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TURNER POV: Uber’s Rebrand #Fail

Jessica Reilly : February 08, 2016

Last week, Uber, the San Francisco-based "ride-hail" company, unveiled a radical rebranding – and the response has been overwhelmingly negative. Most found the concept confusing, and ultimately, unnecessary. As a brand enthusiast and UBER user, I can’t help but jump on that bandwagon. The Wired article that tells the story of Uber’s rebranding clearly outlines the problems from the very beginning. UBER’s CEO Travis Kalanick is an engineer by training, yet he insisted on taking the lead on the project, instead of turning to a branding agency. He felt it was too personal to entrust to anyone else. Half a dozen agencies failed at persuading Kalanick otherwise; usually a sign of an unsure client. The Uber team knew change was necessary, but didn’t fully grasp what they wanted to accomplish, and whom it was meant to benefit. In this case, it definitely wasn’t the consumer. The rebrand in total took three years, another red flag in my opinion. Have you ever been working on a project so long, forcing a certain angle, dramatically overthinking every aspect in the process? And then suddenly, a simple idea presents itself that makes you feel foolish for wasting time on a concept so obviously contrived. The Uber theme of bits and atoms, patterns and locally themed colors, it’s all too much. But I’m betting the team felt they were too far gone to turn back and start over. This redesign seems to have been done for the Uber team themselves, not for those that use their services. I could see it possibly resonating more with the original Uber user, the high-end clientele that wouldn’t be caught dead in a taxi. But now, with UberX and UberPool, most people are just trying to get from one place to another as efficiently as possible. And I know when I open the Uber app, I don’t give a hoot about bits and atoms.