What Hasn’t Changed in Marketing (with Matt Kerbel, Head of Brand Strategy at Turo) | Ep. 333

22:56Matt Kerbel:go yeah i mean what you just said about i mean doing what you said like talking to customers going in the deep depth of the internet what ai is just doing for you now is like you could take those 30 conversations the all the download all those threads of reddit people are talking about yeah and then put it into ai and help it analyze the data that you're still doing research but the the AI can help you get to a point of what are the common words the these people are using what phrases stick out what are some common pain points you just use it to like supercharge be being more human not the other way around like that's what I would do is like when people come into like send me emails or reply to things or even on these podcasts I I take the podcast and say like what are the what are the common things that these marketing leaders are saying like what are the pain points and i put it in ai instead of and i'm also have my bias and my learnings that i think are common too but i want to compare it and contrast against and i couldn't do that before before it would have taken me hours and hours to come through transcripts and yeah so now that's why what makes ai great is like it could take what you're doing already as a human and just 10x what you're doing as a marketer and you can focus on the things that

24:18The Marketing Millennials Hosts:really matter? And that's the, at least at this point, the best way to use it. I joke that we're in the Facebook wall days of AI. It's just so, so, so early. I don't even think we have any idea what's coming and where this is going to go. I truthfully mean that. But I totally agree. That's such an incredible usage that would have taken hours. And by the way, human error, fatigue, things like that may have come into place as you were doing those activities. So to the extent that we can use it as a complimentary tool, as opposed to being fearful and really embrace it, but not be, you know, replaced by it is, is, is I think a really great mindset.

25:02The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And I love that you're doing that. I think that's really awesome.

25:05Matt Kerbel:I want to now, now that we've like established that like you understand audiences and you know how to do it. I want to go into like a latest campaign you dropped and like walk track track back out you like thought about it so like the tour the turo latest campaign that dropped the t the new tv spot like could you walk us through like the strategy um behind it and what you were trying to nail and then also like you can go through like some of the fundamentals that you thought about in the strategy to to crush the campaign yeah

25:38The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Yeah, totally. Yeah. So for those who aren't aware, I'm sure probably most people aren't aware, we launched a campaign last year called Skip the Rental Counter. Pretty obvious what we're trying to do. And it, again, came from a place of research and understanding. And the thing that just kept coming up over and over again in terms of not only the incidence of mentions, it kept coming up over and over again, but the magnitude of it. The sheer anger that comes with the traditional car rental experience at the rental car counter, specifically at the airport, but in general, is just so awful. I wrote on LinkedIn a couple days ago, it just feels like the DMV of the airport, except that you may not drive off in the car that you intended to, which is just a hilarious premise.

26:31The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Um, and so look, we have so many things at Turo that are going for us, right? Uh, you know, you actually get the car that you wanted to rent the exact one. You, you know, have a direct line to, uh, an amazing host, um, the person that owns the car and, you know, they're vested and you having great experience because there's a review system in place. Uh, and that's obviously how they get more business. You know, you can get the card delivered to you, all these different things that, that make, you know, Turo special, not the least of which is all the incredible cars that we have on the platform.

27:06The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And what we wanted to do is really just bring that to life, show that you can rent just about any car, just about anywhere through our platform, which is, you know, different than the experience from traditional rental car. But it started, yeah, it started with research and it actually started last year with a single market test. The reason why we did a single market test. We chose Philadelphia, and I can get into why, but the executive leadership team and the board were very curious to understand, what is the ROI of brand marketing? Is there a way that we can prove it? And so very high level, we worked with data science and said, okay, we're going to choose a market.

27:49The Marketing Millennials Hosts:We ended up choosing Philly. Long story short, very dense market and yet cheaper inventory than places like New York or Chicago or Boston. we created kind of a version of philly what we call a counterfactual so a version of philly as if things just hummed along as they were as if we didn't actually do any marketing in philly so we sort of like trended it out uh in the event that sort of we we weren't going to go in and do any marketing there so like what would philly look like if we did nothing and then of course we we blitzed the market. And so, we had an incredible amount of out of home around the city and train stations and subways and at the airport and in downtown corridors and all these places.

28:38The Marketing Millennials Hosts:We were pretty unignorable. We partnered with a lot of amazing creators from around the Philadelphia area. We partnered with legends from Philly like DJ Jazzy Jeff and Tyrese Maxey and the homegrown band, Mount Joy, to do really fun PR stunts. And what we saw was that it did really, really well. We also did, by the way, events as well. We showed up at four different events because we wanted to have a really good balance of being in people's feeds, but also being on the ground and showing up for the community. And each of the events were very, very different subject matter for one another. So that way it would be highly incremental.

29:18The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And at first, what we saw was the upper funnel metrics exchange. So, like strong awareness, you know, consideration of Turo and booking intent and things like that, you know, went up. But it wasn't until, you know, three to six months later that we really saw the conversion pull through and people starting to book and people starting to use. And Philadelphia actually became and still is our fastest growing U.S. market from a place where it was actually below average. So incredibly successful. And, you know, we had to work really, really closely with executive leadership to say, look, we are a lower frequency trigger based higher dollaring business, right?

30:00The Marketing Millennials Hosts:People, people take a beat to figure out where they're going to rent from. This isn't like a, you know, new t-shirt or like a beer where people will just impulse buy right so um you know we knew that it would take a minute like we launched this in the summer and come holiday time it was like bonkers and it's continued uh through to this year because now the flywheel effect has taken over from all that that really important activity that we did in philly throughout the end of 2024 um now people know turro really really well in those markets and so we've continued that in a few different markets and we've balanced that with now a national campaign, a national extrapolation of that.

30:42The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And we're about to go on TV, on broadcast, on streaming, even on different airlines. We have partnerships with United and Southwest, where we're going to bring that to life. And you can see it on YouTube right now before we kind of launch nationally. But it's a really great campaign where it's like very, very drab and dark and dreary and black and white for people who are waiting in line. There's like a baby crying there's a phone ringing people look exasperated at the counter um everybody can relate like we've all been there we've all had these horrible experiences um and by the way like regardless of who you rent from they're pretty you know homogeneous and then you know there's this sort of like technicolor experience of this family that just kind of burst through the crowd and goes to their their beautiful car and uh you know it was all done through an app because as i They say it's 2025 and not 1995.

31:34The Marketing Millennials Hosts:They go and get on with life and have an awesome time. I think that really speaks to what we have in our midst. I think it's just a category that it's long overdue for disruption. Last thing I'll say is if you look at the players in our category, the youngest of our major competitors started in 1958. And, you know, the eldest started in the 1910s. One is one from 1912, the other from 1918. So, you know, Turo has been around for about 15 years now, but we're still sort of the new kid on the block. And we're really, really excited about this campaign. But again, started from a place of research, testing, you know, really, really great cross-functional um work but also as i spoke about earlier really really important communication you know bringing people along the journey we did a lot of um uh creative testing along the way using the platform zappy um to put things uh whether it was messaging or whether it was storyboards etc in front of consumers before we went live that we would be like okay does this actually resonate like you You know, does this make you want to potentially, you know, rent from us much more so than, you know, before you saw this?

32:58The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And the answer over and over was a resounding yes. And we knew we were headed in a really powerful direction. So I can't wait to see what the summer holds for us and then how we continue to springboard from there and do bigger, better, more awesome things as a crew.

33:13Matt Kerbel:yeah i mean if you if you could now like if i if i broke that down to the fundamentals so people like could go to the fundamentals there's market research involved there's storytelling like you have to have a good good story there's testing which is fundamental in in marketing the yeah there's the teamwork with the communication with all those those teams on the ground i also think that like it relatively to like what you could have done like you took like a smaller bet and picking like one city instead of saying i'm going to try like 18 cities which you could have done like most marketers when they run any like like even facebook ads you can like pick a market to see if there's an uptick to see if like that ad's actually working if you have a baseline um So there's like things that are like fundamentally that like, if you think about it as a marketer, like those things are not, not going to change if you market research, like storytelling, testing, like the psychology stuff, the pain point stuff that you did with the, like the feelings.

34:23The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Yeah. The other thing I would say is that we did a lot of really important tracking of the data, both internally and first-party data, but also we have a brand health tracking partner. We use Tracksuit. They're awesome. And I just think that there's a myth out there that brand cannot be measured. Like there's too many marketers, brand marketers that are being like, trust me, I'm a doctor. Like, just trust me, you know, this is going to go fine. This is, this is going to be awesome for us. And I think that, look, you have to speak the language of the people that you're trying to influence. You have to think, you know, Dale Carnegie famously talks about like the most important thing you can do is think about the other person, not about your own self-interest, right?

35:12The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And if you're talking to your CEO, if you're talking to your CFO, you know, you need to be able to think about what's important to them and also communicate effectively the time horizons with which you expect to see these things pay back. And if they would have been looking at an immediate see ad rent car sort of situation, then this would have been perceived as a failure. But we saw the leading indicators. We were like, the tea leaves are telling us that this thing is going to really pull through. And they said, okay, we're with you, which was awesome. And it's now allowed us to scale this to TV.

35:59The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And the mandate for us moving forward is that we've now essentially convinced the powers that be that we're going to invest more in brand in the years to come. And I always say offense was championships, and I just really appreciate our leadership groups belief in what we're doing. And, um, and I, I really do believe that it's going to pay off, um, and that more and more people are going to talk about us when we're not in the room really positively. And that flywheel will go well beyond Philadelphia to, um, the rest of the U S and then the other countries that we're in, um, which today are Canada, the UK, France, and Australia.

36:38The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And we're excited to expand, you know, down the road as well.

36:42Matt Kerbel:yeah and i think like what you did small i guess small test is the best way to like show like brand um like a market that didn't have any brand awareness versus like you probably have markets that are using toro if you did it in a market that using toro you might have seen like maybe a little uptick which would have shown but you're doing like relatively like low performing market but i want to do like something uh like a bonus thing because i know you're you're a fan so if you were like, I know you love Peloton. So what would you do if you were handed the keys to Peloton's brand right now?

37:20The Marketing Millennials Hosts:I do. You can see it behind me. Um, I, you know, I did Peloton yoga this morning. I was on the bike yesterday. Um, I honestly, I, I think that they've done so much good for so many, so many people. And, um, I think they've done, you know, some great things, but obviously the brand has taken a hit. The business has taken a hit, um, in, in a few years. There's a couple things that like, if you're, if you're from Peloton, you're listening, here's like, you know, free, free advice. One thing I feel like is missing. And I talked about it earlier is it's kind of crazy to me that they don't have like a, like a dietary component to their platform.

38:01The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Like it's, it feels like they could totally have their own food network, you know, on Peloton and, you know, whether that's like, I mean, they have such big personalities who teach, you know, these, these classes who, who, you know, lead these classes. And I feel like, I don't even want to say like food is having a moment. That's just like a ridiculous thing to say. But like, I, I feel like there's people who really take seriously their, their desire to become healthier, but also want to eat things that don't suck. And I just think that there's like such a massive opportunity for there to be a complimentary business.

38:37The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Like I understand, like, let's create a rower and like a, and like a treadmill, but like, you know like everybody eats last time i checked right and so i feel like there's a lot of value there to like compliment what you're doing where like you use you know the bike or or or the app or whatever in the morning to work out and then later you're like back on the app and you're figuring out what your what your meal is going to be to create a holistic program so that's that's one that i think could be could be awesome and i think could be quite believable given like the ethos of the brand and like you could have a community of people sharing recipes because it's such a massive community across the globe like it that's one that i i would think about the other one is actually like i just i i appreciate that at the advertising level they show their community but i i feel like there's so many there's got to be so many like characters and stories across the community um and one thing that i always say to my wife is um like the highest I can get, I would say in any given class is like maybe the top quarter, usually the top third of the leaderboard.

39:48The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And I'm pushing, man, like, you know, I'm going for it. And I'm like, who are these people at the top? Like, how is this possible? Are you just like cranking up your dial and just going like as slow as you can, like get into these crazy numbers? I just want there to be a camera that like looks at these people like who are you what are you doing like how is this even humanly possible you know i i would honestly i told her i'm like i would literally watch a series of like you know the best of the best in these various apps like peloton where people are just dominating and like i can i can just use my imagination right now and like that's hilarious but I think it would actually be awesome to just go one level deeper in terms of transparency and just embrace the fact that we are like sweaty messes who are going for it all together.

40:45The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And they've done that a little bit through advertising, but it feels too polished. Like I think there's a level of polish that Peloton could take away and really show that they are truly the fitness partner for the global community. So those are a couple of things that I think about, uh, I guess when I'm like working out or not working out or going for walks or thinking about things. So, um, there you go Peloton for what it's worth from Matt Kerbel to you.

41:16Matt Kerbel:Have you, have you seen the tour de France show of like the, like them writing like the, the first season and second season of like what the preparation of and the teamwork that goes into. No, but I need to.

41:29The Marketing Millennials Hosts:And I love that. And I actually, one of my, one of my, um, former bosses, uh, he's, he's awesome. And, uh, he was fortunate to have a sabbatical at one point and he, he went, he's a beast. He, he rode the tour de France route by himself over many days. So like, uh, yeah, I feel like, um, like, again, it's like one of those people where I'm like, I don't see this with you like day to day, but like, I kind of want to see the prep that goes into you doing that. So now I need to watch the show.

42:03Matt Kerbel:Last question I have for you. And I asked everybody on this podcast is what is a marketing hill you would die on? Oh man, brand is the way, uh, it's been proven basically forever.

42:17The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Um, and, and, and brand is owned by everybody at the company. It is essentially a synonym for reputation. So I think to the extent that you can rally an entire company around a brand in a really, really cogent and convincing and inspiring and powerful way, you give yourself a monumentally higher prospect of success. I fundamentally believe that. And I don't think it's as easy as it sounds. and the other thing i would say as i talked about earlier is brand is measurable if you don't think that brand is measurable then try harder i mean that's the only way you're going to survive anyway

43:01Matt Kerbel:if brand is not measurable like you're you're just not gonna stay relevant as a marketer because honestly that's how you crime in your career is results driven that's right if you can't uh if you can't prove why the thing happened um and brand is just out there is this like ethereal

43:22The Marketing Millennials Hosts:mystic thing even if it seems like everything's going well we've seen people get fired before even when things are are seemingly going well because internally something's off they're not connecting the dots for you know the people that they need to be connecting the dots for so So I think it's really, really important. And so really, really think about brand. What else have we talked about? Soft skills, don't forget about those. Don't forget about the fundamentals. And make sure your brand is measurable. Lastly, where could people find what you're doing and find you? Yeah, probably by far the place that I'm most active is on LinkedIn.

44:06So just look up Matt Kerbel.

44:09The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Um, and always happy to, to hear from people, to connect, to chat. Uh, I love LinkedIn. It's a 24 seven never ending networking party. And, um, uh, I just, I learned so much. So I'd love to learn so much from you guys as well. Cause it really, um, makes what we do so much more meaningful.

44:29Matt Kerbel:Well, thank you so much for coming on. I love the ideas of Peloton, your campaign. Um, we, we, we covered a lot in this conversation. um we went different directions but i think i think it's helpful to understand why fundamentals and i honestly think like brand is a fundamental thing that people like you just said it's like synonymous with reputation like if you don't have a good reputation as a company you're gonna lose like no matter how many force placements you're trying to do to try one revenue which is what paid is just like a guaranteed distribution but doesn't help brand if you're not having a

45:11The Marketing Millennials Hosts:brand thought behind it so yeah and the last thing i'll say is like don't overthink it like what do we know we know that like people want to be happy people want to be entertained people want to be informed people want to to learn about things that have value to them in in you know uh their lives right and and they want currency they want to be able to tell other people about awesome things um and do those things that i just said for others so don't ever think it like figure out what your you know way to to present these things are and um and just try you know something is better than nothing right as as as they say uh you miss 100 of the shots you don't take well thank you so much and I really enjoyed this conversation.

45:57The Marketing Millennials Hosts:Thanks, Daniel. I appreciate it. And likewise, and keep doing what we're doing.

46:03Matt Kerbel: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 Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.