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.

• Topic Participants

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• 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 to delete attachments form Zoho mail accounts

  I can't find a way to delete attachments from Zoho mail messages, either individually or in bulk. Searches here are providing conflicting results and often talk about workspace, whereas I am only interested in how to delete attachments that are seen with

• Unable to fetch ticket by custom field value

  I'm trying to set up a Flow to fetch a ticket based on a custom field value. This seems like it should be pretty straightforward, but it's not working for me. I keep getting an error saying Zoho Desk says "Extra query parameter 'cf_creator_record_id'

• Zoho Inventory - Composite Items - Assembly - Single Line Item Quantity of One

  Hi Zoho Inventory Team, Please consider relaxing the system rules which prevent an assembly items from consisting of a single line item and outputting a quantity of 1. A client I'm currently working with sells cosmetics and offers testers of their products

• What's New in Zoho Inventory | Q2 2025

  Hello Customers, The second quarter have been exciting months for Zoho Inventory! We’ve introduced impactful new features and enhancements to help you manage inventory operations with even greater precision and control. While we have many more exciting

• Zoho POS App Hanging Issue – Sales Becoming Difficult

  The Zoho POS app frequently hangs and becomes unresponsive during billing, making it very difficult to complete sales smoothly. This commonly happens while adding items, during checkout, or at payment time, especially during peak hours. These issues cause

• Writing by Hand in "Write" Notes

  Hi there! I just downloaded this app a few moments ago, and I was wondering if there was a way to write things by hand in "Write" mode instead of just typing in the keyboard. It would make things a bit more efficient for me in this moment. Thanks!

• "Spreadsheet Mode" for Fast Bulk Edits

  One of the challenges with using Zoho Inventory is when bulk edits need to be done via the UI, and each value that needs to be changed is different. A very common use case here is price changes. Often, a price increase will need to be implemented, and

• SAML in Zoho One vs Zoho Accounts

  What is the difference between setting up SAML in Zoho Accounts: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/accounts/manage-your-organization/saml/articles/configure-saml-in-zoho-accounts ... vs SAML in Zoho One?: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/one/admin-guide/custom-authentication/setting-up-custom-authentication-with-popular-idps/articles/zohoone-customauthentication-azure

• Zoho Inventory. Preventing Negative Stock in Sales Orders – Best Practices?

  Dear Zoho Inventory Community, We’re a small business using Zoho Inventory with a team of sales managers. Unfortunately, some employees occasionally overlook stock levels during order processing, leading to negative inventory issues. Is there a way to

• Deactivated Zoho One account can sign in

  I am concerned by the fact that deactivated users in Zoho One have the ability to sign in even after their account has been deactivated (not deleted). these inactive identities have no access to individual Zoho apps or data. based on my experience they

• How can I reset the password for a user in Zoho Projects

  We need to reset the password for a user in Zoho Projects. I am the admin portal owner and there was nothing to be found to do this. very confusing.

• How can I add a comment to an existing ticket via API?

  I need to add comments/notes to the history of an existing ticket using the API without overwriting the original ticket description. Thanks!

• Marketer's Space: Proven tips to improve open rates – Part III

  Hello Marketers! Welcome back to another post in Marketer's Space! This is the final post in the "open rate series". In the first and second parts, we discussed topics ranging from sender domains to pre-headers—but we're not done yet. A few more important

• MCP no longer works with Claude

  Anyone else notice Zoho MCP no longer works with Claude? I'm unable to turn this on in the claude chat. When I try to toggle it on, it just does nothing at all. I've tried in incognito, new browsers, etc. - nothing seems to work.

• Attention Deluge Developers: Important Update Regarding "Send Email Deluge Task"

  Hi Deluge Users, We hope this message finds you well. We would like to inform you about a recent update on the Send emails deluge task. If you are using this deluge task (SalesIQ Scripts) for your Zobot, widgets, or form controllers to send emails, please

• Zoho Social - Feature Request - Reviewer Role

  Hi Social Team, I've come across this with a couple of clients, where they need a role which can review and comment on posts but who has no access to create content. This is a kind of reviewer role. They just need to be able to see what content is scheduled

• Zoho Books/Inventory - Update Marketplace Sales Order via API

  Hi everyone, Does anyone know if there is a way to update Sales Orders created from a marketplace intigration (Shopify in this case) via API? I'm trying to cover a scenario where an order is changed on the Shopify end and the changes must be reflected

• Zoho Inventory / Finance Suite - Add feature to prevent duplicate values in Item Unit field

  I've noticed that a client has 2 values the same in the Unit field on edit/create Items. This surprised me as why would you have 2 units with the same name. Please consider adding a feature which prevents this as it seems to serve no purpose.

• Kaizen #224 - Quote-driven Deal Reconciliation Using Zoho CRM Functions and Automation

  Hello everyone! Welcome back to another instalment in the Kaizen series. This post covers quote-driven deal reconciliation, emphasizing Functions and Automation to address practical sales challenges. Business Challenge Sales organizations often mark deals

• BARCODE PICKLIST

  Hello! Does anyone know how the Picklist module works? I tried scanning the barcode using the UPC and EAN codes I added to the item, but it doesn’t work. Which barcode format does this module use for scanning?

• Zoho Inventory - Allow Update of Marketplace Generated Sales Orders via API

  Hi Inventory Team, I was recently asked by a client to create an automation which updated a Zoho Inventory Sales Order if a Shopify Order was updated. I have created the script but I found that the request is blocked as the Sales Order was generated by

• How do I create an update to the Cost Price from landed costs?

  Hi fellow Zoho Inventory battlers, I am new to Zoho inventory and was completely baffled to find that the cost price of products does not update when a new purchase order is received. The cost price is just made up numbers I start with when the product

• Zoho OAuth Connector Deprecation and Its Impact on Zoho Desk

  Hello everyone, Zoho believes in continuously refining its integrations to uphold the highest standards of security, reliability, and compliance. As part of this ongoing improvement, the Zoho OAuth default connector will be deprecated for all Zoho services

• VoC in Zoho CRM is now data savvy: Explore response drilldown, summary components and participation in CRM criteria

  VoC has all the goods when it comes to customer intelligence—which is why we're constantly enhancing it. We recently added the following: A customer drilldown component that shows you the list of prospects and customers behind a chart's attribute Expanded

• How do I bulk archive my projects in ZOHO projects

  Hi, I want to archive 50 Projects in one go. Can you please help me out , How can I do this? Thanks kapil

• Passing the CRM

  Hi, I am hoping someone can help. I have a zoho form that has a CRM lookup field. I was hoping to send this to my publicly to clients via a text message and the form then attaches the signed form back to the custom module. This work absolutely fine when

• Can I add Conditional merge tags on my Templates?

  Hi I was wondering if I can use Conditional Mail Merge tags inside my Email templates/Quotes etc within the CRM? In spanish and in our business we use gender and academic degree salutations , ie: Dr., Dra., Sr., Srta., so the beginning of an email / letter

• Zoho Browser??

  hai guys, this sounds awkward but can v get a ZOHO BROWSER same as zoho writer, etc. where i can browse websites @ home and continue browsing the same websites @ my office, as v have the option in Firefox, once i save and close the browser and again when i open it i will be getting the same sites. If u people r not clear with my explanation, plz let me know. Thanks, Sandeep  

• Let’s Talk Recruit: LinkedIn Cheatsheet

  Welcome to the first edition of Let’s Talk Recruit for 2026. We are kicking off the year by revisiting one of the most asked about topics in Zoho Recruit. How our LinkedIn integrations actually work and how recruiters can get the most value from them.

• Zoho Forms API

  Is there any way to get all form entry list using API? Looking forward to hear from you

• Ability to Set Client Name During Portal Invitation

  Hi Zoho Team, We would like to suggest an important enhancement to the Zoho Creator Client Portal functionality. Zoho Creator recently introduced the option to set a client’s display name in the Client Portal settings, which is very helpful for creating

• Move email between inboxes?

  Is it possible to move emails from one team inbox to another? We would like to be able to have a single "catch-all" inbox for incoming requests, and then move the email to the appropriate department inbox. I was hoping we would be able to accomplish this

• PDF Attachment Option for Service Reports

  Hello Team, I would like to check with you all if there is an option to attach PDF documents to the service reports. When I try to attach a file, the system only allows the following formats: JPEG, JPG, and PNG. Could you please confirm whether PDF attachments

• 【Zoho CRM】データ一覧画面でのメモのバッジ機能リリースのお知らせ

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの藤澤です。2026年度もゾーホーユーザーコミュニティをどうぞよろしくお願いいたします！ 今回は「Zoho CRM アップデート情報」の中から、新機能のデータ一覧画面でのメモのバッジ機能をご紹介します。 目次 概要　メモのバッジ機能について メモの作成について メモに関する様々な処理について 最近追加したメモについて メモのバッジの非表示について クライアントスクリプトの対応 概要　 メモのバッジ機能について 既存の活動バッジに加えて、すべてのタブのデータ一覧表示画面に、各データごとに利用できる「メモのバッジ」（キャプチャ内の赤枠部分）が新たに導入されました。

• is it possible to add more than one Whatsapp Phone Number to be integrated to Zoho CRM?

  so I have successfully added one Whatsapp number like this from this User Interface it seems I can't add a new Whatsapp Number. I need to add a new Whatsapp Number so I can control the lead assignment if a chat sent to Whatsapp Phone Number 1 then assign

• Can’t find fsm in zoho one

  Every other app is available to me in Zoho one except fsm

• Posibility to add Emoticons on the Email Subject of Templates

  Hi I´ve tried to add Emoticons on the Subject line of Email templates, the emoticon image does show up before saving the template or if I add the Emoticon while sending an Individual email and placing it manually on the subject line. Emoticons also show

• Task Deletion Restriction & Strict Stage Control

  Hello Zoho Community, We have the following two issues currently pending and under testing, for which we require a workable and reliable solution: 1. Task Deletion Restriction We are testing ways to ensure that staff users are not able to delete tasks

• Unable to mass update a picklist field

  Hello, I have the records within our Accounts module divided between two account types: Parent Accounts & Member Accounts. I am attempting to mass update accounts from one picklist value to the other (within other specific criteria in our custom fields)

• Process checklist in CRM

  Hi We've created a new sales process that I'm mapping into the CRM - issue I have is that some of the tasks / milestones I would like to capture require very simple tick box responses but there are quite a few under a variety of sub categories so I don't

• Next Page