← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
Why Trust is the Key to Growth with Meiling Tan, VP Brand & GTM at Care.com | Ep. 390
00:45:55
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off. We are back with another episode of the Market Millennials podcast. Today I have Meiling on the podcast. She used to be the founding head of marketing at Waymo, which is super cool and if you haven't been in a Waymo, that is fun. And she's the one who is one of the people who got that in your head that you should take away mode, which I love taking Awaymo actually now. And now she is a VP of Brandon go to market@care.com which I've also used. Care.com I know you've heard I have a baby. I use it to look for nannies and babysitters. So I used care.com so both the products she's worked for I've used a lot. So I'm excited to chat and pick her brain and But I want her to tell us how she got into marketing in that journey.
- [01:12]
B
Yeah, for sure. Great to be on, I'd say. If I go back all the way into my childhood, I had always loved a couple of things. One, I always loved being creative. I spent a lot of my time actually dancing, singing, performing, choreographing, directing, and always thought about how can I bring that into my career but also marry that kind of creative part of my brain with the part that is more strategic and operational and wants to make an impact. I also kind of loved helping people to connect with certain concepts because I love dance so much and a lot of people didn't really get it. I would try to explain, no, this is what's magical about it. When you have this feeling and you want to express it and if you put out this movement, it kind of expresses it okay, but if you do this, you really feel it. I find ways to help people connect with things that are very abstract to them. And as all of those things came together, I was like, you know what career could be fun to explore Marketing. So that's what I did. And first role was at Google and YouTube where I got to get my feet wet and learned about that. But very quickly then was like, I want to try something that feels even bigger, where I have a blank canvas, where I feel like I can create something from scratch or transform something. And I went over to the Google X, which was our moonshot factory with self Driving cars, balloon powered Internet drone delivery, crazy stuff. And I was like, I want to try marketing that. Super fun, happy to get more into it. But that's how I first landed in this world of self driving cars and really introducing the whole category at this point. It was like 13 years ago. Then went over to Waymo when they became their own independent company, named it Branded it did a bunch of like foundational trust building work and then namcare.com, i'm also a mom and I love that it allowed me to bring everything that I love, that creativity, the strategic and operational side, but also the sense of deep purpose and mission. That's something that I felt really fortunate to have throughout my marketing career. Whether it's at Waymo or Care.com or other stops in between. I've always worked on things that felt like really foundational infrastructure for people and for society. Whether it's how you get around safely or how you find a care that fuels you and frankly helps society to operate. Because if we don't have care, we can't go to work. So many things fall apart. So it's been nice to have the creativity, the strategy and then also the sense of mission.
- [03:47]
A
Yeah, let's go back to your Waymo days. At first I want to talk about the convincing of people that like they should get in a self driving car, which was kind of, it's kind of the same convincing to people who had to get into a car with a stranger. Like with Uber, it's that moment where you realize, wait, your parents told you not to get into cars with strangers and then now everybody's getting into cars with strangers. So how, like how did you go through that thought exercise? Like how am I going to teach someone to like self driving safe? Like it's not a scary thing. It's an, it's not as hard as you think it is and scary as you think it is.
- [04:27]
B
Yeah, I'll actually take it, take you all the way back because you know, one of the things that I've learned from my time at X and on self driving cars is a lot of marketers think purely or for the majority about just talking about your solution and your product. So this is safer, easier, better, cheaper. We definitely did some of that with self driving cars. But I actually think part of the reason why we were so effective is because we brought it back even earlier into helping people understand the problem and why the status quo today of humans getting into these metal tins and driving them around with hindered vision actually isn't that great of an idea. So I remember being in rooms again more than a decade ago, thinking about how do we even introduce this concept that at the time, I mean, today I think for some people it feels a little sci fi. Imagine back then it was like, this is not even possible. Like, what are you talking about? A car with no driver. And we brainstormed all these things like around the reasons why. Do we talk about safety? Do we talk about productivity and how you gain all this time back that you would have spent driving. Now you have time in the car, right? Do we talk about how cities will be transformed because there'll be no parking lots? Do we talk about accessibility and independence for people who can't get around? We really landed on safety as the big why? Both because it was really genuine to the mission and because it's a must have. So instead of just jumping straight into things like, oh, you know, the car can see 360 degrees around it. You don't have to worry about drunk and distracted driving. Here's how the technology works with the camera and the radar and the lidar. We actually went first to defining the problem and we would start here. We would say every year 1.4 million lives are lost around the world because of traffic accidents and crashes. The US alone is 43,000 people. Is the same as a 737 falling out the sky every day. Humans are not meant to drive these things without, you know, distracted driving. Like people are like, do drunk driving all the time. Like, this is unnatural, this status quo that we all have come to accept as normal. Isn't that normal? So we actually had to start there because then once we frame that problem and then introduce. So now here's our solution, then we would bring in the things like here's technology and a vehicle and a driver that can see 360 degrees around it constantly. You never have to worry about drunk or distracted driving. It learns from every single mile it accumulates on any street. We talked about how it become the most experienced driver that then I think it clicked more right. Like when you frame the right problem, then the solution feels like it makes so much more sense. And we've actually. Whereas it felt crazy before to go from like, I drive my own car to what do you mean I'm going to a car without a driver. We've kind of done like the flip of that, which is, no, it's kind of crazy that we're driving. We're not made to do that. So we use that messaging a lot. You know, we really shared it consistently. You'll still hear Waymo talking about it today. And then we'd also try to bring it to life in our marketing and our experiences. And there were a lot of things we did there that I could get into. But one of the insights that I'll elaborate on a little bit is we always learned that one of the biggest turning points is the first moment when you get into a car. You might have a little bit of anxiety and panic at first with this strange thing that's going to drive you around, but within like a minute or two of the car going, you're like, oh, it's kind of boring. And I can kind of relax. People who are anxious start taking out their phones and texting and doing other things. So we knew this moment of a demo ride was also very game changing. Waymo offers a lot more rides now, but back then we had very limited scale and limited rides that we could offer. So other cool things we did was I worked on this360 sort of VR video to give people a virtual ride in the car where you could actually see for yourself everything the car sees. So you could see, here's what lidar sees, here's what the camera sees, here's what radar sees, here's how it works. And we're demystifying this scary sounding technology and also kind of forcing people to go into that moment and see when you have your headset or you're just looking at YouTube, you can only see so much. You have limited field of view. Can you see everything that's happening around you at once? You can. So it was a way of kind of scaling up this experience of a demo. It was also a way of educating around how the technology works and demystifying it. And then obviously in that process, we don't just want to be this super kind of sci fi tech forward company. We also wanted to bring a sense of humanity. So we would talk about our mission, we talk about safety, and we would talk. We had a segment at the end where you just get in this empty car and see it's actually kind of a boring ride. And you talk about how boring is good. We want you to get in the car and be bored. A lot more things went into it, but I think really defining the problem was really, really critical in helping people to feel more open to the technology and open to our messaging.
- [09:39]
A
Yeah, I love that, the challenging, the status quo, because if you actually do think about it, it is pretty crazy that we're driving heavy machinery around. Also when you hone in A problem of safety. There's a lot more things that you think about safely. So there's the drunk driving thing, but you also think about like putting your daughter in a car with a, a driver. And that's scary too. Like there's no. That this person's not, there's nobody in the car that can hurt like you as a, a passenger if you're taking an Uber. So there's that thought of it too. Like if you hone in that messaging of safety as well. There's so many different things, things that are safer about driving in a self driving car than driving a car by yourself. I mean, I get scared of driving a car by myself and I think I'm a pretty decent because I'm scared something's going to dart out in front of me. This is going to. This person's not paying attention. So I get super scared.
- [10:37]
B
Me too. Strangely, like working at Waymo actually made me even more scared because I became so aware of all the crappy drivers that are out there or even aware of my own imperfection. Like I'm not a perfect driver. Even even though I think I'm okay. Like I can't be perfect. There might be something that jumps out that I can't see that's literally out of my field of view. So, you know, I think that like, to help people understand that this status quo doesn't really make sense was huge. And then being able to bring in simple concepts, like we talked a lot about how, you know, we can break down the technology and how it works. But at its core, Waymo is really trying to build the most experienced driver on the road. Like, where else would you find, you know, a driver that can accumulate learnings from all these, like millions of miles on different streets and all these different things that sees. So for me, I'm very much. Now, I obviously drink the Kool Aid, but I'm like, it just makes sense.
- [11:35]
A
I want to know. Okay, so you told me like one of the things you did is challenge the status quo and then you found the problem that you should market. But how do you go in and start setting up that brand identity playbook that could be used throughout the company that people are talking about? They know this is our core messaging, this is our core problem we have. This is how we should be talking about and go to market with it? So how does that look like? What does that thought exercise and that playbook look like?
- [12:05]
B
Yeah, of course. So I did that twice to your point when at Waymo we were branding the entire company from scratch. And then with care.com, last year, we did major rebrand, small tweak to the name that I'll get into. New identity, new integrated campaign. For me, the key is, I think a lot of people think about branding just as, oh, your name and you've got a new logo. But I think to do a really good job at branding and go to market in general, it has to go much deeper. It has to start with sometimes what I call kind of the soul of the company. Like, why do you exist? What are you trying to impact? What is your voice? What is your tone? What is your personality? How do you want to show up in the world? And then finding the right kind of name and symbol for it? So with both companies, it really started at that core. With Waymo, I remember going to lots of different leaders who've been working on the technology for a while and asking them, why do you work on this? What's your vision for the future? And then we came to brand principles. We wanted to, yes, indeed, be bold and be undaunted in taking on this crazy technical challenge and making a real difference in the world. But we also really wanted to be thoughtful, inclusive and human. And when you have principles like that, that becomes your goal and the standard that you want to set. It's the question you constantly ask yourself when you look at an option for a name, when you look at an option for a logo, does this feel like what we want it to feel? What we've said, we want this company to represent very similar thing@care.com in that case, we had an old identity that sometimes felt a little bit more dated. It felt very childcare oriented. When in reality, our new vision for the company was not to just tackle one type of care like childcare, but to help people unravel this web of complex care needs. Because a lot of people have childcare needs. They've got aging loved ones and we've got an aging population in this country. They've got pets, they've got a household to take care of. How do we reposition ourselves as attacking that problem as a whole and make sure the brand reflects that? We had similar exercise around what is our voice. We want to be warm, we want to be protective, we want to be trustworthy. What verticals do we want to be in? There's so many different verticals. And then once we've defined those principles, and again, by partnering with an agency to think through options for names, logos, figuring out what's right, working internally with stakeholders, I actually often feel like sometimes the hardest part of building an identity isn't necessarily defining a good one. It's helping a whole bunch of people internally to understand and align on whatever you're trying to achieve and actually agree on what we should go with. Because it's so much a balance of an art and a science. And that stakeholder management process can actually be really, really tricky. But ultimately, you hope to have an identity that is distinct. That's really one of the most important things you can do. All this work around building positive associations with your brand, with your product or your company, and you need to build all that association with something that is memorable, with a name that people can recognize.
- [15:21]
A
Yeah, I like that. I think so many companies need to go back to, like, their core and, like, figure out, like, who we want to be, like, what problem we're trying to solve, like, what niches are we trying to attack. And then also, you've been doing this at way more. But both those brains, like, you have to have some level of trust because one of them, like, you're letting someone in your home to, like, care or take care of your loved ones. And the other one is like, you're putting a loved one in a car or you're putting yourself in a car, or is this a safe experience? And you have to. Your brand has to embody that as a brand as well as, like, how you message going into market. Otherwise there's a disconnect of, hey, this doesn't feel like a safe brand. And so I, I like how you. Your thought process of, of going through that so well, after you've done like, that, those, like, thought exercises and built that up. How did you go to market with both? How did you. Because I know you like, how do you. How do you bring this to more and more people?
- [16:25]
B
Yeah, I might use Care.com is the example for that one. Because we, when we came in, it was really. We've had new leadership come in over the last two years or so. It had actually been prior rebrands@care.com that didn't go quite as well. And we all knew, like, looking at each other, we're like, rebrand cannot be superficial. It cannot just be. We've got a new name and logo or colors. There has to be a deeper story behind it. So in terms of going to market, we really thought about not just the identity, but also things like the tagline and the campaign behind it and the storytelling behind it. So I've talked a bit about the identity piece. We also, by the way had brought back the.com because for a while we were just care. And there were some challenges with that. Is really, as you can imagine, really hard to own a generic name. Anecdotally I'd be like, I work at care. People would go, huh, Care what? Care not come. Oh. So we like brought that back but then with that needed to modernize other elements and we're distinct but still, you know, more, more, more up to date. We also thought a lot about things like our tagline and creative platform. So we actually landed on the line that we worked on with an agency called when it's not you, it's care.com I like to think of it as a bit of a behavioral hack built into a tagline where we're building this kind of trigger and association of when you can't be there. Think of us very similar to how a lot of other brands we just have a break, have a KitKat. We built that into our go to market plan so that again, it isn't just this new logo and identity, but there's a trigger to help you, to help you think of care.com in those right moments. And I also love that when it's not you, it's care.com felt really authentic. It's acknowledging the parents like yourself that actually we know you are your number one choice. You know, you wish you could be there all the time, but it can't always be you. We know that's a problem. We're here to solve that in this kind of very real and authentic way. We built out a whole integrated campaign based on that insight that, you know, sometimes the hardest part of caring for people and all of those demands is trusting someone else to give the care you wish you could. And so we met people where they are in that emotion. You mentioned you have a six month old. We have a spot that's specifically about a mom going back to work after maternity leave and all those mixed feelings that come with it. But then having that moment of relief of like when it's not you, it's care.com we can be there for you. All those things add to this identity that we're building. And then deeper than that, we also work with across the entire company, especially with our product team, on updating our product experience. And that's a really, really critical part of rebrands that your brand isn't just your logo, your name, your advertising, it's the experience people have when they come in. So we refreshed, we redesigned the entire experience to feel more like the new care.com more trustworthy, more like an ally, less transactional. We built in new features that match that positioning. You and I were chatting a bit earlier around. Sometimes we need to find care. It feels a little bit like you're thrown into a maze and there's a whole lot of stuff to figure out from things as mundane as oh my gosh, who am I interviewing again and when is that interview and have I talked to this person? Do we need to do a trial to things that are more foundational? We see this a lot in senior care of oh my gosh, I have an aging loved one. I don't even know what my options are. What is the senior living community? What's a nursing home? What's an in home caregiver? We also worked on updates to our product experience. We have a hiring hub to tackle that mundane problem I talked about where now you have all of the people you've talked to in one place. You can track their status, you can take private notes on them. Then with that more foundational issue of I don't even know where to start, we launched a senior care advisor Service where for 90 days you can be partnered with a master's level social worker who can give you advice and guidance. So to me, go to market for a rebrand again wasn't just the logo. It was why we exist. It's our storytelling. It's the product experience itself and telling that story of how we are revamping the product to match this new North Star of who we are and what we want to be. Still a work in progress, but that's in part why my title isn't just the brand piece that's also the go to market, that deeper storytelling that supports the brand.
- [21:19]
A
It's super important what you said and I love that you work with the product team to do this because it's super important that as a brand person you could do all you want is trying to make the brand feel trustworthy and make the brand feel this and make the. But if there aren't elements in the product like I know you for nannies, you have like they're automatic. Like they have like that auto background check and then you can go deeper background checks and you feel like a little safer that if I'm going to hire this person, I can go do a background check on them. Those little features, if you didn't have them and you're trying to call yourself a trustworthy company or, or, or care.com is not only like you have care, but you're actually caring about like you have to care about the person who's at the end where you said the mundane feeling, the feeling of you have an aging parent, but also new parent feeling of okay, there's so many options as a new parent. Like, hey, I might need only a few hours of care on the weekend. I need full time, I need night, I need day, I need, I need some parents who want Montessori versus not Montessori. It's like all these things and you don't know where to look and how to look. But if you make it easy and have filters to do that, it's. It makes it a better experience for someone looking for care.
- [22:40]
B
Yeah, I think that brand can be really. I've seen this happen both@waymoandcare.com, it can be really powerful, not just as your external go to market, but as the internal rally and cry. Like I've had so many moments of producing, let's say it's a video or something that tells our story for why we do what we do and sharing that internally and seeing internal folks, product folks, engineers, legal, finance, going, feeling inspired, being like that is what we're setting out to do. That's the problem that we want to solve. This is what we want to do for families. In a way, it kind of raises the bar internally of what people see themselves as doing. They want to be able to meet that standard. Yesterday, actually, we released Care.com's like 13th edition of something that we call our cost of Care report, where we're looking at everything you talked about, like not only the financial but the mental and emotional load of caregiving. And we share that internally to help everyone stay really grounded in the problems we're trying to solve. We saw some kind of really astounding stats. Like 90% of parents have lost sleep finding and managing care. 80% spend almost every waking hour thinking of someone else other than themselves. 84% feel burnout. Most parents when they have to find care, go to three different platforms, maybe including some unvetted social media options. Like this is the state of overwhelm that parents are in next to that problem. This is how we want to show up as a brand. We want to be an emotional ally, we want to be a partner. Yes, we communicate that externally. But you also know that you're effective when you see people internally kind of had that like light bulb moment in their hands of I want to sign up to work at that company, I want to build that product and I'm going to make sure Their product can live up to that standard.
- [24:33]
A
I can attest that every one of those problems I had as a. Yeah, me too.
- [24:38]
B
Yeah.
- [24:39]
A
Every one of those problems where you said looking at multiple platforms and then going to one and then losing sleep over, am I going to find the right person? Is this the right person? Caring Even when you hire someone losing sleep, they're with your loved one, like, is this the right person? So many things that go into, like, letting someone take the range where you want to, as a parent, look after your kid as much as possible, but you have to. You have to work, and you have to let someone else help you with that experience. I want to also go, there's a moment you. You said that when brands go from what is that? To how do we live without this? What are like, some signals that you look for? Like, you see that shift is happening as a brand that people are like, oh, like, what is. Like, what is this product is like, okay. People are finally like, aha. Like, I understand. I need this right now.
- [25:37]
B
Yeah, Waymo. Definitely the best example of that. And on a personal note, it's honestly been really surreal and astounding. Going from what I just talked about, right, like 13 years ago, we're naming the company, we're doing all this foundational work on, like, what's our positioning and our messaging? How do we help people understand what we solve for? Today, I'll be on social media watching people do the work on behalf of the brand, saying, I'm converted. There's no better way. Like, how did we get around otherwise? And they would call out different examples. Like, they notice that the car is super consistent, that it stays out of other blind spots. It is really thoughtful about people on the streets. On a personal note, just being able to go from that point A to B has just been mind blowing. And I think to that note, that is probably one of the most compelling signals. When you hear someone else say it, not you, they're offering it, they're saying, I can't believe that this didn't exist before. This is clearly a much better solution. I can't see any other way. You know, you've done that work. And I'd say, you know, before, when I was there, again, we're not quite in so many markets, but we would see that aha moment when people took like a demo guy and they come out and just like, they're super excited. They're like, that was incredible. I noticed it did this and that. Like, it feels so safe and consistent. And now it's Just happening at even greater scale. So that that's probably the single most powerful signal when you can hear someone else say it. The thing that you've been trying to get them to understand, they've put it in their own words and their own experiences.
- [27:21]
A
Yeah, it's so hard to go back and think there's so many things like you said, the status quo of even like why we got into vehicles in the first place to why we got into strangers cars to. It's just going back to that moment you figure out like the first person who got into a car where someone else is driving you or like the first person who got into like a heavy vehicle that you're driving and like, and now everybody's in the road doing that. It's just crazy to think about like people are, there are going to be heavy challengers of this product and you have to fight through that, those challenges to get through the next to the next level of it.
- [28:03]
B
And you have to be really thoughtful in thinking about that adoption curve too because I think now Waymo's in a different state where the team there like there's so much more social proof that you can lean on people who've taken rides rights that you can give. But when I was there again we were in earlier stage and so we had to be really mindful of like who are the people that we are really trying to go after who have the most influence on the next tranche of people who are going to become more open to self driving technology. So I work very, very collaboratively, not just within marketing, but with our comms and PR leads or policy leads. We would think of this really as a three legged stool. Like who are the right people to get in the room between policymakers who need to open up the pathway for self driving cars and ride hailing services to be a thing press who write articles about why does technology exist, Is it good, is it bad, how should you think about it? But also just general public and local community members who are seeing the cars being tested in their neighborhoods, whom the journalists will talk to for real life experiences and examples like it really we had to create a bit of a flywheel between those audiences in very select markets and then watch as that flywheel gets bigger and bigger and bigger and again to the point now where there are a lot more members of the general public in it. I'm sure the folks at Waymo now are also thinking about now how do we lean on that to make this problem go even bigger and bigger and bigger?
- [29:35]
A
That's an important point too is you have to press and all these people you have to have on your side because you hear, you'll hear a million stories of one problem happening with a waymo in public where like you, you miss out on the millions of stories of cars, like someone getting in a car and doing something crazy. And it's just like people focus on this technology's bad because of this one incident. But you have to like weigh out like the one incident versus like the millions are happening over here. And it's hard sometimes to do that. But you have to have press on your side, like you said, because they are going to be the anti press out there. So you have to fight the anti all the time.
- [30:20]
B
Exactly, yeah. And that's part of the education that we have to do around that problem. Because I think people often think of safety as very black and white. Something is completely safe or it isn't in reality. Safety often exists on the spectrum. So we had to do this really delicate storytelling, like I said earlier on, around like the state of human driving today and why it's a problem and coming in with this new technology. You know, we've never gone out and said this is like 100% safe, guaranteed like zero incidents because things happen. But it was a bit of this safer than story that this is still a better solution than what we have today. Helping journalists and other thought leaders to also see that and tell this really complex story. And then from a marketing standpoint too, to your point, every time there's a problem, it's headlines, but you don't see headlines every time the ride goes well. So how do you, from the marketing side make sure you also like promote the wins to create that kind of counterbalance, to create that social proof to have advocates on your side so that when something bad happens, people can really see the big picture and it's more balanced.
- [31:38]
A
I also want to go. I know there was like a lot of things you people don't see in marketing of backroom chats, of what should we name things? And like going back and through and taglines and iterations and iterations. So could you go through, like when you're doing some like these thought exercises, like what does it look like behind the scenes to get to that final product? Because most people just see this beautiful tagline or a new website or a new product, but they don't see like this, the war room and the ideation and the iterations and all that stuff.
- [32:13]
B
Oh, for sure. I've been through it multiple times. Really fun and Challenging all at once. I think, like I said before, it starts actually with what I call kind of defining the soul of the company. Understanding why we exist, the mission, what problems we're trying to solve, what the vision is and then getting. Usually the first step is then defining what we call your brand principles. What do you want to look and feel like? Do you want to be friendly, fun, exciting? Do you want to be premium, luxurious, polished? Do you want to be some other complex combination in between? And we would define that for our brand. So, for instance, with Waymo, we wanted to be undaunted, but also thoughtful and inclusive. Then you engage creative partners, often an agency, to come in, help them understand what you're trying to achieve, what your vision is, because you're creating an identity not just for today, but for the decades to come. And then they often come back with different territories. So you could say, okay, here's the brief. We want to be undaunted, thoughtful and inclusive. Here are three or four different ways in which we could achieve that. And they look and feel very different. You got to get all the right stakeholders in the room, weigh in on that together. Help everyone and because it's such a long process, help everyone get out of their heads. In terms of when you're looking at explorations, you're not looking for perfection, you're looking for potential.
- [33:35]
A
That's the hard part.
- [33:36]
B
That's the hard part. Because people look at it, they're like, I'm not sure about that.
- [33:39]
A
Yeah, why does. What does that piece in the website look like that? I want to change that. This is not what you're looking at right now. This is a rough draft.
- [33:47]
B
Exactly. Yeah. And there's actually a little bit of an art to that, stakeholder management, especially when you're bringing in folks who aren't in marketing and branding. And in both of my cases, like with Waymo, in both of my cases, I felt like I was naming other people's babies. Because Waymo, yes, the company was new, but the people who have been working on the technology have been doing it for like at least 10 years. Care.com had like 18 year long history, so I had to get them in the room to get their buy in, but then also educate these people who are not marketers, who are not creative people, not brand people that, like, right now we're playing in the sandbox. We're carving out territory, pulling them in enough so that they feel engaged in the problem solving of it and not just the outcomes. So, yes, seeing the potential instead of the specifics. Narrowing down on territories and then getting deeper into, okay, here are some specific names and logos and how to think about it. And a lot of the kind of war rooming work there is in. Yes, like, you know, refining some of it. Like we might say, oh, that color feels a little too bright for what we're trying to achieve. But a lot of it's also like, again, that stakeholder management and that goal alignment of helping everyone to remember, hey, don't get lost in the fun here. What did we say we want to achieve? Who are we trying to talk to? What do we want to feel like? That's the bar. Which of these directions do you think does the best job of being bold, thoughtful, inclusive? And those are the brand principles. And then getting deeper and deeper and building out a whole ecosystem. Again, it's not just your logo. You're thinking about how colors come in, how illustrations come in, photography, all of the different things that give you a certain feeling and a vibe. I often describe it as if a brand were a person. You're not just thinking about their name or their title, you're thinking about how they dress, how they behave, how they show up, the accessories they're wearing, what they do. So you're building all this dimension and then sometimes curve balls come. Because actually at Waymo, we spent months on this identity and six weeks before launch, our Alphabet founders came in and were like, I think we should rethink our name and our logo because they had, you know, they saw certain issues with it. So then within six weeks, if they adapt to change, speed through that process again, again, still hold ourselves accountable to that goal and think more critically about what do we think we want to keep? What are some elements of their feedback that really do make sense, that we should revisit and cobble it all together. And you've got a brand identity, you've got a set of guidelines and you realize that's only part one, because now you need to go apply the guidelines to every single asset that you have, because that is where the brand comes to life. The great set of guidelines.
- [36:40]
A
Cool.
- [36:40]
B
No one cares. You have to bring it to life. And the things that you're actually putting out in front of people.
- [36:46]
A
Yeah, the process is laid out perfectly because the stakeholder battles that you said are people who have been there forever versus like someone who fresh eyes in the brand and never didn't, hasn't had that experience. And then you have founders opinions coming in, which is hard because founders have a heavy opinions on what the brand is and then it's always changing. And then you go to market and you realize like this should be a little different because people are responding not in the principles that I thought we're going to. And then you're updating all these assets and everything's a touch point. It's so crazy because people don't get like a rebrand is how much goes in the rebrand and how many metrics are changing and how many things like how many different points in the website are changing and how many pieces of copy are being changed and how many things that are ready in the world that you were the old brand, you have to like try claw back to get the new brand in there. It's crazy. It's a crazy process. But it's marketing and it's fun at the same time.
- [37:49]
B
It's fun and it can work. I think@care.com because I think we had the opportunity to think about it in such a deep way. Not just think about the name and the logo and the colors, but think about the storytelling behind the brand, the tagline, the product experience that we've seen it being really successful. We have our brand awareness and consideration after our rebrand went up year over year over like double digit percentage points. And it just is some proof and validation that that new personality we're trying to build out is resonating. So it can work really well. You can also fail. There are a lot of failed rebrands out there, so definitely a really complex challenge.
- [38:41]
A
Yeah, I mean, the failed rebrands either are headlined and some people don't get what a rebrand is like. Some people look at a logo and be like, wait, that's the rebrand? And people don't get the rebrand was way more than that. Just that logo that they changed a little bit. It's like a thousand other things, but they think it's that. But yeah, there's so many field ray brands that take a company and there's so many positives that made the company go to the moon. So the last question I have for you and ask everybody in this podcast is what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [39:16]
B
Oh, probably one of my biggest learnings here. There's so many hills I could die on, but I'll pick this one that I think was kind of unique to my experience. You can't just be a marketing person. You have to be a business person. And I think I uniquely learned that in my career because I think for maybe about 10 years or so, I actually didn't report to another marketer I reported to a GM or a CEO or a coo, and I had to learn how to speak their language. So, you know, I couldn't just say. And I would still say this, but I couldn't just say this. I wouldn't just say, oh, you want to build a brand that is emotional, that resonates. I had to connect the dots and say, I want to do that because that's what makes your brand distinct and memorable. When you have a strong brand, it drives up your sales baseline because people think of you organically. It can make your customer acquisition costs lower. Like, I had to kind of translate it for them. And I think that that made me a lot more effective in trying to drive the change that I was trying to push forward. It didn't mean, at the same time, it can't mean that you're only thinking business and you're not thinking customer. Because I think, as many marketers would say, one of our most important jobs is to be empathetic to the customer and their need and figuring out how that connects. That is still 1000% true. That's probably the other hill I would die on. But to be effective internally, you have to learn how to channel that into business language and to help people see how it connects so that you're really like. I think both can be true. You want both to be true at the same time, which is you're deeply understanding, authentically, your customers needs, their problems, their challenges. You're connecting that with them. But in doing so, you are also driving the business forward and you're able to tell that story of why you're doing things the way you are. I think sometimes in performance marketing, that's a little easier. But when it comes to creative work, that's really hard, and people struggle with that a lot. You have to learn how to connect the dots, and that makes you so much more effective as a marketer.
- [41:27]
A
Yeah, I mean, I 100%, I'll click on that. Because I was in marketing ops and I had to talk to other stakeholders and people. I was always in the room, like, weekly meeting with the head of finance and exactly how to speak the language. But I, I think, like, I would argue too, that being a better business person and understanding the business helps you do what you need to, like, exactly support the customer. Because, like, if you're not going to. If you can't sell your ideas internally to help the best for the customer, it's not going to ever get to market those ideas. It's not going to help people are not going to understand it better. So being a business person actually helps you achieve the goal of understanding your customer better. Because you have to understand how this business, like how this business runs efficiently. So this customer can, we can solve this customer's problem.
- [42:23]
B
Yeah, I totally agree. And sometimes it's this exercise of ask yourself so much at least two or three times. So with Waymo, it might be like, oh, we want to launch this campaign. We think it'll be really good. Why? So what? Well, it's important because it will help build trust in our brand. So what? Oh, well, if you don't have trust, we don't have permission to operate and test. So what? Well, if you can't do that, you can't grow the business. Ask yourself so what? A few times to dig in and, and help to connect dots. I completely agree with you. I naturally am much more of like an empathetic person. I want to advocate for the customer. I want them to have great experiences. But think of like you learning business as your way of fighting for the customer. Like connect the dots.
- [43:14]
A
Yeah. And I think, I mean it's so important because you have like, as a marketer, like, yeah, you could care about the customer deeply, but to uplevel yourself in your career, you have to be able to talk the language. Like to get to the director level, to get to the VP of marketing level. To get to. You have to. You're talking, you're not talking to the only the marketing team anymore. You're talking to different stakeholders. You're talking to, you're reporting to the CEO or you're reporting to the CEO and you're, you have to go in the meeting and fight.
- [43:44]
B
Yes.
- [43:44]
A
So your marketing team can do the things that you want to do for that are best for the customer. And that takes like learning the business and being like the one of the best business people in the company. So. And lastly, where can people find you and what you're doing?
- [44:04]
B
LinkedIn's probably the best on there. Sometimes I share a little bit about past experiences at Waymo and at Google Exit are really fun and unique, but definitely also, you know, here to champion the cause of caregiving in general. I think it's, you know, caregiving is a bit of this like invisible infrastructure that helps the world to run so on there. Happy to connect with folks.
- [44:30]
A
Yeah, I mean it is. I am a Care.com customer, so I know how it works. And if you have any questions about Care.com and how, like how I did it as a father, not just like a brand, but let me know too. But yeah, it is. It's a weird world. It's a, it's a hard world to understand, but once you understand it, you kind of. It's a trial and error thing like marketing, you understand. But so many, there's so many times where you think you need, you don't need care and you actually do need care and you, or setting up the infrastructure to like even go on a date. Like you need to be able to have like a babysitter on or even. There's so many things that comes. It's crazy. But thank you so much for coming on and chatting and sharing your experience.
- [45:16]
B
Of course. Thank you for having me. It was super fun.
- [45:20]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.