- Client
- Bolt
- Industry
- Mobility
- Location
- Lisbon · Madrid
- Engagement
- 2022 — 2025
The Square · Case in the record
How Bolt became one of Iberia's most recognised mobility brands.
A three-year narrative arc that reframed a ride-hailing operator into a category-defining mobility platform — through positioning, patient media work, and a public conversation Bolt could credibly lead.
The Square
Vol. 04 · No. 01
The story before the story.
Business · Market · Communication
Business context
When we started working with Bolt in Iberia, the company was still perceived primarily as a challenger to a single dominant competitor. Growth was strong, the operational story was solid, and the leadership team had ambitions that reached far beyond ride-hailing — micromobility, food delivery, business travel, and a broader argument about how cities move.
Market challenge
The market conversation, however, wasn't set up for that argument. Coverage was reactive, dominated by pricing and driver disputes. Regulators framed mobility narrowly. Investors read Iberia through the lens of the incumbent. Every product launch risked being reduced to a comparison it didn't want to have.
Communication challenge
The communication challenge wasn't visibility — Bolt already had that. It was authorship. We needed to move the company from a brand that answered questions to a brand that framed them, and to do it consistently enough that the market started borrowing its language.
Strategy first. Everything else is downstream.
Movement 01
Research
We began by mapping who was actually setting the mobility agenda in Portugal and Spain — which journalists, which regulators, which think tanks — and where Bolt's voice was structurally missing. That map, refreshed quarterly, became the operating document behind every decision that followed.
Movement 02
Positioning
The reframe was simple to state and hard to earn: Bolt is not a ride-hailing company operating other verticals. It is a mobility platform, and every product decision is a statement about how European cities should move. That single sentence unlocked a different kind of conversation with a different set of journalists.
Movement 03
Narrative
From there we built a narrative architecture with three layers — an executive-level thesis on European mobility, a market-level story on affordable access, and a product-level cadence on launches — designed so each layer reinforced the one above it rather than competing with it.
Movement 04
Execution
Execution was disciplined more than aggressive. We turned down more opportunities than we accepted. When we placed a story, it was because the story moved the thesis forward. Volume followed authority; it wasn't the other way around.
Organised by strategic pillar, not by chronology.
Editorial archive
Executive Positioning
A leadership voice built to be quoted, not just interviewed.
We rebuilt the visibility strategy for Bolt's Iberia leadership from the ground up — talking points, opinion pieces, keynote briefs, a defensive playbook — so that when a mobility story broke, journalists knew whose office to call.
Selected deliverables
- Executive narrative document
- Named-opinion pieces in tier-one press
- Keynote strategy for four flagship conferences
- Regulator briefing programme
Media Relations
Fewer stories, better stories, on the terms we chose.
We moved from a volume-first press office to an editorial one — pitching a small number of well-defined stories per quarter, each mapped to a strategic argument the company was trying to win.
Selected deliverables
- Quarterly editorial calendar
- Embargoed launches with tier-one exclusives
- Sustained relationships with 40+ named journalists
- Crisis and issues playbook, refreshed twice yearly
Thought Leadership
Owning the mobility conversation, not renting it.
A long-form programme of research, op-eds and public data drops that gave Bolt a defensible point of view on the questions regulators and investors were already asking.
Selected deliverables
- Annual Iberia Mobility report
- Op-ed programme (18 placements / year)
- Bespoke policy briefings for regulators
- Speaking programme at EU-level forums
Events & Public Presence
Turning presence into authorship.
We treated events as narrative infrastructure — every appearance chosen to reinforce the platform positioning and expand the audience of people who could credibly cite Bolt as a source.
Selected deliverables
- Web Summit and Mobile World Congress presence
- Two owned executive dinners per year
- City-hall roundtables in Lisbon and Madrid
- Investor and press briefings around results
Influence measured beyond headlines.
European visibility
Bolt's Iberia leadership is now routinely quoted in FT, Reuters, El País and Expresso as the default European voice on urban mobility — a position it did not hold in 2022.
Investor confidence
Iberia moved from a market Bolt had to explain to investors to one it uses to explain the business — cited in three consecutive funding narratives.
Executive recognition
Two Iberia executives entered the shortlist of most-cited mobility leaders in Portugal and Spain, from unranked at the start of the engagement.
4
Regulatory access
Standing seat at four regulator-led working groups on urban mobility, from zero standing seats at the start of the engagement.
+184%
Media reach
Coverage share of voice inside category grew year on year while volume decreased — a deliberate trade of quantity for authority.
Market expansion
Communication runway supported the launch of two new verticals in Iberia without a reputational reset.
Selected pages from the archive.
Curated · Not a carousel
The Square didn't run our press office. They shaped how we thought about our own story — and then made the market think about it the same way. That's a different order of value.
Bolt
Head of Communications, Iberia
What this story taught us.
The strategic residue — the ideas we now bring to every next brief.
Lesson 01
Trust compounds.
Reputation isn't a campaign line item. Each restrained, well-placed story raised the credit line for the next one — until the market started coming to us.
Lesson 02
Narratives need consistency more than novelty.
The same three arguments, held for three years, moved further than any single campaign could have.
Lesson 03
Reputation is built long before launches.
The verticals that landed cleanly in year three landed cleanly because year one was spent earning the right to be heard.
Lesson 04
Say no more than you say yes.
Turning down the wrong story is a strategic act. Every declined opportunity protected the value of the ones we accepted.
Lesson 05
Measure influence, not volume.
Clippings count what happened. Positioning counts what changed. We built the dashboard around the second.
Three more from the archive.
Let's write your next story.
If you're building a company that deserves a stronger story than the market currently tells about it, we should talk.
Talk to usCross-border communications · Lisbon · Madrid