What Ashim Gupta teaches about privacy-first marketing

As a second time, our platform has to be reliable and trustworthy so that more and more people come to our platform. So our comm strategy has to be revolving around drivers. It has to revolve around drivers and also we have to make the platform very safe and secure. Hi Ashim, as we enter 2020, what will be the key pillars of Uber's communication strategy? What were the last few years about? To answer this question, I just like to take through what exactly Uber stands for in India. Uber is a simple business of moving people from point A to point B.

Now for this, we need to have a certain set of riders who will be part of our platform. We need to have drivers who will take these riders from point A to point B. As a second time, our platform has to be reliable and trustworthy so that more and more people come to our platform. So our comm strategy has to be revolving around drivers. It has to revolve our drivers and also we have to make the platform very safe and secure. Right. And that's an issue which has been plaguing which you must have heard in the media as well.

So for us, safety becomes a key pillar of differentiation between us and other players in the market. So as a comm strategy, we need to ensure that the platform is safe, firstly. Secondly, we need to give a lot of mobility solutions available to our customer across different price points. So we've got the taxi service of ours or the cab healing service in which we have got the hire, we've got intercity, we've got premium, we've got go. That caters to a particular segment of people. Then we also have the auto solutions

and the motor mobility solutions. They cater to a certain specific price point as well. And we also have now partnered with DMRC, Delhi Metro, to offer a public transportation integration in the app as well. So as a comm strategy, we have to look at all these multiple price points products that are available and we have to ensure that we have more and more riders taking up our platform because of the options that we give them. So I think our comm strategy has to be across drivers, riders and also to making

a platform very secure and safe for the riders who come on it. How does the company look at long-term brand building? You see, we've done a lot of purposeful advertising recently. If you look at our campaigns, Leave Your Car Behind campaign that was done. That was primarily on sustainable mobility solutions. We wanted people to leave their cars behind and take up Uber and also complemented it by public services, public transport services. How was the response to that? Well, Leave Your Car Behind

was an excellent campaign which was cut across all platforms, trend outdoors, even reduced outdoors as well in that. And we found there were a lot of takers for this campaign. In fact, it resonated with the masses. It was a very purpose-driven communication and we were not trying to basically create mileage on our platform through having people more people ride our platform. But we wanted Uber to serve as a last mile connectivity as well. So if you're going to a metro station, we

wanted Uber to be there to help you reach the metro station, take a metro, reach your destination, then again take an Uber to reach your destination. So we were trying to complement Uber with a lot of public transport services which are already available in the market. And all this purposeful advertising that we have done has really helped us to build a brand of Uber in the market. And we also did something called Parks Not Parking as well. A lot of cars take up a lot of parking spaces.

So we wanted people to leave the cars behind and take up public transport, take up Uber to reach their destination. As a new economy brand, the first adopters are typically millennials. But how does Uber gain a wider mass appeal among the older age groups? Well, we have products which are suiting every consumer segment. We have products which are targeting the millennials. We have products which are targeting the working professionals. We have products targeting the working women professionals, which is auto. We

have products like Hire and we've got products like Premium as well, which are targeting slightly different set of consumer segments. So we already are marketing our programs in a manner which are basically helping us reach our customer segment across price points. So that's something that we're endeavouring to do. It's not that we're just focusing on one customer segment. We're trying to focus our product and services across price points through a different multimodal mobility solutions that Uber platform has to offer.

Uber's marketing has traditionally focused on very niche groups and issues like working professionals, then women's safety, right? Tell us more about it. As far as safety is concerned, we have taken up a lot of initiatives. We've got the 24 by 7 helpline. We've got the call anonymization as well as an initiative that we're taken under safety. We've got the integration of Himmet app on our platform. So there are a lot of stuff that we're doing as far as safety is concerned so that people perceive Uber as a very

safe and secure platform. So you want that safety angle to come out very strongly. So as far as working professionals are concerned, we have our Uber offerings which are Go, we've got Hire, we've got Premium. So all these services are there to target the working professionals. But we've also launched some campaigns recently, the auto campaign and the moto campaign. So the auto campaign is targeting the women working professions because we find that a lot of women have this hesitation of going too far

of places and they want to have a secure platform for them to reach from point A to point B. So we want more and more women to reach their aspirations and we want Uber to be playing a part in that. And we also have launched the moto campaign which are targeting the entry-level working professions. So if you want to reach point A to point B across different routes of Delhi through zigzagging through different routes at a very optimum and very cost-efficient price then we have the moto as well as a product proposition.

So as a product or as a brand we're trying to offer our services cutting across all different class of people including women, including working professionals and you name it we have a product suiting their needs and requirements. A digital first approach to media planning, is this a way forward for consumer businesses? Well digital definitely will be a mainstream of our communication approach going forward but by just doing digital loan won't serve the purpose.

It has to be complemented by a lot of other platforms. So digital for example if you look at the Leave your car behind campaign it was digital plus we also had print as well as outdoors. If you look at parks road parking campaign it was digital print outdoors as well. If you look at the campaigns which will be launching in the coming months as well. So it's going to be a mix of digital and other traditional media coming together to get the cohesive message out.