Internal brand- and culture-building

Turo tone & voice guidelines

Rebranding from “RelayRides” to “Turo” in November 2015, I was privileged to have the opportunity to create the Turo tone, voice, and editorial conventions from soup-to-nuts. Initially working off existing work by our branding agency, I evolved their visual branding into tone and voice rules, editorial and mechanical conventions to apply across the Turo product, as well as marketing and support content, and content marketing tactics to build the verbal brand from the ground-up. From mission, vision, and unique value proposition definitions to positioning statements and a complete product lexicon, I created and maintained the Turo voice and editorial executions for over four years.

Turo values

As part of the Turo tone and voice exercise, we wanted to apply the brand ethos to our internal culture — how do we ensure we’re hiring the right people who believe in the same values that underpin the mission-driven brand? To add method and standardized qualification to our hiring process, we staged some “Turo talks” during an all-company conference, where we asked a series of questions to employees to distill that existing company ethos into a few core values and effectively crowd-source and democratize the value definition process.

After moderating four separate group discussions and documenting everyone’s responses, we grouped and distilled those sentiments and stories into four core values that were both reflective of the existing culture, and augmented the brand lens we were creating. Those words, which are still core to our hiring and performance review process today, are supportive, down-to-earth, efficient, and pioneering.

“The Road Report” quarterly magazine

Tasked with building some content to engage our internal employee-base and build our internal brand, I collaborated with our visual design team to devise an internal magazine that would help build our culture and amplify any HR agenda items to the broader team. I acted as editor-in-chief, coming up with the featured content — featuring cross-team collaborations, product wins, employee stories, etc. — delegating writing resources to the various features, contributing myself as a writer, and proofing and quality assuring the whole shebang before shipping it off to the presses.

It started as a quarterly magazine, but as scope ballooned and resources became constrained, we transitioned to a bi-annual affair. It became one of the more anticipated aspects of our all-employee-conferences, and helped build the Turo culture into what it is today. Below are some of the more benign pages — so as to honor the company and employee’s privacy — from the tenth issue of the Road Report.