How to change what people think about your brand

Behind the expert

Meiling Tan is SVP of Marketing & Communications at Care.com. She joined in 2024 to lead brand and creative, grew her remit to six go-to-market functions including product marketing, consumer insights, social and comms, and led the company’s largest brand transformation in 18 years.

Earlier, she was Waymo’s first marketer and head of marketing. She started on the Google self-driving car project at Google X in 2013, and when it spun out as Waymo in 2016 she was the only marketer on the team, working with leadership to name the company and build its brand from scratch. Before Google X, she worked in marketing at Google, including YouTube Ads.

This conversation connects both chapters: how to evolve a legacy brand without throwing away what made it valuable, how to build trust in a technology people are afraid of, and how to make the case for brand to a CEO and CFO.

The gist

• Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Legacy brands carry awareness, trust and nostalgia worth keeping; the job is evolution, not a rebuild from scratch.

• Brand positioning should sit close to corporate strategy. Care.com’s shift from childcare utility to emotional ally was backed by product, member experience and leadership, not just the brand team.

• The repositioning lifted brand awareness and consideration year over year and delivered Care.com’s first quarter of new membership growth in nearly four years.

• At Waymo, trust came from reframing the problem before explaining the technology, and from third-party voices rather than the brand’s own.

• Brand is built to drive growth. Impressions and engagement aren’t enough on their own, but they’re useful leading indicators alongside long-term brand equity.

Evolving a legacy brand without starting over

Meiling’s first piece of advice is counterintuitive: more often than not, don’t rebuild from scratch. Care.com had strong awareness, salience and the fact that 45 million people have turned to it in almost two decades. The things that made it Care.com then still make it Care.com now. The change was an evolution in two directions: from a brand known mainly for child care to one that solves for a broader set of caregiving needs, including senior care, pet care and housekeeping, and from a transactional utility to an emotional ally.

She calls the approach systemic change. Product invested in senior care, launching Senior Care Advisor, one-on-one sessions with a master’s-level social worker. Member experience opened a 24/7 safety hotline. Every TV spot, social ad and piece of product design was overhauled, and the annual Cost of Care Survey grew from the financial cost of child care into a report on the financial, mental and emotional load of care for the whole household. Add time, consistency and genuine leadership buy-in, and the positioning stops being a brand-team project and becomes company strategy.

Where the repositioning came from

There was no single starting point. The business had been declining since a peak during COVID, which pushed leadership to look at the untapped parts of caregiving. At the same time, new segmentation work showed that customers often had multiple care needs in the household, were often searching for care for the first time, and were overwhelmed. Finding a nanny is a logistical problem wrapped in anxiety and guilt, especially for the “sandwich generation” caring for kids and aging parents at once.

Business growth and customer insight pointed to the same place. That tension became the campaign, “When it’s not you, it’s Care.com,” built on the idea that people want to be there for their loved ones but can’t always be.

Keeping a company-wide project coherent

Meiling calls it the biggest project she has led. It worked because it felt like one project rather than ten, anchored on one clear, concise, inspiring vision that product, design and marketing could each translate for themselves. She also turned her marketing skills inward, marketing the marketing with something crisp people could latch on to rather than only a 50-slide deck.

She ran it as an open book, showing senior leaders work in progress like logo explorations and creative so they could follow along, and building a growing set of examples of what fit the new North Star and what didn’t, like a snowball rolling downhill. Day to day she paired high standards with high empathy: weekly check-ins that held the team to on-time execution, while clearing obstacles when people were overwhelmed. The result was a significant year-over-year lift in awareness and consideration, double-digit growth, and the first quarter of new membership growth in nearly four years. As she puts it, it wasn’t the new logo.

Building the Waymo brand from day one

Meiling joined Google X, the moonshot lab, and began working on the Google self-driving car project in 2013, about three years before Waymo existed and at a time when self-driving cars sounded like science fiction. When the project spun out in 2016, she was the only marketer on the team, and she built the brand from scratch: the name, the mission and values, the design principles and every creative asset.

The biggest unlock was reframing the problem before selling the solution. The enemy was the lives lost to human driving: 1.4 million around the world every year and roughly 43,000 in the US, the equivalent of a 737 falling out of the sky. Accessibility helped too. Early videos showed Steve Mann, who is legally blind, taking a ride on his own. She calls this “cause work,” and it ran through everything from a founder’s TED Talk to local community outreach.

Trust is felt, not thought

Once that door was open, Meiling focused on hearts as well as minds. On the logical side, the team was transparent about how the technology worked, ran demo rides (nervous riders would grip the seat for five seconds, then find it boring in the best way possible) and built a 360-degree virtual ride showing what the car sees. But trust is a thing you feel, not a thing you think, so the cars were designed to look friendly rather than aggressive, and the project put real human faces forward.

The other half was third-party voices. What a brand says about itself only goes so far, so marketing worked closely with comms, public affairs and policy teams to educate journalists, policymakers and influencers. She sees that collaboration as a big part of why Waymo was able to build so much trust.

Brand and product are the same thing to customers

Meiling doesn’t draw a hard line between brand and product, because customers don’t. Ask people what Nike is and they think of the swoosh, the ads, the shoes and the endorsements all at once. Inside a company, though, different teams bring different expertise, so she uses a driver’s seat and passenger seat model. Everyone is in the same car heading to the same destination, and for each project the goal and the expertise it needs decide who drives and who weighs in from the passenger seat.

Making the case for brand to the CEO and CFO

Her opening line to finance is “I am in your corner.” She doesn’t build brand so it looks nice; she builds it to drive growth, just on a different timeline and with more ambiguity. From there she speaks the CFO’s language: a strong brand attracts customers organically, increases margins and pricing power, improves loyalty and retention, and helps attract talent. Then she breaks it down into brand equity metrics and uses MMM to connect brand to the business, rather than relying on abstract studies.

She also defends short-term signals. Impressions, views and engagement aren’t enough on their own, but they aren’t useless: brand equity takes months to move, so leading indicators show whether a launch is pushing in the right direction. And she argues for a right-sized, always-on brand or risk budget, because the underestimated enemy of any company is a lack of risk-taking and innovation.

Quote snacks

• “I build brand to drive growth.”

• “What is easy to measure is rarely the most important. And what is most important is rarely easy to measure.”

• “More often than not, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and rebuild from scratch.”

• “Trust is not a thing that you think. It is a thing that you feel.”

• “What we say about ourselves can only go so far.”

• “The often underestimated enemy of a company is lack of risk-taking and lack of innovation.”

Why it matters

This is the brand-versus-performance conversation from someone who has built a category brand from nothing and repositioned a legacy one. In both cases the brand work wasn’t a campaign layered on top. It was product, customer experience, comms and leadership moving together, and at Care.com it showed up in growth, not just awareness.

It’s also a practical model for the measurement conversation. Meiling doesn’t ask finance to take brand on faith, or to judge it only by clicks. She ties it to growth, tracks brand equity alongside leading indicators, connects it to the business with MMM, and protects a small budget for risk. That’s how brand earns its place in the plan.

Practical next steps

Keep what your brand already owns. Before a rebrand, list the awareness, trust and assets worth protecting, and evolve from there instead of rebuilding.

Tie positioning to company strategy. Make sure product, customer experience and leadership are behind the new position, not just the brand team.

Market the marketing internally. Give the company one crisp North Star, share work in progress early, and collect examples of what fits and what doesn’t.

Reframe the problem before selling the solution. Especially in an unfamiliar category, lead with the problem people already feel, then explain how the product works.

Invest in third-party voices. Work with comms, policy and PR so journalists, partners and customers tell your story, not just your own channels.

Speak finance’s language. Track brand equity and leading indicators together, connect brand to growth with MMM, and ask for a right-sized, always-on budget for risk.