A Practical Framework for Brand Building with Meiling Tan, VP Brand & GTM at Care.com | Ep. 390

0:01Welcome 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 f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today, I have Mei-Ling 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 a Waymo, which I love taking a Waymo actually now.

0:47And now she is the VP of brand and go to market at care.com, which I have also used care.com. I know you've heard I have a baby. I use it to look for nannies and babysitters. So I use care.com. So both the products she's worked for, I have used a lot. So I'm excited to chat and pick her brain. But I want her to tell us how she got into marketing in that journey. Yeah, for sure. Great to be on. I'd say, you know, 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.

1:41I 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 like, no, this is what's magical about it. You know, when you have this feeling and you want to express it. And if you put out this movement, it kind of expresses it. OK, but if you do this, like you really feel it like 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.

2:18But 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, you know, landed in this world of self-driving cars and like 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.

3:03And then NamCare.com. I'm also a mom and I love that, you know, it allowed me to bring everything that I love, that creativity, the strategic and operational side, but also the sense of like 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.

3:39Like so many things fall apart. So it's been nice to have the creativity, the strategy, and then also the sense of mission. Yeah, let's go back to like your like 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 did you go through that thought exercise?

4:16How am I going to teach someone to self-driving safe? It's not a scary thing. It's not as hard as you think it is and scary as you think it is. Yeah. I'll actually take you all the way back because 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. And 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.

4:54And why the status quo today of humans getting into these like metal tins and driving them around with hindered vision actually isn't that great of an idea. So, you know, we I remember being in rooms again, like 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 this is not even possible. Like, what are you talking about? A car with no driver. And we, you know, brainstorm all these things like around the reasons why. Do we talk about safety? Do we talk about like productivity and how you gain all this time back?

5:33that 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.

6:03we 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. It's the same as a 737 falling out the sky every day. Humans are not meant to drive these things without distracted driving. People 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 framed that problem and then introduced, so now here's our solution.

6:46Then 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 that accumulates on any street. We talked about how it would 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?

7:20We'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.

7:56But within 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 this 360 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, you know, here's what LiDAR sees.

8:37Here's what the camera sees. Here's what radar sees. Here's how it works. And we're like demystifying this scary sounding technology and also kind of forcing people to go into that moment and see when you have like your headset or you're just looking at YouTube, like 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.

9:11We 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. You talk about how boring is good. We want you to get in the car and be bored. So a lot more things went into it, but I think really defining the problem was really, really critical and helping people to feel more open to the technology and open to our messaging. Yeah, I love the challenging the status quo because if you actually do think about it, it is pretty crazy that we're driving heavy machinery around.

9:48And 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 putting your daughter in a car with a driver. And that's scary too. There's nobody in the car that can hurt you as 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 that are safer about driving in a self-driving car than driving a car by your 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 gonna dart out in front of me this is gonna this person's not paying attention so i get super scared me too strangely like working at waymo actually made me even more scared because i I became so aware of all the crappy drivers that are out there or even aware of my own imperfection.

10:50Like I'm not a perfect driver, even though I think I'm OK. 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. We talked a lot about how we can break down the technology and how it works, but at its core, Wain was really trying to build the most experienced driver on the road. Where else would you find a driver that can accumulate learnings from all these millions of miles on different streets and all these different things at C's?

11:29So for me, I'm very much now, I obviously drink the Kool-Aid, but I'm like, it just makes sense. 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 like brand identity playbook that could be used throughout the company that people are talking about? They know this is our like 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 in that playbook look like?

12:04Yeah, of course. So I did that twice to your point. One at Waymo, we were branding the entire company from scratch and with care.com. Last year, we did major rebrand. Small tweet to the name that I'll get into a new identity, new integrated campaign. for me the key is you know 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 like 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 like how do you want to show up in the world and then finding the right name and symbol for it.

12:51So with both companies, it really started at that core. You know, at Waymo, I remember going to lots of different leaders who'd been working on the technology for a while and asking them, like, why do you work on this? What's your vision for the future? And then we came to, like, brand principles. Like, we wanted to, yes, indeed, be bold and be undaunted in, like, taking on this crazy technical challenge and making a real difference in the world. but we also really wanted to be thoughtful and inclusive and human. And when you have principles like that, that becomes your goal and the standard that you want to set.

13:28It'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 at Care.com. In that case, you know, 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.

14:07They'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? So we had similar exercise around what is your voice? We want to be warm. We want to be protective. We want to be trustworthy. What verticals do we want to be in? It was 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.

14:44it's helping a whole bunch of people internally to understand and align on what are we trying to achieve and actually agree on what we should go with because it's so much a balance of the 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 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 a way more but both those brands like you have that 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 uh 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 like how did you because i know you like how do you how do you bring this to more and more people yeah i might use care.com is the example for that one um because we when we came in um And it was really, we've had new leadership come in over the last few years or so.

16:38It had actually been prior rebrands at 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 then colors. Like there has to be a deeper story behind it. so in terms of going to market you know we like really thought about not just the identity but also things like 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 dot-com because for a while we were just care um and there were some challenges with that is really as you can imagine really hard to own a generic name like anecdotally i'd be like i work at care people would go, huh?

17:25Care what? Care.com. Oh, so we like brought that back, but then with that needed to modernize other elements. So 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 like 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 do this, have a break, have a Kit Kat.

18:07We built that into our go-to-market plan so that again, it isn't just like this new logo and identity, but there's a trigger 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. It 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 on all of those demands is trusting someone else to give the care you wish you could.

18:55And so we met people where they are in that emotion. You know, 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 I 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.

19:34It's the experience people have when they come in. so we refreshed we redesigned the entire experience um to feel more like the new care.com more trustworthy more like an ally less less transactional we built in new features um that match that positioning um you and i were chatting a bit earlier around sometimes when you define care it feels a little bit like you're thrown into a maze and there's a whole lot of stuff to figure out um 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.

20:13We 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? So we also worked on like updates to our product experience. We have a hiring hub to tackle that mundane problem I talked about, where now you have, you know, all of the people you've talked to in one place, you can track their status, you can take private notes on them. And then with that more foundational issue of, I don't even know where to start, we launched a senior care advisor service. But for 90 days, you can be partnered with a master's level social worker who can give you advice and guidance.

20:50So 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, but it's also the go-to-market, that deeper storytelling that supports the brand. 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 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 I need night, I need day, I need some parents who want Montessori versus not Montessori.

22:29It'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 makes it a better experience for someone looking for care. Yeah, I think that brand can be really, I've seen this happen both at 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 like 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.

23:14That's the problem 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 13th edition of something that we call our cost of care report, where we're looking at everything you talked about, 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.

23:5580 % 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. 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 in that company i want to build that product and i'm going to make sure their product can live up to that standard i can attest that every one of those problems i had yeah me too yeah every one of those problems where you said uh looking at multiple platforms and then going to one and then um losing sleep over am I going to find the right person is this right person caring even when you hire someone losing sleep like they're with your loved one like is this the right person um 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 um 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 did you see that shift is happening as a brand that people like oh like what is like what is this product is like okay people are finding like uh-huh like i understand i need this right now 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 So today, I'll be on social media watching people do the work on behalf of the brand saying, I'm converted.

26:03There's no better way. How did we get around otherwise? And they would call out different examples. 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.

26:45You 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, you'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'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 yeah it's so hard to go back and think there's so many things like you said the status quo of a drive even like why we got into vehicles in the first place to um why we got into strangers cars to it's just going back to the 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 the to the next level of it and you have to be really thoughtful and thinking about that adoption curve too um because i think now waymo's in a different state where the team they're like there's so much more social proof that you can lean on, people who've taken rides, rights that you can give.

28:15But when I was there, again, we were in an earlier stage. And so we had to be really mindful of 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 her 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 this technology exists, 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 like create a bit of a flywheel between those audiences and very select markets and then watches 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 flywheel go even bigger and bigger and bigger 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 um 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 the anti press out there so you have to fight the anti all the time exactly yeah and that's part of the like 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 where it isn't.

30:31In reality, safety often exists on the spectrum. So we had to do this really delicate storytelling, like I said earlier on, around the state of human driving today and why it's a problem. And coming in with this new technology, we've never gone out and said, this is 100 % safe, guaranteed, zero incidents, because things happen. But it was a bit of this safer than story. right like 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 like to your point every time there's a problem it's headlines right but it 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 um people can really see the big picture and it's more balanced 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 um 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 well for sure i've been through it multiple times really fun and challenging all at once.

32:18I 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.

32:56Then 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, OK, here's the brief. We want to be undone, thoughtful and inclusive. Here are three or four different ways in which we could achieve that. And you 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.

33:33You're looking for potential. That's the hard part. That's the hard part. Because people look at it and they're like, I'm not sure about that curve. Yeah. Why 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 like rough draft exactly and 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 i felt 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 and 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 same box.