How Urban Company is Rekindling the Sparks of Humanity
Urban Company’s #WearASmile Initiative
By Rachit Juneja
Jan. 2, 2021
“Masks keep us safe - but hide our faces and our humanity - they get in the way of our human interactions with each other.” - Tarun Menon, Director - Marketing, Urban Company
Urban Company is an Indian online on-demand company that offers home beauty and wellness services, along with home installation, maintenance, and repair services. With over 25,000 plus trained professionals across various verticals, they have expanded their operations to 17 Indian cities - Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Ludhiana, Lucknow, Vadodara, and Visakhapatnam - and four international markets - Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, and Singapore.
The advent of Covid 19 brought with it severe setbacks for most businesses. With the lockdown and its emerging phases, it took consumers a while to get used to the idea of letting people into their homes. Urban Company has been actively involved in winning over their consumers’ trust by focussing on offering safe and hygienic services. Their marketing campaigns aim at forming connections with their audience and winning over their homes and hearts. One such campaign is #WearASmile.
Urban Company recently launched a campaign called #WearASmile. We got in touch with the Director - Marketing, Mr. Tarun Menon from the brand who through some light on the Objective of the #WearASmile Initiative:
“The idea is simple and borne of our own experiences and from conversations with service professionals. Masks keep us safe - but hide our faces and our humanity - they get in the way of more human interactions with each other.”
They are of the belief that while the feeling is difficult for us, it is heightened for service professionals - food delivery partners, aggregator drivers, and service professionals on our platform. So, they added a simple design - a smile - to face masks that their service professionals wear, to make the mask itself a little more human, and serve as a reminder of the humanness behind the mask. On ground, over 20,000 service professionals across India received redesigned face-masks to wear through December.
Battle with Covid 19:
“Covid 19 has caused a severe setback for most businesses since its inception. Urban Company is an at-home service provider - so while there were natural tailwinds as people were not stepping out, the burden of proving safety, as we were stepping into safe spaces, homes - was of paramount importance. From June-July: their messaging focus across categories was focussed on the safety measures our professionals employ on each service. They created UC Safe: a marketing construct that allowed us to message each of the 8-step safety measures deployed before and during each service on the platform. We built messaging in this vein for Salon and Men’s Grooming. This groundwork helped us allay the overriding consumer sentiment.”
On being asked about how this particular campaign stands out, he responded:
“Through the last 8 months, a lot has been said by brands, primarily urging audiences to stay safe, wear masks, and stay home. While wearing masks has become the norm, the impact of having to hide our faces in interactions over this period was of interest to us, primarily because of the nature of interactions between consumers and service professionals. At its core, this campaign is an action that the company has taken to address how service professionals were feeling, versus just communication.”
Furthermore, as evident from Sheeko’s Activity Graph and Brandscore Ratings, Urban Company has been very active on digital platforms in 2020, in terms of content associations and collaborations. Since the advent of the #WearASmile initiative, there has been a considerable increase in their numbers.
Parting on this beautiful note, Urban Company has done a tremendous job of keeping the essence of humanness alive through this campaign. Additionally, service professionals go out of their way to provide their customers with the best service, while risking their own health, so this also proves to be an ode to rekindle the sparks of humanity and human interactions with them. The brand’s initiative to remind people about the sentiments of the human being behind the mask through the expression on it humanizes the mask itself while exhilarating a cue for indomitable human spirit through a smile!
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