beyond traditional market segments and embraced the broader product portfolio. And Brand Ambassador recognized someone whose interactions with colleagues and customers embodied the values behind the brand.
It was playful. But the strategy behind it wasn't. We weren't simply telling employees what behaviors mattered. We were showing employees what those behaviors looked like when real people put them into practice. That's an important distinction.
A list of corporate values on an intranet tells people what the organization says it values.
A story about a colleague demonstrates what the organization actually values.
Other times, you simply turn the camera toward the real heroes
Another internal communications project at Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies did not require fictional superheroes. The real heroes were already there: a cross-functional team that came together to make the seemingly impossible possible.
The company needed to dramatically increase production of the Spectra Optia Apheresis System while continuing to meet global demand and protect the quality standards patients and customers depended on. People across purchasing, planning, engineering, manufacturing, service, and other functions stepped beyond their usual boundaries, solved problems together, and kept the work moving.
The video turned the camera toward that collective effort. Employees described the small changes that created big results, the daily communication that kept everyone aligned, and the shared commitment to quality that guided every decision.
More than a story for the employee newsletter, the video was an investment in recognition that mattered. It gave people the opportunity to see their work—and one another’s contributions—as part of an extraordinary achievement. It recognized not just the outcome, but the collaboration, persistence, and trust that made the outcome possible.
That is what meaningful recognition can do. It tells employees that the organization noticed how they showed up, understood what their effort required, and valued the way they worked together.
And it made the brand tangible—not through a logo, tagline, or set of guidelines, but through people living the company’s promises when the stakes were high.
Connect the work to something bigger
The most powerful part of that story, to me, wasn't that employees successfully increased production.
It was where the story ultimately went.
The video moved beyond machines, production schedules, sales, and revenue to the people who would ultimately be affected by the devices. One employee talked about the patients who needed the technology and the families surrounding those patients. The closing message brought the story directly back to employees:
"Your work impacts our company and countless patients. Thank you."
That's when internal communications can become something more than information distribution.
It creates a line of sight:
I did this → our team accomplished this → our company delivered this → someone's life may be affected by it.
That connection can be difficult to see from someone's desk, workstation, manufacturing line, or daily list of tasks.
Communications can make it visible.
Your employees don't need talking points. They need a reason to believe them.
This is where I think companies sometimes get brand ambassadorship backward. We develop the brand platform. Create the messaging framework. Produce the PowerPoint. Train employees on the new language. Then we hope they'll become ambassadors for it.
Employees don't become ambassadors because they know the approved words. They become ambassadors when their own experience tells them those words are true.
· If a company says collaboration matters, recognize the people who break down silos
· If innovation matters, tell the stories of employees who improve something that everyone else accepted as "just the way we do it"
· If customer commitment matters, connect employees' everyday decisions to actual customer outcomes
· If purpose matters, help people see the human being at the other end of their work
And if employees are doing extraordinary things, sometimes the smartest thing a communicator can do is simply point the spotlight toward them.
Before looking outside, look inside
· Influencers can introduce your brand
· Advertising can amplify it
· PR can build credibility around it
· Your employees live it
Employees see whether the organization's internal reality matches its external promise. They experience the decisions, behaviors, tradeoffs, and culture behind the messaging.
That makes them extraordinarily credible brand ambassadors.
So before asking employees to share your brand story, there's a more important question to ask:
Are you helping them see themselves in it?
Because some of the best brand stories you'll ever tell may already be happening inside your organization. You just have to notice them.