AMA: Uber Eats Former Head of US&CA Marketing and Global Product Marketing, Francisco Bram on Messaging

Great question. I believe in data-driven market insights as a foundation for your channel strategy. I always start the assumption that the market is heterogeneous, and therefore, requires a personalized communication strategy. For example, a recent marketing research project I was able to lead here at Uber, helped us understand the different business travel personas, their demographic information, their individual needs, pain points, wants and values and the channels they use to communicate and ...Read More

I think you need to experiment and test your messages throughout the go-to-market planning phase, marketing research and development of your value proposition. We use multiple channels to test our messaging, Emails, In-App Messaging, Push Notifications, Text Messaging, Social Media, Performance Ads, Web, Customer Focus Groups and Sales Teams. As mentioned in the other response, experimentation is a critical factor in the success of your story. Because the pace of change is accelerating, user nee ...Read More

Data insights is a critical component of what I like to call “Evidence-based Marketing”. I like to use 3 types of data insights: User Research, Market Research, and Customer Proof-Points. I use User Research data to help guide the user/customer journey map. This data is critical to help you map out all possible touch points that your message will hit. I then use market data (industry stats, market reports or surveys) to quantify and magnify the problem that your users or customers are experienci ...Read More

I believe in promoting a very collaborative environment where the best information is always shared and used to inform the different workstreams. At Uber we create one source of truth document, called the Marketing Brief. This brief can be shared with every stakeholder in the organization but is mostly used to inform the cross-functional work needed to launch a product or campaign. This Marketing Brief is used by our creative teams to help design the campaign, by our Growth marketing teams to pl ...Read More

I love this question. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen inexperienced and experienced product marketers (including me) commit a variety of messaging capital “sins”.Here is my list of the top 3 messaging capital “sins” to avoid:1. Starting with the WHATThis is perhaps the most common mistake marketers will make and also the one that will most negatively impact the stickiness of your message. Due to their close relation with product, product marketers will often develop a message around what ...Read More

Because Product Marketing can encompass a variety of different roles and responsibilities depending on your organizational structure and company size, I haven’t found a great location other than Sharebird (via AMAs) or HubSpot Blogs where people can actually share specific Product Marketing case studies. Nevertheless, Product Marketing is Marketing and a lot of my inspiration for the work that I’ve done can be derived from insightful books, leaders and conferences. These I would like to share wi ...Read More

I find that the best way to get everyone aligned is to include them early in the marketing research and user insights phase. This will help set a baseline for what the narrative needs to be, removing already some of the personal assumptions other team members can bring to the discussion.  The second thing I normally do is to test the narrative individually with multiple stakeholders, this allows everyone to provide unbiased feedback and feel 100% heard.  Thirdly, I present the complete narrative ...Read More

These are the top 3 best practices I recommend: 1. Include Include the regional marketing leaders or regional general managers (depending on the size of your company) early in the development of the go-to-market strategy and team. These leaders are a great sounding board for the countries in the regions that they manage and can help you identify potential pitfalls and opportunities as you develop your marketing plans.  2. Research I cannot stress this enough, marketing research is key to a succe ...Read More

The best way to handle products that are ever changing is to build a solution centric narrative.  If you build your narrative around solutions or customer-centric needs, then this shouldn’t change with a few feature add-ons. Customer needs tend to change less often than product features. Think of features as pillars or building blocks to support your narrative. A strong, well researched and tested narrative will not collapse if you need to replace one feature with a newer one. A good way to thin ...Read More

It all depends on your intent, your market and your business operational setup. With regards to intent, you can use competitive information to inform your unique and differentiating features and solutions. This can certainly help you craft a more compelling narrative that uniquely stands out. I would however, never mention the competition in your broad narrative. I would use it only to inform what solutions you can focus on that will help you differentiate your product or brand. If you do intend ...Read More

Experimentation is a critical factor in the success of your story. Because the pace of change is accelerating, user needs and mental models today may greatly differ from just a few months ago. This will impact how successfully your message is being received. What worked a few months back may no longer work today. That’s why you should always be testing, measuring and experimenting. I like to experiment messages already during the research phase through customer focus groups. The way I would cond ...Read More