At this stage of my life, I’m fortunate to be part of a global corporation that not only delivers products and services to consumers worldwide but is also on a purposeful journey to build a brand that resonates from the inside out. We’re working to elevate brand equity through intentional internal and external engagement—while inspiring a culture of excellence, where every employee contributes to a consistent, high-quality customer experience.

Knowing the amount of effort it takes to create this type of environment, I’ve wondered how a company like Uber builds and manages their brand contact process and how they do their internal marketing and establish employee involvement to shape the perception of the brand in the eyes of their clients with most of their employees scattered around the world, riding the streets with a current count of roughly 3 million drivers and 75 million riders. Uber has recently decided to strengthen their public image by rebranding themselves as “a platform for mobility”. This rebrand has included new colours,  a redesigned app look and feel and a custom wordmark logo where the right side of the first letter “U” and the stem of the lowercase “b” animate into 2 lines resembling the white lines on a black road. With this rebrand Uber says: “As we expand our reach into our other markets and modalities, it’s super important that it’s very clear that when you’re getting into an Uber car or on an Uber scooter, you know that is an Uber product, we weren’t achieving that with our current system.”

Uber has had an unconventional marketing strategy in that they initially didn’t rely on traditional planned points of contact like TV and print ads for their advertising but rather focused on service points of contact through clients experiences with the app and the driver providing a good service for their users, and as a result capitalising on unplanned points of contact by relying on word of mouth to promote them. 

When establishing themselves in a new region, Uber has a 5 phase brand contact strategy that is aimed at growing brand loyalty. When establishing their services in a new city, their first contact point includes the #Ridezero campaign. This campaign aims to create lots of interaction on social media with word of mouth by roping in an influencer of that specific area, connecting them with the name of the brand and thus winning the interest of their followers. Frequent contact points where loyalty is won through the brand experience includes their newly designed app, as well as their partner network in cities, and different types of cars one can choose from for your specific needs; from hatchbacks, to sedans, autorickshaws and motorbikes. Uber also focuses on providing impact contact points through strategic partnerships with apps like zomato, where users can book an Uber from their favorite restaurant through the restaurant app. And then they also have a  last impact contact point which gives the customer credits for each friend they refer. Uber gives credits to the referrer and the friend that accepts the referral with the aim of creating loyalty with frequent users.

See you soon – To ensure brand contact cohesion, Uber aims to establish themselves as a brand that provides a service for everyone by positioning themselves as inclusive. They have strengthened this positioning by putting together ad campaigns that aim to capture the culture of the cities they provide services in to speak more directly and be more relatable to their consumers. An example of this would be their See You Soon advert.

Further building brand cohesion would be through humanizing the brand to make it relatable to all, supporting their position of inclusivity. This is accomplished through storytelling and using the faces of their users in their brand marketing to establish trust. Uber has also used this strategy when they were redesigning their logo by getting customer input on their perception of the current logo and using the feedbacks from users to design the new logo solution.

Uber aims to be the number one choice for transportation and in order to accomplish this they provide different loyalty incentives to their drivers, these incentives are designed to reward the driver while giving the customer the best experience. One of these initiatives is called an hourly guarantee. This initiative encourages riders to shorten consumers waiting time so that they don’t decide to rather use a different transportation service. They do this by encouraging drivers to fill in a form that will guarantee their availability during certain peak times or events. The guarantee will then be credited to the driver’s paycheck as a percentage bonus to reward them for their extra effort.

To grow company culture among employees, Uber has appointed a chief diversity and inclusion officer who is responsible for overseeing DEI strategies within the company. Uber has also recently launched a set of new cultural values which they have announced to employees. These values have been established from the bottom up to ensure that the people believe in them and will be willing to commit to them. 

Uber has an amazing brand contact process that is effectively promoting their service, but it seems like other than providing quick assistance there is not much more contribution from employees to build the brand.

With their focus on turning their values into cultural norms, I believe we could see much growth in the impact and contribution employees will have in further building the positive perception of Uber in the eyes of the consumer.