Employee testimonials: Animating corporate messages through employees’ stories

•The testimonials of ostensibly real employees are used to animate corporate messages.•Employees and organizational senders share a complex of narrating participant roles.•Visual and verbal style and forms of evaluation are devices to personalize employees’ narratives.•Testimonials illustrate the tension between narrative interest and stylistic naturalness.•The article employs a multimodal approach to analyze the interplay of visual and verbal meanings.

This article explores why and how organizations use the personal experiences of ostensibly real employees as a persuasive strategy in image management. It analyzes the verbal and visual discourse of the corporate genre of employee testimonial to understand how the production of meanings is distributed between organization and employee, and how this distribution influences the effect that they are authentic employee stories. I argue that the personalization of the narratives, particularly through verbal and visual evaluation, is a strategy which shifts the voice of organizations to employees, and in doing so illustrates the precarious balance between narrative interest and authenticity in promotional texts.