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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Influence Gap

Many organisations assume brand champions will simply appear: the most vocal people get a badge, and the rest will follow. That’s tidy on paper and messy in practice. When enthusiasm substitutes for influence, you get mixed messages, inconsistent behaviour, and short-lived spurts of activity. The real gap isn’t passion; it’s permission, time, and the social capital to move peers.

Content Stadium notes that only 30% of employer-branding teams currently run formal employee ambassador programmes, which suggests most organisations are still improvising rather than designing the role. The takeaway is straightforward: informal networks won’t carry strategic change without deliberate architecture.

Select For Influence

Champions should be chosen for their peer trust, cross-functional reach, and judgement under pressure. Think of them as a distributed leadership bench, mirrored across levels and regions to reflect your customer journey. We often see nominations default to tenure or charisma; the better predictor is who colleagues seek out when the stakes are high.

Anchor selection in clear criteria and treat it as a named role:

• Credibility beyond their own team, evidenced by who people ask for help.
• Reach across functions and locations, not just vertical expertise.
• Curiosity and the ability to convene diverse peers to solve real problems.
• A confirmed time budget and manager sign-off to protect capacity.

Design For Momentum

Once selected, champions need a remit that links to strategy and is measured by behaviour change, not activity. Equip them with field-ready stories, simple playbooks, and a way to de-risk first moves. Make support visible: leaders should model the behaviours champions are advocating.

Build practical scaffolding so momentum compounds:

• Define outcomes (e.g., adoption of new messages in key meetings), not a task list.
• Ringfence time and, where needed, reassign work to avoid overload.
• Provide a living toolkit: proof points, talk tracks, and templates for daily use.
• Create a fast escalation path for blockers measured in days, not months.
• Convene a peer community to share wins, missteps, and working examples.

Prove And Renew

Treat champions as a renewable network. Rotate membership every six to nine months to prevent fatigue and to surface new voices. Make recognition public but evidence-led, highlighting changes in how teams sell, serve, and decide. Measure what matters: leading indicators of behaviour and lagging signals of commercial progress.

Leadership implications:

• Tie champion metrics to behaviour shifts (e.g., consistent messaging in proposals, cross-team collaboration rates).
• Back them in public forums and protect their time in private.
• Mirror selection to the customer journey so influence maps to revenue moments.
• Refresh criteria as strategy evolves to keep the network relevant.

Get this right and you convert informal influence into an operating system for change—one that makes brand-led behaviours easier to do well, and harder to ignore.

Sources:

• Employer branding 2022 trends & social media statistics — Content Stadium

1. Transforming Brand Impact with Everyday Behaviour Change
2. Brand Consistency Beyond Content Guidelines
3. Elevating Brand Enablement for Team Alignment