How do you make a company values day fun?

Turn the values text into something the team has to transform, such as a song, a sketch or a challenge. Active participation helps the message be understood and remembered, and a festive tone breaks the solemnity without downplaying the content.

Which internal communications ideas help spread corporate values?

The ones that make employees the protagonists: rewriting the values as songs, creating rituals that come back every year, producing audiovisual pieces with the team itself or designing dynamics where you have to apply the values to move forward.

Johnson & JohnsonCase study

Johnson & Johnson Mariachi Loco: Credo Day turned into a musical ritual

Johnson & Johnson wanted Credo Day to be fun and to involve every employee. Mariachi Loco turned the Credo into a ritual of mariachi songs that the team itself rewrote and performed.

ClientJohnson & Johnson
FormatInternal activation

Johnson & Johnson — Johnson & Johnson: Mariachi Loco

The challenge

The brief: make Credo Day at the company fun and get every employee involved. The Credo is the document that sets out Johnson & Johnson’s values, and celebrating it carries an obvious risk: that it becomes a solemn reading everyone listens to and nobody feels.

Corporate values statements tend to share the same fate: they are respected, hung on the wall and recited on autopilot. The challenge was to change the team’s relationship with that text, from listeners to protagonists, and to do it without trivialising its content. Participation also had to be broad; a Credo Day that only a few people engage with fails at its job of reminding the whole organisation why it does what it does.

The idea

The idea was to turn the company Credo into a ritual of mariachi songs that employees themselves would rewrite and perform on Credo Day. The goal went beyond the party: to connect emotionally with the change, collaborate in the transformation and create an atmosphere open to creativity.

Mariachi is music of collective celebration: it is sung in a group and you do not need to be a professional. That makes it the perfect vehicle for a formal text to become something people sing at the top of their voices. And the key detail is that employees rewrite the lyrics: to adapt the Credo into a song you have to read it, understand it and decide what it means. A songbook, audiovisual pieces and dedicated art direction were produced to give the ritual its own identity.

What we did

Creative idea: the Credo turned into a ritual of mariachi songs
Songbook for employees to rewrite and perform the lyrics
Production of the Credo Day activation
Audiovisual pieces
Art direction

Key takeaways (expert view)

If your corporate values are recited but not felt, let the team rewrite them in their own words; understanding them becomes part of the game.

Taking part forces you to understand

To rewrite a song about the Credo you have to read it carefully. Active participation is the best way for a values statement to sink in. Any brand that wants its team to know its purpose should ask them to transform it, not memorise it. And events in the industry, from conventions to kick-offs, can apply the same logic.

Humour without losing respect

A mariachi band on a corporate values day is slightly subversive, and that is precisely why it works. The festive tone breaks the solemnity without ridiculing the message, because the content of the Credo stays at the centre. Knowing how far to stretch humour in internal communications is one of the most delicate calls, and here local culture helped get it right.

A ritual repeats; an event is forgotten

Calling it a ritual is no accident. A ritual is meant to come back every year and build an internal tradition. Designing corporate celebrations with that mindset multiplies their value, because each edition reinforces the last. For agencies and event suppliers, proposing repeatable formats is also a way to build long relationships with the client.

Services involved

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