That’s a reasonable position given the new depths to which Uber constantly sinks. For instance, last year the company defied California state regulators to run a self-driving car experiment in San Francisco. When one of its cars ran a red light, Uber put out a statement blaming human error for the problem. As The New York Times reported last week, that wasn’t true. The car was driving itself and Uber had misled the public.

Any company with such a reckless culture and tarnished reputation would have to do something to remake its brand. But Uber faces extra motivation to do so.

Unlike many aggressive start-ups that have come before it — Amazon and Facebook, for instance, were no pushovers — Uber is not a natural monopoly. It sells a service that has ready substitutes, and it has well-funded competitors in many of its major markets. Its rivals have put their supposedly friendlier brands at the center of their competitive strategy. They are all waiting for Uber to fail, and every time Uber finds a way to lower its reputation even further, competitors can peel off customers, drivers and engineers.

Finally, there’s the Trump factor. Ever since the presidential election, people in the tech industry have been amped up. Employees and customers have learned to take up arms against companies that don’t espouse their values, and companies have started to listen.

“Left-leaning Silicon Valley has been embracing the Women’s March and had this heightened awareness about issues that women face due to misogynistic men,” said Karen Catlin, a former software engineer who is now an advocate for women in the tech industry. Now the same social-media energy aimed at President Trump is being marshaled against Uber, better known on Twitter as #deleteUber.

Put all these factors together and you get something toxic to Uber’s bottom line. As Ben Thompson of the Stratechery blog noted last week, Uber’s reputation now looks like an existential problem. Its brand is so diminished that it is possible, for the first time, to see how the company’s enormous valuation of about $70 billion could begin to unravel.

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, and others at the company appear to understand the gravity of the threat. The company moved swiftly to open an investigation into Ms. Fowler’s allegations. Eric H. Holder Jr., the former attorney general, and Arianna Huffington, the media entrepreneur who sits on Uber’s board, were among those it appointed to find out what’s going wrong at the company.