You might call Andrew Mok an accidental CMO.
“I never thought I would do marketing,” Mok said.
Although Mok is now CMO of peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo, which bills itself as “Airbnb for cars,” he was “more of a left-brain person growing up.” Mok’s Taiwanese immigrant parents encouraged him to focus on hard skills, so he majored in computer science and business administration at UC Berkeley and, in 2012, started at Turo in a business intelligence role.
In the beginning, he did a little of everything, including data analytics, finance, marketing and preparing board presentations. A Turo boomerang, he’s been at the company for a total of 10 years, with a brief stint in between as VP of growth at dog boarding and pet sitting company DogVacay.
Turo’s revenue hit $746 million last year, but the company is far from done growing.
“Turo still is not a household name,” Mok said. “We do quite a bit of revenue today, but if you think about it as a percentage of the total addressable market, it’s still very small. There’s still a long way for us to go.”
To reach and retain customers, Turo casts a wide net.
Although the vast majority of its traffic is organic, Mok said, driven primarily by direct search and word of mouth, Turo also spends on Hulu, YouTube, podcasts, billboards, streaming e-sports and TikTok and runs performance marketing campaigns on Google, Facebook and Instagram. In addition, it has partnerships with travel aggregators like Kayak; credit card companies, including Amex and Capital One’s Venture X card; and airlines, such as Delta.
Mok spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: How does Turo differentiate?
ANDREW MOK: The traditional car rental industry has not really changed in 50 years, and it’s not an industry consumers would rave about. Consumers have no idea which car they’re going to get, other than it’s an economy, compact or full-size.
We allow people to pick the exact year, make and model. You can select whatever car matches your budget. You can even pick the color of the car.
It’s a very specific, one-to-one experience, which is what people have to come to expect. Starting in 2021 and extending into 2022 coming out of the pandemic, there was this voracious hunger to get back out there and reconnect with friends and family. People didn’t want to have a cookie-cutter experience; they wanted to do something fun and cool and special.
How does Turo use data to personalize its marketing?
People tell us what they like and what their preferences are based on the actions they take on our platform. If we know you’re really into EVs, trucks, sports cars or classic cars, we’ll surface them to you in our marketing and product recommendations.
For example, we have a feature where you can create and add different cars to your favorites list. If we see that somebody is adding a bunch of Teslas to their favorites, we can incorporate that into our product and marketing experiences.
And we pay close attention to how people browse and search and to their past booking behavior. We can see patterns based on how people use our search filters and how they book.
What other customer insights have you picked up on?
We’ve noticed this phenomenon where people like to book the exact car on vacation that they drive when at home.
We also see a lot of auto enthusiasts, gearhead-type folks, who use us for dream drives. There’s this guy in Southern California who gets a different car every couple weeks during the summer. These are cars that would be impractical for him to own because he has a family and kids. He’s not going to buy a two-seater Maserati, but he wants the experience because he’s a car enthusiast.
Another example is people using us for extended test drives, particularly for EVs. More and more people are realizing that EVs have both environmental and economic benefits, and the normal test drive experience you get from a dealership is not enough. We see people book EVs for a weekend or a week. They can park it in their garage, test drive within their daily lifestyle, see if their kids and parents like it and get a full experience.
What are your marketing priorities?
People have gotten very good at detecting ads and scrolling past them, especially on digital platforms. We talk a lot about how to stop the scroll, and often the answer is not creating a corporate-looking commercial, post or ad. It’s content that’s relevant culturally in the moment and almost feels like organic, user-generated content.
We’ve become increasingly interested in partnering with influencers and creators to highlight the Turo experience in a way that doesn’t look like an ad.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
