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The Longevity Lessons: Coley Porter Bell (est. 1978)

From Tesco own-brand and British Gas to Boots and Lego, Coley Porter Bell has straddled packaging and corporate identity for nearly half a century.

CEO Vicky Bullen, who joined in 1995, explains how optimising its position in WPP, changing with the times, and staying relatively small have helped the agency survive.

Coley Porter Bell CEO Vicky Bullen

How did Coley Porter Bell begin?

It was a breakaway from Fitch, where Jim Coley, Colin Porter and Sally Bell had been brought up by Rodney Fitch thinking about brand.

They set up in 1978, with Coley and Porter leading creative, and office manager Bell doing everything from finance to client service.

Their original clients, Guinness and M&S, came with them from Fitch.

Sadly Coley, who had been ill with a brain tumour, died in 1980.

In the 1980s, the economy peaked and troughed. How did that impact the business?

At the beginning of the decade, the economy was booming and design was growing up – shifting from being somewhat of a craft business to a professional service, and importantly, from going from design to brand.

CPB began to grow fast. CEO Jan Hall was a marketing and new business dynamo, and she took the agency from small to medium-sized in the first half of the 1980s.

Big FMCG wins came along like Tesco – the largest ever own-brand rebrand, we believe. The agency scaled rapidly to deliver that project, and it led to a 10-year client relationship.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Tesco own-brand

But towards the end of the decade, when there was concern that another recession was heading down the tracks, the team felt they needed to be part of something bigger to weather a storm. So they started talking to potential buyers.

A conversation with Sam Sampson, who had sold Sampson Tyrrell to WPP in 1986, led to us being bought by WPP in 1989.

This was a time when agencies were being snapped up by the big networks. How did being part of WPP impact on the business?

Soon after joining WPP the recession hit, so growth was sluggish.

However, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell took a keen interest in the new acquisition, and often made introductions to the CEOs and marketing directors of WPP clients, which was a real boost for business.

And Porter and Hall worked hard to meet their WPP counterparts, to look for opportunities.

By the mid-1990s, the leadership team, under new CEO Helena Rees, was starting to have differing opinions about what kind of business they wanted CPB to be.

A few years later, Simon John and Stephen Franks, who joined as group creative directors in the early 1980s, left to set up their own things.

When you’re part of WPP, you’re expected to grow, and that’s absolutely fair enough. We need to give a return to our shareholders.

It wasn’t that John and Franks didn’t want to grow, but they wanted to stay more of a boutique size.

How did CPB boost its reputation for corporate identity work?

A pivotal win was British Gas in 1993, which had been privatised. At this time, corporate identity was all about the logo, and brand wasn’t a word that was used.

Porter’s team believed that brand was just as important in corporate design as in packaging, and that was quite unusual at the time.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for British Gas

CPB pitched against Sampson Tyrrell and other traditional identity agencies. There was a sense that CPB’s win annoyed the whole industry, because we were seen as a packaging agency.

In fact, we already had corporate work, but British Gas brought more our way, like the Environment Agency and BT.

How did the agency reposition for the future?

At the end of the 1980s, our new CEO Amanda Connolly did an agency reset.

The business had done really well through the 1980s. And there was a feeling in the 1990s of, right, where are we going next?

Connolly commissioned some client research which told us that CPB was seen as the Rolls Royce of design companies – brilliant at its craft, top of its game, but a bit traditional, part of the old guard, and extremely premium.

I never worry about being expensive as long as you’re delivering brilliant quality. But there’s something wrong with being a bit fusty and dusty.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Boots

Connolly reframed the offer around strategy and creative. She wanted us to be the agency that dug deep to understand brands. She created the visual planning product, to introduce a new way of thinking about brands.

And she made sure that the business had a very strong strategy offer. We’d always had a strategic approach, but we hadn’t had strategists until then.

To this end, Connolly brought in Beth Barry, ex-EMEA planning director at WPP-owned Ogilvy, one of the sharpest brains in planning, and a really established name. That was a massive coup.

In 1999, we lost our final founding partner, as Porter – who was then chairman – followed Bell and left to set up his own thing again.

By now, CPB was working very closely with WPP-owned ad agency Ogilvy, becoming their brand identity partner.

What impact did working with Ogilvy have?

Connolly was reporting directly into Sorrell, but WPP got so big that it was no longer tenable for one of the smaller agencies to be reporting that way.

We could have reported into the Brand to Design Group – the WPP division that included Enterprise, Landor, Addison, Lambie Nairn and The Partners.

But we thought, if we go in there, everybody’s going to be fighting for the same bits of new business.

Meanwhile, when Ogilvy were talking to clients about brand and brand identity, they wanted to have expert partners.

We thought we’d have a better chance to grow with Ogilvy, because we would have a more global outlook and would be able to explore new business opportunities with its clients.

We didn’t want to lose all our FMCG business, but we felt that we’d become quite FMCG-focused, and quite local.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Tesco finest

We also felt we needed a US office, so in 2019 we opened in New York. That made a difference, not just in terms of working on US brands, but for global brands headquartered in the UK, I think we appeared more credible.

Our founding US-based clients, Merck and Nationwide, were both Ogilvy clients. We have 15 people in New York, so we work in blended teams on the US business.

I joined in 1995 as an account director, and took over as CEO in 2005. I sat on the Ogilvy leadership team and so I knew all these people. I still know a lot of them, which is helpful as it gives us such good access.

What’s next for CPB?

Last year, we moved from Ogilvy into the Landor Group, to become a founding part of a new branding network with WPP branding agency CBA.

This new network, which officially launches in January 2026, aims to be the antidote to the monolithic agencies, offering big agency impact with a small agency vibe.

The CBA network was founded in Paris in 1982 and has about 300 people across nine markets. That’s small compared with Landor, which is 1,300 people, Omnicom-owned Interbrand, which has around 650 employees, and 500-strong FutureBrand, which is part of Interpublic Group. But it will give us more global reach.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for the Post Office

There’s some interesting skill-sets in the network, like a fantastic retail and environment design practice in Paris, and some great consumer insight tools in LATAM, which we’ll tap into.

Just sharing the experience and credentials that this network has will be positive for us.

It’s a great opportunity for our people, because they’ll be working with broader, more global teams, in different markets. I think it will help with attracting talent.

The CPB name will remain, because it has got such legacy.

Design and branding is pretty cut-throat. How has CPB survived for nearly half a century?

I think we’re still here because we’ve always adapted. We’ve tried to stay ahead of the game in terms of what brands need.

From the start, we believed in the need for deep consumer insight to get to the right solution.

And then we understood that storytelling was more important. So we developed those skill-sets.

Then we could see that brands needed to think about purpose, brand experience, sustainability. And we brought in the right skill-sets.

We developed a process to deliver unordinary ideas – that are sticky and relevant, and create distinctiveness in a world where differentiation is hard to come by. We’ve embraced AI, and started creating experiences, like the F1 Paddock Club at the British Grand Prix.

The upshot is a massively broad range of work which reflects that ability to move with the times.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for F1

And we’ve chosen our place in WPP very carefully, moving homes within the network, and changing reporting lines.

We’ve always deliberately been WPP’s smallest branding offer, with about 45 people in London, in contrast to stablemates Design Bridge and Partners, which is 900-strong, and Landor.

Being small in the context of WPP agencies means we have to be resourceful, to reach into the network so that we’ve got the right skill-sets, and to be able to scale up and down.

We have to be collaborative, and clients want that, they don’t want bloat in an agency. They want agencies to be simple, agile, lean and dedicated, and staying small has helped us do that. And being small, our clients get access to senior teams.

How do you think CPB is seen by the industry?

Some people say CPB hasn’t done anything radical for a long time. We have done radical things in the past, like Kotex and the Museum of London, but sometimes it’s not right to do something radical.

You have to be super-respectful of very established brand equities – we’re real guardians of iconic brands.

Championing brand ideas-driven creative work that helps our clients grow is a very clear proposition to go out to market with. And it’s something that we can rally our people behind.

Coley Porter Bell’s work for Kotex

We’re very lucky – our people stay. I’ve been here for 30 years and our production director Peter Cottington has been here even longer. About 50% of my leadership team have been here for more than 10 years.

Also, clients come back to us, and clients who’ve moved jobs come back to us. That’s another important part of why we’ve succeeded.

That makes for a very stable business. We look after each other, we’ve got each other’s backs.

And we believe in each other, which makes a huge difference to a business’ longevity. Because when leadership teams start to crack, businesses start to crack.

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“The timeless design lessons I learned creating album covers”

Before the stream. Before the swipe. Before the algorithm decided what your next favourite song was, there was a square sleeve. A piece of print that wasn’t just packaging, but a portal to an infinite number of worlds.

Album covers carried rebellion, intrigue, mood, and message. And sleeve design teaches us how to package identity with permanence, through restraint, intrigue, and intent.

For designers then, and, just about, now, they were a chance to craft identity with pure emotional clarity.

For today’s brand builders, it still holds lessons we’re at risk of forgetting. No room for fluff. No place to hide. Just music and meaning, distilled into 12-inch truths – or more often in my case, the size of a CD case.

Rob Petrie’s album cover for Cream

Instinct and intensity

I learned to design in that space. My first sleeves were made on instinct and intensity, not through focus groups or pitch decks.

From early work with the Liverpool super-club Cream to the precision of the Pet Shop Boys, Electronic, M People and Lightning Seeds, up to my recent collaboration on the Light of Leith Orchestra vinyl cover, it has always been about visual storytelling with tactile resonance.

That need, that urgency, hasn’t faded. It’s shifted.

Album artwork wasn’t there as pure decoration, or at least it wasn’t if it was doing its job properly. It defined.

As a young designer immersed in cutting-edge popular culture, I saw sleeves working harder than ads. A minimalist logo, a cryptic image, a whisper of text – these weren’t aesthetic choices, they were emotional codes.

Rob Petrie’s album cover for The Pet Shop Boys

They spoke directly to those who were listening more deeply. They had to jump out of racks filled with identically sized and shaped products and resonate across gender, generation, and musical tribe.

Cream’s early visual language was built on bold colour and geometric clarity – a kind of visual directness. Hell or High, a water brand I developed at Leith, feels miles apart in theme, but there’s a common design instinct – clarity with soul.

Both aim to create resonance not through noise, but through intentional simplicity.

The best sleeves didn’t tell you everything. They invited you in. And that ethos, of inviting, not instructing, still shapes how we build brands today.

The sensibility lives on

That sleeve sensibility now shows up in places that don’t spin on turntables.

It’s in the clean lines of a gin bottle. Typography that only reveals its true meaning later. The use of mystery, not gimmick, as a strategic choice that rewards the consumer for their intelligence.

Design for brands has become noisier, faster, and more reactive. Throw everything at it, including the hallucinating kitchen sink, and hope for the best. The answer is in there somewhere, right?

Yet the lessons from sleeve design demand a different pace

Craft over complication.
Tone of voice over trend.
Memory over mimicry.

Effing Gin was designed with the same mindset I had in the late 1990s – find the feeling first, then shape the form. It’s not retro. It’s resonant. It carries heritage and rebellion in equal measure.

Ewan’s Cut was equally simple on the surface, featuring typography as the hero and crediting consumers for their film knowledge, with each of the bespoke “film script” labels being a unique reference to a Ewan McGregor film.

Leith’s Ewan’s Cut bottle

We’re told consumers want clarity. That confusion is friction. But sometimes, what isn’t said speaks loudest. The sleeve taught us that often what you don’t see matters most.

As AI generates infinite near-perfect executions, what becomes valuable is imperfection with intention. Authors of meaning, not curators of mood-boards.

Original work that earns its place because someone gave a damn about how it feels.

Design language born on album covers wasn’t obsessed with strategy. It was obsessed with emotion. And that’s the heartbeat that endures. Even now, when building identity for Leith, it’s about authorship. Instinct over process. Feeling over formula.

Not about nostalgia

Don’t get the impression that I’m suggesting we should all get misty-eyed over album sleeves of yore. There are still great designers out there who are making work that really resonates.

Brat by Charli XCX, designed by Brent David Freaney, has had its fair share of recent plaudits but rightly so, and it raises a lot more questions than it answers . Is that really a default font, maybe Arial?“Why does its positioning look deliberately low? Is its “anti-design” stance off-putting, or effectively subversive?

Heavy Heavy by Young Fathers, designed by Hingston Studio, features a mesmerising image created by Jordan Hemingway which is mysterious, cryptic, visceral and indefinable.

We shouldn’t just preserve that language – we should project it forward. It’s not a nostalgic exercise; it’s cultural continuity.
So, what does all this mean for today’s brand builders? A few provocations:

Treat every touchpoint like a record sleeve. Make it crafted, intentional, and desirable.
Reject lazy inspiration. Don’t start with design references. Start with a mood, a feeling, a narrative.
Let mystery lead. Clarity’s great, but intrigue lingers longer.
Make emotional shelf life your metric. The sleeve lasted because it mattered.
Design isn’t about control. It’s about connection.

And if we want brands to mean something, really mean something, we have to remember what the sleeve taught us. Design with intent. Craft with emotion.

Let the square speak, and listen when it does.

Rob Petrie is head of design at Leith.

Rob Petrie’s album cover for Light of Leith Orchestra
Rob Petrie’s album cover for M People

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“We needed a complete reset” – Jaguar MD defends controversial rebrand

The managing director of Jaguar has mounted a robust defence of the car company’s much-discussed rebrand.

Rawdon Glover, who has been with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) for 12 years and steering the Jaguar business since 2023, was interviewed by Jon Evans on his Uncensored CMO podcast. The episode was titled, Jaguar Relaunch – Genius or Marketing Madness?

Last year, Jaguar unveiled a controversial rebrand, and a few weeks later its new concept car, the Type 00. It became the big design story of the year, and while the brand insisted it needed to make sweeping changes to attract new buyers, many people were shocked by the new designs.

But Glover told Uncensored CMO that Jaguar should be a brand that divided opinion.

“A new Jaguar shouldn’t land and everybody goes, yeah that’s nice,” he said. “We are fine with polarising. What we shouldn’t do is try and be loved by everybody… you’ll end up with vanilla – six, seven out of ten.”

The commercial strategy behind the new car, Glover explained, is to sell “relatively small numbers at elevated price points.” In that context, he said that having some people love, and some people hate, the new design isn’t a problem.

And he drew a comparison with the launch of the E-Type in 1961, which also caused some controversy. “That’s Jaguar at its very best,” Glover said. “That’s what Jaguar should do.”

Glover said he and the team were unconcerned by the furore around the rebrand, because a key part of the marketing strategy was “to get people saying, ‘What is going on at Jaguar’?”

“We just wanted people to acknowledge that Jaguar was doing something that was different,” he said. “The whole purpose of that two-week build-up was to get as many eyeballs as possible on the unveiling of the new design language.”

The new Jaguar logo, by Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house design team

Despite Glover’s upbeat analysis, there were reports earlier this year that JLR was reviewing its relationship with Accenture Song given the reaction to the new branding. Glover wasn’t asked about this, and it’s not clear if the two parties are still working together.

The need for change

Glover said that the bold departures of the new designs – both of the visual identity and the cars themselves – were necessary, given the challenges facing Jaguar when they embarked on this work.

He mentioned the massive changes in both the technological landscape, with electrification and self-driving vehicles, and the competitive landscape, notably in terms of Asian manufacturers.

Taking into account “the dynamics of our brand, the age profile of our client base, and I guess, candidly, the commercial performance of the brand,” Glover says there was a need for revolution, rather than evolution.

“The answer clearly wasn’t to tweak here or tweak there,” he said. “We needed to make a big change. We needed a complete reset.”

It’s been suggested the new electric Jaguars, which will launch next year, will cost around £100,000, and the brand hopes between 80 and 90% of buyers will be first-time Jaguar owners.

Glover says he understands that Jaguar “is one of the industry’s most cherished icons” and that they hope to take existing buyers with them into Jaguar’s new era. But he was clear that attracting new, younger consumers is the main priority.

“It was very clear from the demographics of our previous client base, we needed to attract a new audience,” he said.

A new design language

Given the size of the strategic shift Jaguar wanted to make, Glover says they had to “deconstruct and rewire” people’s existing associations with the brand.

And some of the design choices were “quite straightforward” as they shifted into an EV-focused future.

For example the growling cat logo had “connotations with throbbing combustion engines” and “didn’t make sense” on an electric vehicle.

The leaping cat – known as the leaper – was retained, but Glover said it needed to be contextualised within the new visual direction.

“How do we reinvent the leaper to look appropriate in the context of that new design language?” he said.

That led to the development of the strikethrough,  the 18 horizontal lines which surround the leaper which now appears in the negative space within that set-up. It also led to a new type system, with a mix of upper and lower case letters, which Glover said creates “beautiful symmetry and circular consistency” and, in the future, will “open up all sorts of interesting artistic abstraction.”

The new Jaguar maker’s mark, by Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house design team

Glover also discussed the unusual design process which JLR used to create the Type 00. Rather than engineers creating a brief, they started with a design competition involving the whole JLR design team.

“There’s a really large pool of talent, and we had a competitive process, where effectively they were all given the same brief, and they had three months to explore creatively,” he explained.

They ended up with 17 full-size vehicles, made of clay but painted to look like production models, featuring four different design languages. “The purpose of that really was to make sure there was tension in the process,” Glover said.

The Type 00 concept models were launched in Miami Pink and London Blue, and Glover said these colour choices were an important part of the “brand world” they wanted to create. “We want it to be exuberant, we want it to be visceral,” he said.

He is aware that production models often end up looking and feeling very different to the concept cars, with “all the joy and the all the fun” often missing in the final designs. But Glover is confident that won’t happen with the new Jaguars.

“I’m really close to the production car – I don’t think anybody’s going to be disappointed,” he said.

Copy nothing

The long gap between the brand and concept launches, and the arrival of the new models was also a deliberate strategy, Glover explained.

“We could have waited much closer to when actually the vehicle will be on sale,” he said. “But we need to spend this time to tell people that actually Jaguar isn’t perhaps what they perceive it to be, and reposition the brand. So that’s why we went as early as we did.”

And he is confident that when people see the new cars in person, the overarching strategy will all come together.

He referenced “copy nothing,” the phrase adopted by Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, which was widely-used (and often pilloried) in last year’s rebrand.

“When everybody else is going this way, Jaguar has got to have the strength of its convictions to do something completely different,” Glover said. “The spirit of what we’re doing with this re-imagination of Jaguar is entirely in keeping with that philosophy and that, and I think when you see them on the road… it’s going to have an incredible reaction.”

And he seems happy to be driving through such big changes, despite the backlash.

“The best bit of career advice I ever had was don’t sit on the comfy chair,” he told Evans.

The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00

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How is Superside using AI?

Superside is a design, branding and creative service that works with the in-house teams at clients like Reddit, Pernod Ricard and Antler.  Executive creative director Kae Neskovic explains how they’re using AI.

You can see all the articles in this series here.

Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry or nervous?

I’m definitely excited. There’s always been a natural progression of technology in our field, and it would be unreasonable to think that it wouldn’t keep evolving. AI is just the next chapter.

But I also think we need to stop thinking of “AI” as one big thing. It’s not the same when your mom uses ChatGPT for a recipe, a creative uses Runway to edit videos, or a scientist uses it to speed up calculations.

It’s not one thing, so it’s not going to have one single effect.

Instead of being nervous, I think it’s much more productive to focus on how do we, as a group, make AI work for creatives instead of waiting for it to be decided for us?

Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business?

Yes, we do. We’ve defined a set of principles that guide how we use AI, built around our company’s vision, our brand values, and the needs of our customers. We developed these in collaboration with our leadership team.

Some of the key pillars:

Opt-in, opt-out flexibility – Customers always have a choice.
Human-guided creativity – Technology is powerful, but creativity starts with people.
Data security first – We protect assets and keep everything confidential, safe, and compliant.
Customer-first approach: Different clients want different levels of AI involvement, and we adapt to that.

When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design? Was there a moment, a tool, a conversation?

It’s hard to pinpoint a single “aha” moment because things have been changing so fast.

A year ago, many of us thought, this is cool if you’re a 15-year-old wanting to make a poster, but what can it actually do for big enterprise brands?

So many companies leaned into that grotesque factor of AI making fun of what it can do, the Super Bowl Minions ad comes to mind, or Fiverr’s Nobody Cares, trying to talk about AI as this sort of fad or trend that doesn’t really work, like NFTs.

Now things are changing. Month by month, quarter by quarter, the improvements have been massive. It’s been incredible to watch, and it keeps pushing our thinking.

Have you undergone any AI training?

Yes, and this has been a huge priority for us.

In the beginning, we encouraged self-training. But we quickly realised that’s not scalable, fun, or aligned across the team, so we built a structured training program.

Our L&D team collaborates with AI experts to run regular workshops and up-skilling sessions. Over the last six months, we’ve trained our entire creative services team of 300+ people on the latest tools, and we’ll keep doing it as the space evolves.

How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process?

There are so many different ways we use AI, it’s integrated across the full creative process:

Ideation and research – From desk research to note-taking, brainstorming, summarising conversations, and distilling insights, AI helps speed up and streamline early-stage thinking.
Moodboarding and exploration – It’s great for early visual exploration and riffing.
Image manipulation – Think of it like Photoshop on steroids, adapting, transforming, and refining visuals at scale.

Custom workflows – We’ve built AI-driven systems to support design ops, like auto-populating design templates, plugging into Figma, and manipulating design systems. It’s more than just generating images, it’s an engine behind smarter, faster work.

The one thing AI isn’t great at is taste and judgment. It’s a powerful assistant, but creative direction still starts and ends with humans.

Do you think clients care if and how you use AI at work?

Absolutely. We always discuss AI usage up-front with clients, and they’re in full control, at both the project and account level. They can opt in or opt out entirely.

Some brands are all-in on using AI to multiply what they’ve already built. Others want to keep their image generation 100% human.

Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running the business?

Yes, AI is everywhere behind the scenes.

AI note-takers in meetings, ChatGPT for quick research, writing, brainstorming, automations across dev, product, marketing, pretty much every tool we use now has AI baked in, and people across the company are encouraged to experiment and build new workflows.

Beyond the best-known tools like ChatGPT, what’s one AI tool you’d recommend to other design studios?

Some of our favourites right now:

Krea – Great for campaign generation and marketing workflows.

Leonardo AI – Our go-to for visual exploration and enhancement.

Runway – Amazing for video work.

Visual Electric – Super fun and the most intuitive for designers.

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“Checkbox to catalyst – why smart brands unleash their employees”

Brand activation is undergoing a quiet revolution within the day-to-day experience of employees.

As audience attention fragments and the line between internal and external brand touchpoints blurs, the smartest organisations are turning inward, empowering their employees not just as messengers, but as activation strategists who shape the brand’s public-facing presence.

Successful brand activation pulses through peer networks, team meetings, grassroots projects, and ultimately, the customer experience itself.

The rise of employee co-creation

Companies commonly think of internal brand activation as the process of bringing employees along for the ride.

The legacy playbook is familiar: a coordinated internal communication plan rolling out in concentric circles ahead of an external launch, a toolkit for frontline staff, perhaps an all-hands meeting with the C-suite.

But category leaders are rewriting this script, tapping into the power of employees as co-creators of culture, relevance, and reputation.

“When employees are given real agency, the brand itself gains depth, agility, and cultural relevance.”

Delta Airlines, for example, has made co-creation a core part of its approach, inviting employees to shape activations like the Inspired Journeys digital art pop-up. At this event, employees and community members shared travel stories, which Delta employee-artists brought to life in real time as digital art, weaving employee creativity directly into brand experiences.

This model is about unlocking the full potential of the organisation’s most credible voices to shape authentic interactions online and offline, directly with customers and across their own communities.

Strategic co-creation is the differentiator

The evolution is driven by necessity: a sense of purpose leads to stronger retention, and involving employees as brand advocates is one way to give them a sense of purpose.

Salesforce built its brand advocacy program around the belief that all employees are industry experts with authentic stories to tell.

Rather than distributing canned messages, Salesforce encourages advocacy built on employees’ unique expertise, interests, and perspectives. Employees are provided with toolkits to help them, but success hinges on personalisation: ambassadors are encouraged to adapt content, add their own insights, and share stories meaningful to them and their networks.

For example, during the annual Salesforce Dreamforce event, employees have shared behind-the-scenes experiences, industry tips, and community impact stories, contributing far more reach and engagement than official brand channels alone.

The results: over 25,000 employees acted as authentic advocates, collectively generating 742,000+ social shares and amplifying Salesforce’s brand voice across industries and regions

Leading brands convene employee advisory groups, inviting diverse voices to shape everything from messaging to product launches. These forums are not about rubber-stamping leadership ideas – they elevate the nuances and creativity that make activations resonate.

Rituals, recognition, and real-time feedback loops

Brand activation is now a living system, not a point-in-time event.

Smart companies weave brand values into daily rituals, from recognition moments to collaborative innovation sprints.

Consider Adobe: its Inside Adobe platform is more than an intranet. It enables 20,000+ employees to create, personalise, and share content, while also integrating feedback and employee-generated initiatives.

Content is targeted by location or role and distributed across web, mobile, and in-office digital displays, with analytics driving ongoing improvements. This approach has achieved a 94% satisfaction rate among employees – clearly a valued approach to communication.

Authenticity over consistency

Perhaps the biggest shift is from consistency to authenticity.

Employees at companies like Macy’s, for example, participate in the Style Crew program, where employees create and post videos such as bartending tutorials or hiking adventures.

Each video features Macy’s products, chosen by employees themselves, and is shoppable. Viewers can click directly on what’s featured, blending employee passion with commerce in a way no scripted campaign could match.

Style Crew is so popular that it has expanded to include influencers outside Macy’s, making the effort an especially powerful example of achieving authenticity by branding from within.

Empowered and trusted, employees have amplified brand reach exponentially and created the model for a grassroots expansion.

Data-driven personalisation and continuous evolution

The best-in-class strategies are data-driven, and in this regard, businesses seeking to build brands from the inside out would do well to learn from employee advocacy programs.

Electronic Arts (EA) continuously improves its EA Insiders employee advocacy program by combining analytics with regular feedback loops. Participation metrics, such as programme sign-ups, content shares, and engagement rates, are tracked in real time, while pulse surveys and direct employee feedback identify what content and recognition incentives drive authentic advocacy.

This data-driven, feedback-informed approach ensures the program evolves to remain motivating and relevant, enabling EA to scale advocacy globally while keeping participation authentic and employee-powered.

Brand activation powered by employee ownership

This re-imagining moves internal brand activation from checkbox to catalyst.

When employees are given real agency, supported by data, feedback, and opportunities to co-create, the brand itself gains depth, agility, and cultural relevance it could never achieve through messaging alone.

The result isn’t simply better alignment, but a living system where the brand evolves with, and even because of, its people.

In this model, advocacy emerges not as a managed campaign, but as the natural outcome of genuine participation and shared ownership.

Chris Prescher is chief strategy officer at Fifty Thousand Feet.

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