With Great Brand Culture Comes Great Employee Advocacy

With Great Brand Culture Comes Great Employee Advocacy


During a visit to the NASA space centre in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?” “Well, Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” 

To most people, this janitor was just cleaning the building. But in the more mythic, larger story unfolding around him, he was helping to make history.

That a janitor is so well-aligned with the mission and vision of NASA is the result of a great brand culture.

What is a brand culture?


The e-book Telling Your Brand Story from Zoho Academy states:

Your brand’s story is much more than your “company bio.” It’s everything from the colors on your website to your packaging materials to the way your employees answer the phone and banter with your customers on social media. It includes your origins, your goals, your inspiration, your challenges, your target audience and their experiences with your company. It’s even the stuff you don’t have control over, including how your prospects and customers perceive what you do and interpret what you say. In short, it’s the sum total of who you are, all you do, and everything people believe about you based on the signals you send.

When your brand story is consistent and has been owned by every stakeholder of your company, it creates a solid brand culture.

Zappos is a good example of a brand that is very proud of its culture. Even the interview and hiring process at Zappos are designed to learn about the candidate's compatibility to fit in Zappo's organizational culture (50% weightage).

If a candidate is hired by Zappos, they can expect to spend their first three to four weeks manning phones in their call center learning how to respond to customer needs. This, in a way, is an introduction to the soul of the business. Upon completion of their time in the call center, Zappos employees are offered $3,000 to leave the company. If you haven't become a Zappos insider, committed to the goals and the culture, the company really prefers that you leave. Take the money, though, and you can never come back.

What happens when your employees are aligned with your brand culture?


They tell your story to the world.








When your employees share your story widely, it gives your brand a word of mouth boost, which is better than any form of marketing. [A report from Pew Research Centre found that word of mouth was the top point of influence for buyers.]

Let's do some quick math. I'll try to calculate the organic reach of your social media post with some assumptions. Say your brand has 300K fans on facebook while you have 200 employees who are active on social media and can share positively about your brand from their profile.

When you post from your brand page, your organic reach is this:
300,000 X 6.4% (average organic reach of an FB post) = 19,200 impressions

When your employees post about you:
200 advocates X 338 friends each (avg. number of friends) X 33% of friends seeing the post = 22,308 impressions

Remember, the average organic reach of a Facebook post is declining every year, so the posts from your brand page are going to fetch you less and less views in coming years.

Employee advocacy will be your positive word-of-mouth marketing that helps create a favorable brand image with larger organic reach. It will also help you fetch the right talent when you have a job opening.

How to convert employees into brand advocates


Sending a memo asking employees to be your brand advocates is a bad idea. Asking someone to write positively about you in public will always prompt a "what's-in-it-for-me?" attitude from the employee. Instead, win over them and trust them to post naturally.

Some employees will already be posting more about your business than others or have a more engaged audience. Identify your top socially active employees and give them the opportunity to build their thought leadership further by including them in your social media strategy.

Here are few actionable tips:

  1. Brand culture: Like how the janitor at NASA, your employees—no matter their department—should own your brand's vision. Cultivate this by re-iterating the vision and goal in meetings, emails to employees, your own social media posts, posters around the office, and through your actions. For example, start office yoga classes if your vision is related to health or fitness. Don't let your folks forget what you're working to achieve.
  2. SWAG: Who doesn't like a cool swag? Give your employees a t-shirt, a coffee mug, or even a cool hat with your logo on it. If they love your swag, there are two advantages: one, they will advocate about it in their social media space, and two, when they wear the swag in public, it's free advertising for you. Plus, swag increases the bonding between companies and employees.
  3. Celebrations: Celebrate days like Employee Appreciation Day, which falls on the first Friday of every March. Make your team members feel important and appreciated.
  4. Indirect campaign: Start a social media campaign with a hashtag and send a mailer inviting employees to participate. For example, "Best Selfie with colleague wins a prize. Use hashtag #(YourBrandName)Fun." You could also have them host a Twitter chat around a topic in your industry or perhaps help them create a longer piece of content like a blog post or video that you can then promote on both the employee’s Twitter account and on your brand account.
  5. Surprises: Surprise and delight your employees by sending them gifts on their birthdays or anniversaries. They might spread the word. Worth a shot!
Once you organically convert your employees into brand advocates, they will begin posting positive things they experience in the workplace—whether morning yoga, team lunch, employee appreciation gifts, or an employee awards function. As they start sharing their experiences with the world, your brand will get the right kind of exposure—and hopefully increased traffic via genuine word-of-mouth marketing.


    • Sticky Posts

    • 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

      Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

    • Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

      Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage

    • Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

      According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,

    • How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

      Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the

    • The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

      Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell?  Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging

      • Recent Topics

      • How do I see the total leads during a certain period?

        I understand I can get the count of leads and potentials but the total number of leads in a certain period should be equal to Leads+potentials because when we convert a lead it gets moved to potentials and no longer exists there. is there a way i could

      • How do you print a refund check to customer?

        Maybe this is a dumb question, but how does anyone print a refund check to a customer? We cant find anywhere to either just print a check and pick a customer, or where to do so from a credit note.

      • Enable Screen Recording in Zoho WorkDrive Mobile Apps (Android & iOS)

        Hi Zoho WorkDrive Team, How are you? We are enthusiastic Zoho One users and rely heavily on Zoho WorkDrive for internal collaboration and content sharing. The screen-recording feature in the WorkDrive web app (similar to Loom) is extremely useful- however,

      • Scheduling a meeting for just a 1:1 phone call

        My business is B2C and many of my customer's don't want to engage in an online meeting for what can be handled in a regular phone call. I am trying to create a new meeting invitation, but there is no venue optoin for "phone call". How are other's handling

      • What is Resolution Time in Business Hours

        HI, What is the formula used to find the total time spent by an agent on a particular ticket? How is Resolution Time in Business Hours calculated in Zohodesk? As we need to find out the time spent on the ticket's solution by an agent we seek your assistance

      • Send Whatsapp message from Whatsapp template with custom variables

        Hi, I'm trying to do some basic integration for sending WhatsApp messages from Zoho CRM using Zoho Desk whatsapp templates. When creating new whatsapp template in Zoho Desk we can choose ticket related fields as variables but it's not clear how to use

      • Good news! Calendar in Zoho CRM gets a face lift

        Dear Customers, We are delighted to unveil the revamped calendar UI in Zoho CRM. With a complete visual overhaul aligned with CRM for Everyone, the calendar now offers a more intuitive and flexible scheduling experience. What’s new? Distinguish activities

      • Empowered Custom Views: Cross-Module Criteria Now Supported in Zoho CRM

        Hello everyone, We’re excited to introduce cross-module criteria support in custom views! Custom views provide personalized perspectives on your data and that you can save for future use. You can share these views with all users or specific individuals

      • Change Currency symbol

        I would like to change the way our currency displays when printed on quotes, invoices and purchase orders. Currently, we have Australian Dollars AUD as our Home Currency. The only two symbol choices available for this currency are "AU $" or "AUD". I would

      • File Field Validation

        Hello all, We are tracking our customer NDA agreements in our CRM and have created 2 fields to do so, an execution date field and a file upload field. I want to create a validation rule to ensure that when the execution date field is populated that the

      • Hide "Section" headers when using a form as a subform in "List view"

        When using a form as a subform and setting the "View Type" to "List View" it is not possible to hide the section headers. This can become an issue if I have a section which is not applicable to this subform and I hide the fields within that section and

      • Super Admin Logging in as another User

        How can a Super Admin login as another user. For example, I have a sales rep that is having issues with their Accounts and I want to view their Zoho Account with out having to do a GTM and sharing screens. Moderation Update (8th Aug 2025): We are working

      • Users Name & Email in Reports

        Hi, I would like to show the Users Name from their Zoho Acount in All Entries/Reports as well as the current Account Email. Thanks Dan

      • Add additional field to quick search results

        IN the advanced search, we can add any field to the columns. In the regular search results (before you press enter, there is no option to modify the results. It would be super useful to include a custom field where it currently displays the pipleine

      • Books API Receiving an Error that Doesn't Make Sense when Creating Credit Note - trying to use 'ignore_auto_number_generation' argument

        Hello, I'm working on a newly created routine and I'm getting an error that doesn't make sense when trying to create a new Credit Note. Here is my POST request. Endpoint: https://www.zohoapis.com/books/v3/creditnotes?organization_id=########## Body:     {

      • Bug Report and Suggestions for Improvement in Zoho Applications

        Hi Zoho Team, I’d like to report a few bugs and improvement suggestions I’ve noticed while using Zoho products: Zoho Cliq Video Call: The camera sometimes turns off automatically during video calls. This seems to be a bug — please check and fix it. Zoho

      • Audio/video quality issues with Zoho Meeting – Any roadmap for improvement?

        Hi Zoho Team, We’ve been using Zoho Meeting for both internal and external meetings, and unfortunately, the experience has been consistently poor. The video and audio quality are so unreliable that it often renders meetings ineffective—especially with

      • AI generated meeting notes associated to Account or Deal

        As our organization works to improve efficiency we are looking for a solution to leverage AI to generate meeting notes and then add those notes to a CRM record such as an Account or Deal. I see Zoho has a Notebook AI offering that talks about the ability

      • Need Help: Updating Related Records via Subform Entries in Zoho Creator

        Hi everyone, I’m trying to set up a workflow in Zoho Creator where each row in a subform updates related records in another form automatically. Here’s the situation: My main form (e.g., “Receipts”) contains a subform where each row selects a related record

      • Zoho Desk - Community - Customer Portal - Description Field UX Improvement

        Hi Zoho Desk Team, As a prolific user of Zoho Cares Community, I find it very frustrating that I cannot increase the size of the Description box (this one which I am typing this message). Many apps with multi line text fields have a small handle in the

      • Add the same FROM email to multiple department

        Hi, We have several agents who work with multiple departments and we'd like to be able to select their names on the FROM field (sender), but apparently it's not possible to add a FROM address to multiple departments. Is there any way around this? Thanks.

      • Can I change the format of the buttons in the email templates?

        Hi all! We have been working hard trying to brand our email templates, and have some way to go yet. One of the things we can't seem to edit is the green ${Cases.CUSTOMER_PORTAL_BUTTON} button and the font of the View Ticket text. Is there any way of doing

      • Introducing parent-child ticketing in Zoho Desk [Early access]

        Hello Zoho Desk users! We have introduced the parent-child ticketing system to help customer service teams ensure efficient resolution of issues involving multiple, related tickets. You can now combine repetitive and interconnected tickets into parent-child

      • I NEED MORE CUSTOM FIELDS!!!

        Why can I only have 60 custom fields!  It's not enough.  I want another 100 extra custom fields to do what's necessary for my business!  I'm sure I can't be the only one with this problem!!! How hard would it be to fix this?  Just fix it for me please at least!

      • Call transcrition working for ringcentral?

        I don't see anything about what telephony providers can be used. The Zoho support person A said that RingCentral isn't supported. Zoho support person B said that it works, just make sure the call recording link works. Excellent instructions here: Call

      • Zoho Analytics - Feature Request For Time Based Data Source Fetch

        Hi Analytics Team, I have a client using Zoho CRM and they want a weekly report at 4:30pm every Friday, emailed to the sales team showing a pie chart of Closed Won Deals for that week. This is easy to achieve in Analytics but not so easy to ensure the

      • Zero Personalization of the File Sharing Experience

        By now (2025) this is the maximum level of personalization available for a Zoho sharing link. We gently asked Zoho if we could modify at least the background, and they replied that it cannot be customized. We're truly disappointed – and surprised every

      • Lead to Contact Conversion with multiple email address fields

        We are a B2C business with a strong repeat cycle, and as such it's not uncommon for customers to use multiple email addresses with us. We have both our Contacts & Leads modules set up with 3 email fields. (Primary Email / Secondary Email / Historic Email)

      • Introducing Dark Mode / Light Mode : A New Look For Your CRM

        Hello Users, We are excited to announce a highly anticipated feature - the launch of Day, Night and Auto Mode implementation in Zoho CRM's NextGen user interface! This feature is designed to provide a visually appealing and comfortable experience for

      • Does Thrive work with Zoho Billing (Subscriptions)?

        I would like to use Thrive with Zoho Billing Subscriptions but don't see a way to do so. Can someone point me in the right direction? Thank you

      • Resizing a Record Template Background Inage

        Hi everyone, I have an issue which I can't seem to resolve: Basically, I'm designing a record template in certificate form. I've specified A5 landscape. I've set my background image the same dimensions with total pixels at 443,520. Whatever I try, when

      • Exporting Charts from ZohoCRM

        Hi...I'm relatively new to ZohoCRM, but very happy with it so far. I have all my leads and potentials accurately entered, and like the reports that I can view, with charts at the top of the data. But when I export the data, I'm receiving only the data, whether I export as excel, csv or pdf. How can I export both the chart and the data? In case it makes a difference, I'm using the free version right now. I tried researching the other editions to see if a paid version of the software offered the ability

      • Zoho CRM - Scheduled Reports Which Contain Chart

        Hi Zoho CRM Team, I'm requesting that the Report Export and Scheduling feature be enhanced to include a chart, if one has been created on a report. At the moment I have a report which shows Sales This Week by Deal Owner and a pie chart at the top of the

      • Show price book list price

        When using price books, once you add products to the price book in the Products related list you can display the Unit price which is the default list price; however, there is no option to show the price book list price. To see the price book list price

      • Zoho FSM API Delete Record

        Hi FSM Team, It would be great if you could delete a record via API. Thank you,

      • "Authorize to Access Your Account"

        Hi, I'm trying to log into cliq on my phone but I can't. It says "Authorize to access your account - Verify your identity to access your account using oneAuth credentials", and asks for a password. I tried maybe 100 different passwords and nothing works.

      • Automatically Update Ticket Status in Zoho Desk Based on Actions in Zoho Projects

        Hi Zoho Desk Team, Hope you’re doing well. We’re using the Zoho Desk–Zoho Projects integration to manage tasks related to customer tickets, and it works well for linking and tracking progress. However, there are a few important automation capabilities

      • All new Address Field in Zoho CRM: maintain structured and accurate address inputs

        The address field will be available exclusively for IN DC users. We'll keep you updated on the DC-specific rollout soon. It's currently available for all new sign-ups and for existing Zoho CRM orgs which are in the Professional edition. Managing addresses

      • sms long credits

        I’m trying to purchase Long Code credits so I can send SMS campaigns to my contacts. However, when I click the “Buy Now” button, the page appears blank and doesn’t load any purchase options. Could you please assist me in purchasing the Long Code credits

      • Whatsapp Limitation Questions

        Good day, I would like to find out about the functionality or possibility of all the below points within the Zoho/WhatsApp integration. Will WhatsApp buttons ever be possible in the future? Will WhatsApp Re-directs to different users be possible based

      • Next Page