There is the glamorous side of being a chief marketing officer: the campaign shoots, the agency courtship, the industry festivals. Then there is sitting in a room listening to customers complain about your brand. Cheryl Goh is spending more of her time doing the latter. As Grab moves from years of explosive expansion into a more reflective phase, she is trying to recalibrate its identity and believes that the real answers about the brand live in the frustration of the people who use it every day.
Goh joined Grab in 2013 when it was still a fledgling taxi company. More than a decade later, it spans rides, deliveries, financial services, payments and loyalty. Within that, Goh’s remit has grown far beyond the usual marketing portfolio. Today, she also runs the P&L for its loyalty products (Grab VIP), its subscription service (Grab Unlimited) and rewards program (Grab Coins), as well as its sustainability division. Her expanding responsibilities reflect a belief inside Grab that its next chapter relies on getting the experience right for users, and that this sits closer to the CMO’s office than it ever has.
Goh puts it plainly: “Our weakness is that there is a bit of incoherence around who we are. What do we stand for? It is something we have been working towards. But our way to tackle that problem is not through a brand campaign.”
Instead, her answer has been structural rather than cosmetic.
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Despite, or maybe because of, its rapid expansion, a formal code of brand conduct has never been issued to the group. Its absence was beginning to show, as Goh realised that drivers, consumers, and merchants had varying experiences with the app. And so she embarked on a project to establish a brand charter that would formalize expectations for the principles that should guide every interaction.
“The brand charter is a promise to our drivers, consumers and merchants on how they can expect us to show up,” she says.
Rather than focusing on awareness or storytelling, the team worked on the substance that shapes a person’s perception of the brand. “In the old days, you watched TV ads and that formed someone’s perception. Today, every single touchpoint forms that perception,” she says.
The brand charter has become the tool that has forced consistency.
That led to detailed internal work. “If you think about the interactions that you have with Grab, a lot of it is through the app or through our customer support. Depending on who writes the copy, who replies, there was quite a lot of inconsistency in that tone of voice,” she explains. To solve this, the team defined a shared voice and used AI to help enforce it. “We built an internal tool that helps even marketers. I am trying to write a copy about a new service, and it can auto-generate in the tone that we want.”
The project also examined pricing transparency, principles for fair communication and even the way drivers prefer to receive updates. “We realised that for our drivers, we were not reaching them properly because maybe they wanted more face-to-face instead of online. So we changed the way we do driver engagement.”
The process stretched across the organization. Goh personally led workshops with country teams on topics from driver engagement to support. “That whole brand charter work made many of us stretch deep into the organization. It is one of the hardest challenges but also one of the most enjoyable things that I have worked on in the past 12 to 18 months.”
The brand charter eventually led to Goh taking on responsibility for customer support, a decision that signals how tightly Grab wants to connect brand, customer experience and operations.
For Goh, the shift felt natural. “To be a good marketer, you need to always put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Bad support and bad experience really infuriate me because as a marketer we spend so much effort, time and money to bring people in, and to lose them because of poor customer support or poor product experience is very painful.”
She wants to change the internal perception of the support team from a fire-fighting function to the first port of call for informing what Grab should prioritize. An insights division for every branch of Grab.
“I do not think of support as the punching bag, which they usually are when all things go wrong,” she says. “Instead of being a punching bag, we need to use it to drive consumer experience. We need to look upstream and figure out how a bad experience happened in the first place and what we can do to prevent it. The best support is you never needing to reach out.”
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Support also opens the door to deeper experimentation with agentic AI. “Besides helping improve the overall customer experience, it is a legit use case for agentic AI. We use a lot of AI in marketing, but this is a space where everyone said it would be easily applied. That is not quite the case because there is a lot of data integration complexity, but we are working through it.”
The work matters because Grab faces an issue of trust. “We have very strong awareness but a lack of deep trust, if I am being honest. Awareness is sometimes inconsistent regarding what we stand for. We are also a marketplace with merchants, drivers and consumers, and what they want is not always aligned. We need to explain these intricacies. If people do not trust us in that process, it becomes harder.”
The charter is an attempt to create reliability through consistency and sincerity. “We are seeing across the board some really good increase in user sentiment,” she says.
Goh has long argued that marketing leaders are positioned to run businesses. Her expanded remit is a live example.
“Marketing is ingrained in many parts of the business today, so we are not a silo function. We co-own outcomes with cross-functional teams. We influence product, policy and go-to-market strategy. We have very deep research teams and very strong analytics teams that allow us to understand the business, the consumer and the landscape. We can own that conversation.”
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Her belief is unwavering. “I really believe that marketers can be CEOs. They deserve a place in the boardroom. CMOs are meant to do way more than advertising.”
She credits her team for proving this. “A lot of our marketing heads have been promoted to MD level, which means they manage the entire country’s P&L. Marketing is known for talent that is not fluffy. We are commercially driven and focused on delivering results. When there are opportunities, people look at the marketing leadership to see whether anybody might be suitable.”
Two of Grab’s seven country heads previously reported to her. It is a statistic she cites not as a boast but as evidence of what a modern marketing function can build when it is empowered to lead beyond communications.
The profile of the modern CMO has changed dramatically, and Goh stands as one of its clearest examples in Asia. The brand problems she faces are not solved through storytelling alone but through a redesign of how the company behaves. In her world, brand and experience operate as one system, and the CMO must be able to run both.
Cheryl Goh has been nominated for The Drum and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year Award 2025. You can find out more about the accolade and this year’s nominees here.
Previous winners of the award include Asmita Dubey, chief digital and marketing officer at L’Oréal, who won for 2023, and Marcel Marcondes, global chief marketing officer at AB InBev, who won for 2024.