Lyft made a splash in the ride-sharing space with glowing mustaches and a friendly demeanor when the company first launched in 2012, but the brand has continued to evolve. As competitor Uber faces increased scrutiny and the recent departure of CEO Travis Kalanick, the field is wide-open for continued disruption and innovation.
Jez Frampton, Global CEO of Interbrand sat down with Melissa Waters, Vice-President of Marketing at Lyft, to discuss how the brand creates a differentiated experience and cultivates growth amid an accelerating technological landscape.
brandchannel: Let’s start by talking about the experience Lyft creates for their customers. You have a well-known competitor, and you’re slugging it out, but at the end of the day, you’re actually often using the same assets, the same people. And yet, you’ve managed to create a different experience. How do you do that?
Waters: We take great care to ensure that when a customer gets in touch with Lyft at the very first moment to say “I’m interested in becoming a driver”, we pay careful attention to the way we treat them through that entire process.
You sign up, you get onboarded, you go and get your car inspected—all these things require a high touch experience. And then we’re there to ensure that, every step along the way, you’re taken care of. The way we treat our drivers has a great impact on the way our passengers receive that experience. And we’re always amazed at the stories we hear about people who one day experience the same exact car/driver/passenger on a Tuesday with one platform, and the same exact car/driver/passenger on a Wednesday with Lyft, and the way people show up to that experience is entirely different. People are friendlier, happier, more respectful of one another, and we’re just constantly amazed that in fact the foundation of how you treat your customer leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy of people having the best experience.
BC: That takes me neatly on to the next question, which is about judging growth for any business: How do you think about growth as a company? What matters to you?
MW: We measure everything. There’s no doubt that we measure everything. But I think the question has to become: what do you pay the most attention to? We’re a tech company, so we’re awash in data. We’re comparing ourselves against multiple different industries, and our own benchmarks. We know that in taking great care to provide the right customer experience for our drivers and our passengers, and looking at NPS metrics, that’s going to help us make sure that, in that sea of noise and data, we’re staying true to our North Star of providing the best customer experience.
We’re celebrating a milestone! Lyft drivers have now earned over a quarter billion dollars in tips.https://t.co/NcKITmLIbR pic.twitter.com/VEAcRFstGH
— Lyft (@lyft) June 19, 2017
BC: As a company, you’re quite famous for your launch tactics, the mustaches that were on the front of Lyft cars at one point being a prime example. How do you think about engaging with your audience? Standing out is tough, right?
MW: That’s right. We had to establish ourselves back in 2012 in a category in which it wasn’t even legal to operate. So our first experience going to market back then was to put big fuzzy pink mustaches on the front of cars, and the quest for all of us as brand marketers essentially is to drive a conversation. Because we know that by driving conversation as a brand, if people are talking about us and having a great experience sharing that, then in fact we are going to get that growth that we’re all looking for.
We’ve since evolved and gone from the glow ‘stache to an amp that sits on the front of the car that is both a beacon—a modern day taxi light—but also a symbol of identity. It is also a great platform to offer value. In a crowded marketplace where you might be standing on the street corner waiting for a Lyft along with five other people, being able to dynamically match the color of the amp on the front of the car with the color on your phone is easier than trying to look at the license plate, shaving seconds off of pick-up time and creating a better experience for both the passenger and driver. Those are the types of car experience innovations that we look to continue to drive.
Happy #NationalPinkDay from some people who kinda like pink. pic.twitter.com/K8IZ54RdVc
— Lyft (@lyft) June 23, 2017
BC: Obviously, part of your job is to make sure as many people in the world know about you and what you do. So that means you have to be brilliant marketers yourselves. How do you use media and all the raft of different channel opportunities that you have to make sure that you’re getting to the right person at the right time?
MW: We look at the full funnel. We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on growth, as every growing tech company does, looking at acquisition and ensuring that we are there in the moments of choice. The interesting thing about our brand is that our point of sale is the street corner. How do we think about that? And does that require some interesting media innovation to ensure that we’re top of mind for folks as they make that choice? And then we’re driving them to choose Lyft in the moment for their transportation needs.
BC: How are you thinking about where the company goes from a technological point of view? I suppose the simple way of putting it is, cars are going to start driving themselves aren’t they—and that provides opportunity for you, but also challenges, because it takes some of the human contact out.
MW: We think about that a lot, because we are a human company. And it really goes back to our founders, and the way that we balance both being an innovative tech organization, but also one that is really rooted in humanity. And it’s fascinating because when you think about it, we are out to change the world, and to change the way people move and make something that’s really democratized. But ultimately, our North Star is going to lead us to change the way cities are built and constructed. If you think about the amount of city infrastructure that is built to accommodate cars, and we only drive our cars 4 percent of the time and 96 percent of the time they go unoccupied, that’s a great opportunity to say, hey, are we really designing our cities properly? Are we designing cities for people? Or are we designing cities for parked cars?
We don’t see an autonomous future of cold machines. We’ve all really questioned whether or not that’s that’s the world we want. I think everybody in the world of AI and machine learning is grappling with this exact balance right now: how do we make sure humanity is still really central to what we build? That’s what’s on our mind the most at Lyft.
Watch this interview and more with General Assembly, Ancestry, and Sir Kensington’s at the Interbrand Breakthrough Brands site.
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