How Sanofi Built the ‘Sanofi Feeling’ with 5,000 Employee Advocates

Sanofi is a Paris-headquartered pharmaceutical company with around 90,000 employees, recruiting across dozens of markets and focused on immunology, neurology, and oncology. In recent years it has repositioned itself as an R&D-driven, AI-powered biopharma, uniting the business under a single global brand and setting a bold new direction that now runs through everything the talent team does. That ambition created an opportunity: to build an employer brand every bit as compelling as the science behind it. Sanofi already had an EVP on paper from 2021 — what it needed was a team to bring it to life.

We had a chance to sit down with Anne Adam, Global Employer Brand Marketing Manager, and Maria Viola, Global Employer Brand Content and Creative Lead, on the Employer Branding Podcast to talk about exactly how they did it — turning 5,000 employees into an earned-media engine and moving their key brand attributes from threats into opportunities in a single quarter.

Rebuilding the Positioning from the Ground Up

Anne and Maria took a step back and rebuilt Sanofi’s brand vision and positioning from the ground up. To do that credibly, they went to the data. As Anne explains, they “took a closer look at our Employer Brand Index to understand how people actually see us, internally and externally,” alongside talent insights reports and the existing EVP attributes. Sanofi isn’t the first life-sciences business to discover its story needed telling more clearly — Baxter went through a comparable exercise building its EVP around a life-saving mission.

Two pillars emerged: Progress your career (development) and Discover and make experiences (workplace experience). Tellingly, both of those themes showed up as threats in the Employer Brand Index when the team started measuring in 2023 — either people weren’t talking about them, or what they were saying wasn’t positive.

The investment that made this possible came in 2023, when Sanofi’s leadership backed employer brand management, bringing in Dan Perkins as global head of employer brand and standing up a center of excellence. Today the core team is around nine people — closer to sixteen or seventeen once the regional leads are included — split across content and creative, channels and data, career site and CRM, professional hires, and early careers. The model works on two levels: the global team drives awareness, while regional teams own conversion, moving candidates the last mile to specific roles. Employer brand reports into the talent function, not marketing or HR.

Start With the Audience, Not the Content

Maria’s clearest piece of advice is one a lot of teams get backwards: don’t start with the content. It’s tempting to jump straight to the fun part, but content only lands if the groundwork is done first — knowing exactly who you’re trying to reach, why the message is relevant to them, and where they actually spend their time.

Sanofi built its target audiences quarter by quarter, drawing on historical hiring data, close collaboration with regional employer brand and talent acquisition teams, and workforce planning where it was available. Only then did channels come into play: paid social, programmatic display, search, and programmatic jobs — with a particular focus on building awareness in the company’s capability hubs, where Sanofi hadn’t had much of a presence before.

Turning 5,000 Employees Into an Earned-Media Engine

The channel Anne is proudest of isn’t paid at all. Sanofi’s employee advocacy program now has more than 5,000 ambassadors, and it has become a genuine force in earned media. In a company voice, you can only say so much on paid or organic channels; authentic employee voices are what actually shift external perception.

The program is open to anyone who’s interested — from interns to senior leaders, across every function and geography — with a single step to join. Because pharma is a highly regulated industry, everyone goes through training first, so nothing put out publicly risks a compliance issue. It’s terrain familiar to other pharma teams: Pfizer runs its own employer brand as a continual experiment under the same regulated conditions. Crucially, this isn’t a passive audience that simply receives content. Ambassadors are built into every campaign, co-creating the stories that carry the brand.

The Sanofi Feeling

This year’s flagship work centered on workplace experience — chosen partly because it was a priority attribute, and partly because Sanofi was rolling out a hybrid policy. Instead of framing the message as “come back to the office X days a week,” the team flipped it to “our offices are genuinely great places to be.”

The campaign, dubbed the Sanofi Feeling, is built on the idea that workplace experience isn’t about how an office looks — it’s about how it makes you feel. Four pillars underpin it, each backed by science and research. In India, for example, Sanofi invested heavily in air quality, something employees there value given the prevalence of respiratory conditions: an improvement you feel rather than see.

To activate it, the team ran a contest across the ambassador community and had 80 employees put themselves forward. They selected 20 and traveled the world — China, the US, France, Germany, India — to capture their stories as hero content. They even created a “scent challenge” around Sanofi’s signature office fragrance (fresh, calming, slightly citric, and consistent across every office), which employees adored. Two hashtags anchor the work: #SanofiStories for ongoing ambassador storytelling, and #SanofiFeeling for the campaign itself.

Hijacking the Olympics

Sanofi was an Olympic partner — but only in France, which meant the global team couldn’t talk about the partnership directly. So they got creative. Inspired by the Olympic theme, they built a “Your Potential” campaign, asking ambassadors to share stories of the people who inspire them. A large group of Sanofians traveled to Paris as volunteers, spectators, and participants, and while the brand itself stayed quiet on the partnership, every employee was free to share their own experience on their own channels.

That ambassador-led activity drove the first meaningful lift in Sanofi’s Employer Brand Index. As Anne puts it, “that was a big game changer for us” — before the Sanofi Feeling campaign went on to break their records outright.

Measuring the “So What?”

Leadership always comes back to one question: so what? A beautiful campaign means little without evidence, so measurement sits at the heart of how this team operates. They track career-site metrics, campaign performance, impressions (critical, given awareness is the goal), LinkedIn Talent Insights, and IPSOS research alongside their corporate colleagues. Sanofi is in good company here — fellow life-sciences firm Thermo Fisher has built its entire strategy around the same measurement question.

But the headline KPI, quarter after quarter, is the Employer Brand Index. Anne calls it “a very comprehensive way of looking at it,” and it’s been a KPI for the team for the last couple of years, every single quarter. It’s “really helped to inform so many of our decisions,” she says, both globally and regionally — every regional team uses the Index on a regular basis to decide which campaigns to run and to work out where to point their ambassadors and what topics to amplify. In her words, it’s “a really invaluable tool to help keep up those important conversations that we care about” and that make up the EVP.

The proof point the team is proudest of: after activating the Sanofi Feeling, workplace experience flipped from a threat to an opportunity in a single quarter — and by Q3 this year, both of their positioning attributes had converted. That’s activation you can actually see in the data.

Three Lessons for Activating an EVP

1. 1. Employee advocacy is a baseline, not a bonus. If you’re not amplifying employee voices in a structured way, you’re only doing employer brand halfway. And you don’t need Olympic-sized budgets — engagement events, ERGs, and everyday moments give you plenty to work with.

1. 1. Audience before content, always. Do the groundwork on who you’re reaching and where, and the content will land. Skip it, and even the best creative falls flat.

1. 1. Build a unified brand. Employer brand is one dimension of a company’s overall brand. It has to work in synchronicity with the corporate and consumer brands — Sanofi didn’t even have a relationship with its corporate brand team at the start, and building that partnership is what let the whole thing move faster and more cohesively.

To follow Anne Adam and Maria Viola’s work in employer brand, connect with them on LinkedIn (Anne and Maria), explore the Sanofi Feeling, and listen to the full episode above. And to see how your own employer brand attributes are trending — and whether they’re threats or opportunities like Sanofi’s were — measure it with the Employer Brand Index.