5 lessons for turning employees into employer brand catalysts

At a recent IABC Asia Pacific webinar, Beyond the Brief: From Believers to Catalysts – Creating a Powerhouse Employer Brand, Anshuman Kumar shared how he helped take Intuit from outside the top 50 to the number one Best Company to Work For in India — twice. Kumar is now Chief Strategy Officer at SeedlingLabs and was previously Director of Global Brand and Communications at Intuit, work later featured as a Harvard Business Review case study. Here are five lessons any communicator can borrow from his experience.

1. Start with empathy, not a campaign brief

Before Kumar's team wrote a word of external messaging, they focused on genuinely understanding what employees were experiencing, including their motivators and their frustrations. This "deep customer empathy" is step one of the design thinking approach he's used throughout his career: go broad on possible solutions, then narrow down to the ideas worth testing with real people.

2. Fix the culture before you try to sell it

Kumar's warning is blunt: "Advertising cannot sell a bad product twice." If the internal experience doesn't match the external story, people notice, and trust breaks down fast. Before Intuit told its culture story, the team worked hard to make sure that story was actually true.

3. Give employees tools, not a script

When Intuit's "I Am Intuit" campaign launched, most employees said they didn't know what to say about the company externally. So Kumar's team gave them a framework rather than a script: pre-written statements tied to real company values, employees' own photos, and light guardrails around what could be shared. The result felt personal, not corporate.

4. Let ambassadors opt in, don't assign the role

When Kumar asked employees for help chasing the number one ranking, 100 people volunteered within an hour, later known as the Great Place to Work ambassadors. Compare that to employee resource groups people join "by default": Kumar found dedicated, opt-in groups built around a genuine shared purpose sustain far more energy than groups people are automatically enrolled in.

5. Once you reach the top, change what you're chasing

After winning Best Company to Work For honours in 2017 and 2020, Intuit deliberately stopped chasing the same award and pursued "most innovative company to work for" instead. Sustaining an employer brand means evolving the goalposts, not defending the same trophy forever.

The results speak for themselves. Intent to join Intuit among tech talent in India rose from under one percent in 2012 to fifty percent by 2018. As webinar host Cameron Craig put it in his closing remarks, employer brand "really isn't something that belongs solely to communications, HR or marketing" — it belongs to the people who experience the organisation every day.