The Internal Brand Crisis: Why your staff don’t believe your external hype

You’ve seen it a million times - the glossy ad campaign rolls out, the CEO beaming in LinkedIn posts about “our values” and “our mission,” and the marketing team doing a little victory lap around the office.

Meanwhile, inside the organisation? Employees are side-eyeing those billboards like they’ve just spotted their ex’s new dating profile.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your external brand is Beyoncé at the Superbowl, but your internal comms are more Cheeky Girls at Cleveleys Pride, your people won’t buy the hype. And if your staff don’t believe in your brand, how on earth are your customers supposed to?

The Branding Two-Face Problem

Externally, you’re shouting about innovation, collaboration, and “people first.” Internally, your comms are:

• A monthly all-staff email from no-reply@company.com.

• Town halls that make jury duty for unpaid parking fines look exciting.

• A tone of voice so formal it could be mistaken for a legal disclaimer.

This gap between what you say and what you do is what we call an internal brand crisis. It’s like promising Michelin-star dining but serving up a Pot Noodle. Eventually, people notice.

Why It Matters (a lot)

Your employees are your most important brand ambassadors. When they believe in the mission, they’ll shout about it - on LinkedIn, in conversations with clients, even down the pub. When they don’t? They’ll just roll their eyes, stay quiet, or worse, complain loudly (and often on Glassdoor).

As we wrote in May, according to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report, only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. In the UK, that figure is a soul-crushing 10%. That’s not just a comms problem, it’s a brand problem. If 9 out of 10 of your people aren’t switched on, your “customer obsession” campaign is dead on arrival.

Classic Signs of an Internal Brand Crisis

• Your internal tone of voice doesn’t match your external one. (Think: visually stunning Insta ads externally, but internal memos that stun in a different way. In an “into a boredom coma” way.)

• Your people hear about company news from the media before they hear it from you.

• The values on the office wall don’t match lived reality. (“Transparency” feels a bit rich if people find out about restructures via the grapevine.)

• Staff don’t share or engage with your external content. They don’t amplify it because… well, quite frankly, they don’t believe it.

  
  

How to Fix It (Without a Full-Blown Identity Crisis)

1. Align your tone of voice

Your external brand voice should flow through to your internal comms. If your website says “we’re bold and disruptive” but your intranet sounds like it was written by a Victorian butler, your people won’t buy it. A tone of voice refresh can fix this disconnect fast.

2. Make employees the first audience

Your staff should never learn about big news on Twitter (or X, or whatever Elon’s calling it this week). Internal must come first. Always. And not just with a dry announcement - give context, tell the story, and make it human.

3. Back up words with action

If you say you’re about collaboration, then collaboration needs to show up in your culture and your comms. Empty slogans breed cynicism. (I could make a comment here about the two ruling governmental parties of the last decade and their three-word slogans, but I won’t.) Real examples and lived behaviours breed trust. Your comms strategy should be relevant, up-to-date, fit for purpose, and lived.

4. Create compelling internal content

Don’t let your employees feel like second-class citizens. Give them the same creative flair you’d give a customer-facing campaign. That means:

• Video updates with energy (and not the charisma of a Love Island contestant reading the Ts & Cs of your new contents insurance).

• Visual storytelling, not just walls of text.

• Genuine, authentic voices from across the business, not just the top brass.

  
  

5. Run an internal comms health check

Sometimes you’re too close to the problem to see it. A comms health check can reveal where the gaps are, where your messages are being ignored, and how to realign your internal and external voices.

But, Is Anyone Really Doing This Well?

Erm. Yes. Here are a five known success stories to prove that it can be done.

1. Southwest Airlines

• External brand: Fun, friendly, customer-first.

• Internal comms: They’ve famously treated employees as the first audience. Leaders communicate with humour, humanity and consistency, so staff feel part of the story rather than on the receiving end of corporate spin.

• Result: Their “employee-first” approach has been credited with driving customer loyalty because staff genuinely live the brand values.

  
  

2. Salesforce

• External brand: Innovative, customer-success obsessed, values-driven.

• Internal comms: Their Ohana Culture (Hawaiian for “family”) is woven into every internal channel, from transparent leadership updates to community-building on their internal social platforms.

• Result: Named regularly in “Best Places to Work” lists (on the pages of Glassdoor & Fortune) and employees themselves often amplify the brand voice externally.

  
  

3. Unilever

• External brand: Sustainability and purpose-led growth.

• Internal comms: They’ve embedded sustainability messages in staff comms for years, making sure employees understand (and can articulate) how their day-to-day roles ladder up to big global goals.

• Result: Their employees are some of their strongest external advocates, especially on LinkedIn, where staff posts often outperform the brand account.

  
  

4. Starbucks

• External brand: “People-first” with a community vibe.

• Internal comms: They call employees “partners,” and that flows through in tone, channel strategy, and storytelling. Starbucks invests in two-way comms so staff can give feedback and feel heard.

• Result: Their culture of open comms has helped maintain a consistent brand experience across thousands of stores worldwide.

  
  

5. Microsoft (under Satya Nadella)

• External brand: Innovative, growth mindset, empowering.

• Internal comms: Nadella has shifted leadership comms from “command-and-control” to storytelling, empathy and clarity. Internal comms campaigns now mirror the external messaging around innovation and purpose.

• Result: Their brand turnaround has been as much about internal culture change as it has about product innovation.

Why This Isn’t Just for the Big Fish

It’s tempting to think this is only a problem for the global corporates with Super Bowl ads and brand guidelines that make James Cameron’s treatment for Avatars 1-5 look like a pamphlet. But SMEs fall into the same trap: pushing out slick marketing while their staff are left in the dark.

The difference? Smaller organisations feel the disconnect even more acutely. If you’ve only got 30 people, and 27 of them don’t believe the hype (as per the Gallup report data for the UK), that’s most of your workforce rolling their eyes. That’s why The Comms Guru works with SMEs as well as corporate giants, helping them get tone, clarity, and trust right from the inside out.

The Bottom Line

If your employees don’t buy your brand story, no one else will. Internal and external comms are two sides of the same coin. And the coin only has value if it’s consistent.

The good news? This is fixable. With the right tone of voice work, comms strategy, and channel plans, you can turn internal scepticism into advocacy.

Because the real crisis isn’t that your people don’t believe your external hype.It’s that they’re probably right not to.