How a psychology-driven casting strategy unified a global employer brand across 65 offices
How do you build a single creative idea that makes the world's smartest candidates across radically different markets feel like they already belong?
This case study includes the following research and creative methods:
Campaign strategy
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Casting strategy
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Audience psychology
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Paid & organic amplification
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Content production
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Campaign strategy • Casting strategy • Audience psychology • Paid & organic amplification • Content production •
My Role
I owned the casting strategy for the Be More campaign, identifying and selecting the right people to feature based on the psychological dimensions of the Be More mission, and ensuring each story mapped to a specific candidate persona and behavioral motivation.
I also owned the full amplification and syndication strategy, ensuring the videos were deployed and optimized across Bain.com/careers, LinkedIn, and Instagram, integrated into paid media campaigns, activated at global and local recruiting events, and distributed across appropriate third-party platforms.
The Challenge
Bain had fragmented employer brand recognition that was strong in the Americas and EMEA markets, but low in APAC, with inconsistent messaging across markets that left candidates with an unclear picture of who Bain really was and what made it distinct.
The Approach
A psychology-informed casting built around the Be More mission. I selected talent whose personal stories made each dimension of the campaign idea tangible, human, and person-specific across 8 talent areas and 65 global offices.
The Outcome
A unified global employer brand narrative delivering click-through rates and engagement rates significantly above industry benchmarks across LinkedIn, Instagram, and Bain.com/careers, with 3 new campaign videos actively in production for March 2026.
Bain consistently ranks as one of the best places to work, recognized across Glassdoor, Fortune, and Vault as a destination for top-tier talent. The challenge wasn't the reality of working at Bain. It was making that reality visible and credible to the right candidates, in the right markets, before a recruiter ever reached out.
In APAC especially, low brand recognition meant that when Bain recruiters reached out, candidates had little context for who they were or why it mattered. In markets where Bain was known, inconsistent messaging across regions created mixed impressions. Be More was the solution to leverage a creative idea that could unify global employer branding while speaking to candidates who are drawn to environments that push the smartest people further in their careers.
Why this mattered
mission statement"At Bain, you can Be More.
Be more authentic, be more the person you aspire to be, be more alive to opportunity. More exists one step outside your comfort zone. It deviates from the set path. It defies expectations and sets new standards. But at Bain, more means more than you think. It's not just about individual achievement and goals. It's generous in spirit and shared in successes. It nurtures, supports, gives everyone a platform to be heard. It rewards lessons learned as much as outcomes. Be More is a mindset that is not for everyone. It takes energy, tenacity, and collaboration. But we believe it's a philosophy that reaps rewards. If you get it, you'll feel at home here with us. And be more than you ever imagined you could be."
The strategic insight behind the creative
The candidates Bain attracts are already high achievers. They're drawn to Bain because you’ll get to work on the world’s toughest problems with the smartest people. But what Be More tapped into was something deeper than that: the most ambitious people don't just want to perform at the highest level. They want to grow into a version of themselves they can't yet fully see. That aspiration is what the campaign was built around.
This insight also had to stretch across two distinct goals, simultaneously. Some candidates are driven by the hunger to push personally and professionally beyond what they thought possible. Others are drawn by wanting to be part of something impactful, collaborative, and bigger than individual achievement.
Be More was written to hold both, which is what made a single creative idea scalable across markets where those values are weighted very differently.
The casting strategy - psychology in practice
Each person featured in Be More was chosen because their story made a specific psychological dimension of the mission tangible. The casting framework mapped each featured employee to a distinct motivational driver — giving candidates across 8 talent personas someone they could see themselves in, doing work that felt meaningful rather than abstract. The campaign launched with five stories in 2023 and is actively expanding with three more releasing in March 2026.
2023 - Original Campaign Launch Stories
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2023 - Original Campaign Launch Stories •
Andrea - The purpose-driven consultant
Chosen for candidates who want high achievement to be meaningful. She directly demonstrates that ambition and social purpose don’t conflict at Bain, and that the firm's reach extends into work that makes impact.
Rachel - The 20+ year advocate
Chosen to speak directly to candidate skepticism, the question every high-achiever asks before joining any firm: "Will this place actually be what they say it is?" Twenty years at Bain answers that question more powerfully than any mission statement. Her story signals psychological safety and long-term belonging.
Sam - The technology visionary
Chosen to speak to candidates motivated by working at the frontier — helping the world's biggest companies embrace AI and emerging tech. Targets the "be more alive to opportunity" dimension for analytically and creatively minded candidates who want their work to shape industries, not just serve them.
Abdul - The doctor turned consultant
A career pivot story that embodies "one step outside your comfort zone." Works for candidates who don't fit the traditional consulting mold and need permission to see themselves here. His story of working alongside F1 engineers and horse surgeons signals the breadth of Bain's world.
Tiiram - The alum who returned
Add the psychological reasoning behind why this person was chosen — what dimension of Be More did their story represent, and what candidate persona were they speaking to?
2026 - Campaign Expansion Stories (Coming Soon)
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2026 - Campaign Expansion Stories (Coming Soon) •
The audience architecture - 8 talent personas
Be More was designed to speak across 8 distinct talent areas, each with its own candidate persona. Rather than producing separate campaigns for each, the casting framework did the persona targeting work within a single unified creative idea, with each featured story mapped to the motivational drivers most relevant to a specific audience.
Analytics, Data & Research
Business Operations
Design
Marketing
Management Consulting
Product Management & Innovation
Talent & Human Resources
Technology & Engineering
Amplification Strategy
Performance
Once produced, the campaign's reach was a function of deliberate channel strategy. Each platform served a distinct role in the candidate journey — awareness, consideration, and conversion — with paid and organic working in tandem to maximize reach across markets where Bain's organic footprint varied significantly.
Videos were deployed across Bain.com/careers as an owned destination, LinkedIn and Instagram as primary social channels with paid amplification, global and local recruiting events as in-person activation touchpoints, and appropriate third-party platforms to extend reach into candidate communities outside Bain's direct audience.
The Be More campaign exceeded industry benchmarks across every platform it ran on.
LinkedIn3.8%
Average Clickthrough Rate
Industry Benchmark: 0.5-1.5%
55K
Average Reach per Post
Above category average
2.5x
Above upper benchmark
vs. 1.5% industry ceiling
Timeline
discovery
date
workflow design
date
user testing
date
interation
ongoing
Reflections
This project reinforced something the research made visible early: the most persistent workplace communication problems are rarely about skill. They're about cognitive infrastructure, or, the lack of it. When people are given a framework that externalizes the thinking they were already doing intuitively, the communication gets clearer almost automatically.
The most important design decision wasn't what the tool does. It was what it asks first. Leading with audience context before content mirrors how human communication actually works psychologically, and that sequencing is what makes the tool feel like coaching rather than generation.
[Add after testing — what you learned from watching real users interact with the tool that you didn't anticipate from the research alone. The gap between what research predicted and what testing revealed is often the most honest and compelling part of a case study.]