Alison Bing

Adventurous travelers made house-sharing platform Airbnb into an overnight success - but not everyone saw the upside in opening their homes to strangers. I was one of those people. What finally convinced me to host was the same thing that inspired me as a guest. Airbnb isn't about private beaches or gilded guestrooms, but about feeling at home in unlikely places: Italian caves, Brazilian treehouses, Mongolian yurts.

For their brand re-launch, Airbnb challenged me to capture this idea. Instead of a grand mission statement, I wrote an ode to small kindnesses exchanged over kitchen tables, ending with these words: “We believe in a world where you can belong anywhere.” This idea evolved into Airbnb Citizen, opening homes worldwide to disaster evacuees, refugees, and essential health workers.

But the story didn’t stop there. We also launched a storytelling platform where Airbnb hosts and guests could exchange stories, building trust and community. Within one month, 37,000 stories had been shared - and new host acquisition rates shot up 82%. Public data shows total available rooms grew from 1 million to 1.5 million within eight months of re-launch, raising total Airbnb revenues 55% over the previous year. There’s also a qualitative difference: we're not strangers anymore.

This brand needs no introduction, because most people online use some Google product daily. So the challenge we faced at Google wasn’t building a brand from scratch - it was reconciling 4000+ pages of existing standards compiled over a decade. I began with a content audit, assessing existing guidance for currency, consistency, and accessibility. Next step: editing. Could we do it all within 6 weeks?

Working with a scrum of UX designers and domain specialists, we did. Celebrations ensued. Then came the request: can you do all Google brand standards?

Which standards? Logo specs or diversity & inclusion guidelines or illustration briefs or …?

Not or. And.

Our Brand Standards team was suddenly much bigger, and so was our goal: to align the company’s beliefs and creative practices across all divisions, globally. But we had a proven model, and a road-tested team.

Together we designed a Google Brand Standards internal site to meet evolving needs, and launched it on schedule. Though the guidance is internal, Google’s interactive best practices are now reflected externally on its Material Design site - and in Brand Studio’s award-winning creative output.

Early on when I was working on marketing knowledge software for Procter & Gamble, I had an epiphany: marketing can either make an impact, or make noise. I decided to go for impact. But first, I needed some decent coffee - hot, strong, sustainable, responsible. That craving was hard to satisfy, until Fair Trade USA changed everything.

When I met founder Paul Rice and heard his plans for fair trade coffee, I jumped on board. What started as a consumer education campaign quickly became a movement. The Fair Trade brand promise of quality, better lives and a healthy planet resonated across product launches of fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, fruit and textiles, with $1.5 billion in sales directly benefiting family farmers worldwide. Together we made meaningful impact with thoughtful marketing - and many excellent cups of coffee.