After three-years building a brand for young, urban professionals, Uber Eats Japan needed a gear-shift to attract an older, more conservative family audience who didn’t consider the brand.

This required unpacking Japan’s nuanced social codes to find the true cultural barriers that sat behind Uber Eats’ brand consideration problem with families. By surfacing an unspoken truth about how moms fear being judged lazy for getting help with meals, the resulting strategy deftly bridged the gap between moms’ claimed lack of need and obvious actual need for online food delivery. Making moms feel good instead of guilty about using Uber Eats.

Uber Eats Japan launched in 2016, second-to-market in online food delivery vs local incumbent Demaecan. Over the next few years, Uber Eats super-charged growth with a core, early adopter audience (urban, pre-family under-35s) by leveraging a localised version of the irreverent and western-style brand campaign from Australia - ‘Tonight, I’ll be eating…’. Yet by 2022, Uber Eats needed new sources of growth from an older, family audience, who also represented higher value with larger average orders.

However, despite adjusting the existing brand campaign to focus on them in 2022, brand health metrics with families continued to lag (Brand consideration: Uber Eats = 37% vs locally-trusted Demaecan = 50%. Ipsos, 2022). The campaign delivered a 0% uplift in brand consideration with families. It was time to try something new.

Our Brief:

Develop a new brand campaign to bring an older, family audience into Uber Eats.

Objective:

Increase brand consideration with families.

Japanese is the 7th largest monoculture in the world (98% native Japanese) and built upon complex layers of nuanced, unwritten social codes that are all geared towards social harmony. As the popular saying goes, ‘the nail that sticks out gets hammered.’ Preserving harmony is taken seriously, and conformity is king. People or brands who disrupt norms are mistrusted and disliked, particularly if they haven’t got license to do so because they aren’t local or don’t ‘get’ the culture.

A core tenet of this collectivist society is the traditional family unit, including the roles of ‘mom’ as housewife / primary caregiver and ‘dad’ as salaryman and breadwinner. Despite many women now entering the professional workforce, these gender roles persist, whether in the expectations placed on ‘mom’ or ‘dad’, or how each is portrayed in the media, entertainment and majority of advertisements.

Most brands refrain from challenging the status quo with more progressive depictions of what a ‘family’ could be for fear of disrupting social harmony. Instead, they revert to deep-rooted tropes.

Yet there’s a growing epidemic of ‘mom burn-out’ as many mothers try to balance both the traditional role of housewife, AND excel in their careers. While women average 25hrs of housework (including childcare, cleaning, meal prep) each week, the male average is just 5hrs (OECD 2022). As one of the hardest working cultures in the world, it’s fair to say that Japanese families - and especially moms - could do with some extra help from convenience brands like Uber Eats!

Brand health and category data revealed that low brand consideration with families was a twofold problem:

Brand affinity. Families didn’t think Uber Eats was a ‘brand for them’ (9% affinity) because of its disruptive, western DNA - which to-date we’d leveraged as a strength. This had effectively acquired young, early adopters, but alienated older, more conservative families. The brand was distrusted because it ‘just isn’t Japanese’ or conformist with local codes (Fiftyfive5, 2022)

Category relevance. This was bigger than just a brand problem though. The trusted local competitor Dameacan had been around since 2000, yet category penetration was still low 31%. The biggest barrier to adoption was ‘I don’t have a need for it’ (Fiftyfive5, 2022).

This clarified the communications challenge: Show families why they need online food delivery in their lives, while making them feel Uber Eats is the brand for them (despite not being Japanese).

There’s a niggling contradiction between a culture suffering a ‘mom burnout crisis’ whilst claiming to have no need for convenient dinner solutions. Surely moms could do with more help?!

A deep-dive into family dynamics (including ethnographic research) revealed why they don’t actually seek it - because they are ashamed. This came down to societal pressure on moms to be ‘perfect’, and keep up with the gold standard of daily home cooking for the whole family. When pressed, moms would love help from Uber Eats…but feel too guilty to act on it for fear of being labeled lazy or deficient - particularly by their mothers-in-law, who are renowned for judging them!

This wasn’t a category relevance problem at all. Moms just needed permission to order Uber Eats, judgment-free. Our campaign needed to make them feel it’s okay - normal, even - for moms to get a little help from Uber Eats.

The campaign this inspired, leveraged the insight that moms feel the most judged of all by their mother-in-laws, who usually have very traditional ideas about how they should behave, parent, and cook for the family.

Across TV, OOH, online film and social, we subverted this stereotype by creating a progressive mother-in-law character who instead of expecting mom to cook, suggests ‘Why not Uber Eats?’ to her family (which in Japanese carries the dual-meaning ‘go on, it’s okay to use…’). Using actress Mari Natsuki - well-loved by moms for her family-friendly yet punk-rock attitude and fashion - the campaign normalised the notion of moms getting help with dinner from Uber Eats, without undermining their parenting or attacking home cooking head-on.

Mari’s family reflected the quintessential Japanese norm, showing respect for local traditions, whilst also nudging the statusquo in a non-threatening way by suggesting that getting help with dinner really is okay.

The 4 month campaign delivered -

Primary KPI:

+4.2 percentage point (ppt) uplift in brand consideration.

(vs +2ppt target).

Benchmark: For reference, the previous brand campaign delivered no uplift (0ppt) in consideration with this audience, despite having comparable duration and spend

Additional business results:

(see confidential judges section below)

Additional brand health results:

First ever statistically significant brand uplift in affinity with families +3ppt.

Additional communications results:

5x higher view-through-rate (VTR) than industry average

150+ earned media articles, equating to $550kUSD AVE (advertising value equivalency).

Results can be directly attributed to the Helpful Mother-in-law campaign.

A market-level test was conducted, where the campaign did not run at all in ‘dark' control cities. Each city was paired with a 'treatment' city of comparable size, demographics, operations and market-share to provide a like-for-like benchmark. Results were then compared between cities where the campaign ran vs where it did not, with any incremental difference in live cities attributed directly to the campaign. Hence we are able to isolate the campaign’s impact from any other factors.

Any promotional activity in the market at the same time was also isolated from this test to ensure the results came from the brand campaign only.