“So you moved from Detroit to Boston to work for a car company.”
– My dad… calling me from Novi Michigan, 2006
“Hello,” I say, in the shaky voice of a 21-year-old making a cold call. “I read your article on DDOT and I… I … wanted to talk to you about Zipcar.”
“Okay – I’ll bite,” answers the Washington Post reporter on the other line. “What’s a Zipcar?”
I take a deep breath and launch into the messaging I’ve been trained to share. “Owning a car in the city isn’t practical. Zipcar lets people share a car and just use it -”
But they cut me off before I can finish: “-So you’re trying to tell me you think people are going to give up their cars and share around these – what are they? – Zipcars? No thanks!” Dial tone.
This wasn’t the first reporter I’d failed at pitching, but it’s one that always sticks with me. Because this is what people now forget about Zipcar (and so many other companies like it). When it first started, people didn’t say, “Oh, that’s such a great idea,” or “Wow, what a great business model!”
In fact, when I brought it up around friends or family, it would spark an even debate between those who thought it was cool, and those who thought it was the downright dumbest idea they’d ever heard of.
But I believed, alongside many others.
In our careers, we can attribute success to hard work. To talent. To skill. But there’s always another factor – luck. And building Zipcar took plenty of each.
I worked for Zipcar on the agency side for two years, before doing the thing you’re really not supposed to do and taking a job directly with them as their first head of comms in 2006. I was 23 years old.
I was there during what I still refer to as the Zipcar heyday. We scaled from $20 to up and over $100M in revenue. We launched new cities left and right, opening up universities, expanding internationally, taking on heated competitive battles… all driven by a team that seemed to perfectly find itself balanced between capitalistic and mission-driven.
Now, Zipcar’s story has since been long and filled with both praise and criticism. But today, I’m reflecting on those early years. The time when it wasn’t just a story of going from unknown to known, but a story of going from, “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard of,” to, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
As I reflect on my time at MOVE America last week connecting with friends and colleagues new and old, I’ve found myself especially reminiscent of my Zipcar years. It’s astounding how much of what I learned there we still use to drive leadership, growth, and category creation for our mobility clients 20 years later.
Here are the three that stand out to me most:
Invest in brand from R&D to exit.
It’s fair to say that brand was an obsession at Zipcar. As a category definer, we had to win on brand – and we needed to establish it early.
At Kickstand, we’re often asked when is the “right time” to begin investing in brand. For other industries our answers vary more widely, but for most mobility brands we work with, the answer is: “early, consistently, and with intention.”
This doesn’t need to start with a steep price tag, but it does require doing the work to figure out who you are today and who you want to be. The challenge lies in connecting that to every touchpoint you have with your customers and other key audiences, and ensuring you bring it to life in the physical manifestations of your brand and products.
At Zipcar, we had the luxury of having one obvious physical connection to our customers: the car itself. Early on, Zipcar’s brand went through a notable shift from a Cambridge-based car-sharing company with a mission to take cars off the road to one focused on the future of urban living. To bring this to life, the brand’s original VW Bugs were swapped for BMWs, and eventually great intention was put into ensuring that Zipcars were vehicles members wanted to drive and would aspire to own.
Determining your brand’s personality and embracing it from the get-go is also a must. You don’t need a lot of capital to figure out what your voice sounds like and how you can use it to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. At Zipcar, we wanted to be known as clever and head-turning – not outright funny, but cheeky enough to catch people’s attention. We invited folks to come “take out their aggression on car ownership” and smash a car with a sledgehammer. We ran billboard ads pointing out that we spend more time each year looking for parking than we do having sex. We sent out street teams to put on exciting installations rather than investing all of our money in paid advertising. These all became brand artifacts that helped tell the story of the brand and bring it to life.
Long story short here – mobility brands come to market with notable innovations that change the way we move. Most often the markets become aggressively competitive in a short period of time as companies compete for geos, IP, talent, and limited capital. And most mobility brands have the luxury of physical interactions with customers and other key audiences. These add up to an equation that equals early brand investment.
Connect competitive strategy to communications strategy.
As an early category leader, Zipcar was in a unique position. While there were certainly other companies starting to offer car-sharing services out there, Zipcar could operate as the sole car-sharing provider in many of the country’s biggest cities, and we were able to use leverage capital to often be first mover and brand and experience leader.
Several mobility brands we’ve worked with have encountered at least some level of similar dynamics. They are a first or early mover, allowing them to operate for a period of time with little to no competition.
If this is you, I would argue that’s even more of a reason to invest in brand early and build out that runway. Take full advantage of your head start by establishing your identity in the hearts and minds of customers, investors, media, and talent. When new entrants start making their way into your space, you should reassess your landscape regularly to ensure you have a solid competitive strategy, but you should also take the extra step to connect competitive strategy to comms strategy.
At Zipcar, we worked to be masters of this – reworking the narrative of the industry and ensuring we had the lead voice on three key questions:
What does financial success look like?
What defines a lead innovator?
How should growth and growth potential be measured?
If you own this narrative, then you can define the answers in your favor. Does the leader in car sharing have the most cars on the road? Or do their cars serve the most people? With Zipcar being the only operator in dense NYC, the volume of people served became a lead growth metric upon which competitors could not compete. After all, you put one car in the center of Chelsea, you have 70,000+ people within a 10 minute walk of it. That’s a pretty compelling statistic for investors.
You need a crisis plan.
Every company, no matter the industry, should have a crisis plan in place by the time it comes to market. The most common way a crisis escalates is when a business handles a situation poorly as it unfolds. We spend so much time thinking about external factors (e.g. what if a fired employee starts a smear campaign on social media?) and less time thinking about how we behave internally during a crisis (e.g. what if that post gets circulated internally before employees have been briefed on what happened?), which can lead to confusion and damage to your brand reputation.
We’ve all heard stories about folks jumping into action to save a life under extraordinary circumstances. Someone chokes on their dinner at a restaurant, and a good samaritan jumps in to give them the Heimlich. But in many cases, we find out that the good samaritan happened to be a doctor or off-duty EMT. They had training that allowed them to act quickly and calmly in the event of an emergency. They weren’t struck by panic like other bystanders; instead, they went on autopilot and let their training take over.
That’s what a crisis plan does for your team. It gives you preparation training so your organization behaves appropriately under times of stress. The #1 thing you want to do is minimize escalation. This is particularly true for mobility businesses – let’s face it, we deal with the physical movement of things and people – and that often means we could cause physical harm. For many brands, those events are inevitable. With hundreds of thousands of Zipcar members, car accidents are unavoidable – small ones, big ones, and deadly ones. Larger events such as a driver intentionally using their car as a weapon or driving it into a public building are less likely, but still possible. Our crisis plan covered the inevitable and the possible. It left us well-prepared to behave on par with our everyday expectations as a leadership team, culture, and brand, saving countless possible escalations that could have caused brand damage.
In a time of crisis, your leaders aspire to lead with transparency and empathy. A crisis plan allows them to do this. They need to act quickly and communicate clear, accurate information. They need to have processes in place that intelligently control the release of information. Without these, stressed brands and stressed executives are far more likely to make mistakes big and small. They are an affordable and relatively quick investment that could save you millions to billions in brand damages – not to mention hundreds of hours of stressed work when a crisis occurs. And again for the people in the back – A Crisis Will Occur. It can’t be avoided. The only questions are how big will it be, and how prepared will you be to handle it?
In closing, most of the brands we work with today or have worked with in the past spend a considerable amount of energy discussing product and IP runway. I would argue that brand runway should be considered equally important. Mobility companies should be constantly reassessing their brand runway against their competitive landscape and develop a solid understanding of what factors could lead to their brand runway collapsing in on them.
If a competitor successfully creates a more well-known brand, how much harder will that make each sale, each partnership, each interview with top talent, each conversation with an investor? Now, what if your competitor succeeded at growing a household name – how much would your product runway continue to help you? Net net… if you can win on brand, it becomes yours to lose.
