Let’s be honest, decluttering, renovating or moving house are rarely at the top of anyone’s ‘favourite things to do’ list. As a business whose primary customers are those looking to shift or store their stuff, TAXIBOX wanted to recast what is usually a stressful chore into a different context, with a dominant flavour of fun and nostalgia. TAXIBOX’s head of marketing Emma Lee explores.

Finding the fun with TAXIBOX

Creating a fun, creative brand gave us an opportunity to build visibility for a service that’s revolutionary in the market. While traditional storage requires customers to drive out to unload at a facility, TAXIBOX provides convenience by delivering storage to customers, which is why we needed to set ourselves apart through a radically different tone and personality. We looked at the different reasons why people store or move and many are stressful – divorce, downsizing, renovating – so injecting fun into the brand was our way of balancing out a not-so-fun activity.

The primary way we use fun is weaving surprise and delight at several touchpoints throughout our quoting process, booking, and customer service experience.

One example is a play on how packing a TAXIBOX is a lot like stacking boxes in Tetris. TAXIBLOX is a Tetris-like game featured in many (mostly hidden) parts along the TAXIBOX quoting and booking funnel. The arcade-style game occasionally features on our homepage with secret links for curious customers; for example, a customer might click on a Mario character in the ’email my quote’ stage of our flow, and be redirected to TAXIBLOX, where they can play for a discount. Although TAXIBLOX doesn’t enhance the storing or moving process for our customers – the serious, useful version of this is our storage calculator tool, Calcumate – it keeps them in the funnel and strengthens conversions. The game also includes a leaderboard for customers to leave their initials, echoing 1980s arcade games.

Another surprise customers may find on our website is a genie that offers discounts, free packing supplies or free merch, which is activated through our Calcumate storage calculator that helps customers determine how many TAXIBOXes they need for their move. In addition to the genie, we also offer surprise awards throughout the booking journey, where a customer is rewarded for certain achievements. One example is our Speed Demon reward – customers obtain $20 off their booking if they can finalise their booking details in under two minutes.

When our customers least expect something and get a good surprise, they don’t just appreciate it, the impact is larger overall and, as a result, they remember the brand for longer. This strengthens brand loyalty and builds word-of-mouth referrals. We’re working with our customer service team to identify customers who may need a pick-me-up surprise, so we can continue to grow this element of our brand strategy.

We also chose to personify TAXIBOX itself, arguably one of the strongest points of our branding. We achieve this through a first-person voice to create a relationship with our customers. We then build on the TAXIBOX personality in a few ways. One example: we create a soundtrack to the move via a Spotify playlist. When the customer gets their TAXIBOX at the start of the process, they get a ‘moving on up’ playlist, which includes motivating music related to positive change and moving. Then when they return the TAXIBOX to us, they get a ‘breaking up’ playlist symbolising the break-up between the customer and their TAXIBOX to create a feeling of heartfelt closure.

The role of nostalgia

We decided to include nostalgia as part of our brand because we wanted to highlight how the decision-making process involved in storing and moving items is often a reflective and emotional one. We combined that nostalgia flavour with a sense of fun through positive, familiar concepts from previous decades that builds trust in the brand. Our target market is inner-city dwellers aged 25-40, who often relate to the tone, humour and icons in our branding: Mario, 8-bit games, and good times from the 1980s and ’90s.

As an extension of nostalgia, we also aim to create new memories through our merchandise, which includes TAXIJOX, TAXISOX and a TAXITOY truck, among other fun things. These act as souvenirs that keep the brand front-of-mind, long after the customer’s experience with TAXIBOX is over. The crowd favourite is our TAXITOY trucks, which our drivers carry with them when delivering TAXIBOXes to customers. We hand them out to kids/parents, which results in being featured in Instagram stories, reviews, and emails from customers raving about them; we’ve even had kids taking their trucks for show and tell. It’s a positive souvenir of what could otherwise be a stressful time and it helps people remember us as a household name. 

If you’re looking to add fun to your brand, here are some tips to start:

•   Know your target audience. Relatability + engaging messaging is supercharged by a robust strategy and execution.
•   Leverage the core of your business. At its most boring, our brand can be reduced to a storage box, but extrapolating that out gave us the TAXIBLOX game.
•   Add a (good) surprise. What are some bonuses or gifts that your customers would appreciate? How can you scale surprise and make each touchpoint memorable?
•   Find the emotional beat and make it fun. We recognised that decluttering/moving can be stressful so transitioning with a fun but emotional element – our playlists, nostalgic tone and humour – helps to alleviate that stress.