Prophet

CASE STUDY

The Wharton Center

Defining brand purpose for a performing arts center

Challenge

The Wharton Center at Michigan State University (MSU) is an important asset to the Lansing community. While its well-known for providing entertainment, its purpose is elevated by its support for the performing arts in the local community. The organization brings a unique spirit to Lansing but has recently struggled to demonstrate value to its constituents. While embarking on new programs poised to improve engagement and relevance within MSU, The Wharton Center found that its brand lacked focus – it needed to redefine its role at MSU and within the greater community.

Solutions

The Wharton Center looked to Prophet to help define its purpose and better position it within the extended local community. The Prophet team found that the brand’s purpose and promise were rooted in its core beliefs and reason for existing: to inspire the mind and move the soul by sharing stories, celebrating differences and creating a community through performance and education.

To demonstrate its newly discovered and defined purpose through its visual assets and media, Prophet created a new visual identity for the brand and an implementation plan. The brand evolution focused on the concept of putting “Art at the Center” – it reflects both the variety and dimensionality of the performing arts by using a dynamic logotype. Prophet also introduced representational shapes to add a unique flavor to the graphic system. These shapes represent that performing arts are always alive, moving and evolving through music, dance and variety.

Results

The revitalized brand purpose and visual identity helped The Wharton Center define and express its role within the MSU community. Each year, the Center impacts the lives of more than 30,000 young people, to help them find courage, foster boldness and embrace diverse perspectives. The organization is committed to shaping the world through performing arts and arts education; and sharing stories of its community–of dreams, heartbreaks, struggles and triumphs– and heritage for future generations.

This work received a gold award for key art and a bronze award for print collateral at the 2019 International Design Awards.

CASE STUDY

Equality California

Helping a civil rights organization evolve

Challenge

Equality California had achieved major state policy victories but faced a fraught national political climate and persistent disparities in health and well-being. The organization needed to reframe its ongoing mission for California’s LGBTQ community, and beyond.

Solutions

Prophet helped Equality California think through fundamental questions about its purpose and brand story, helping the organization think about the strategic considerations behind ambitions such as broadening beyond California or doubling down on intersectional advocacy.

Leveraging input from a rigorous qualitative and quantitative research process, Prophet developed a 5-year plan to transform the brand. This strategy laid the groundwork for the new Equality California brand to come to life physically and digitally, through new brand identity, tagline, messaging and mission statement.

Results

Equality California’s refreshed strategy, brand identity and brand assets launched to great celebration. Its new direction set the organization on a path to become an even more inclusive, disruptive and enduring agent of change for years to come.

Impact

40%

increase in monthly Twitter impressions

27k

new members since the rebrand

CASE STUDY

Hikma

Building a brand as big as its business

Challenge

Following years of tremendous organic growth, Hikma, the multinational generics pharmaceutical company, soon realized the scale of the business had become far greater than the scale of the brand.

It had also made a number of acquisitions, but this was having a detrimental effect. Having such a fragmented brand was limiting Hikma’s brand strength and ability to build a powerful reputation as a global company among external stakeholders and employees alike.

Solutions

In a complex generics environment, Hikma needed a simple, unified brand that would help to set it apart on the global playing field. Reducing the complexity and confusion created by its current portfolio of multiple brands, Prophet worked to consolidate under one, global master brand to build consistency and drive impact.

A brand positioning was also developed: ‘Better Health Within Reach’, which successfully anchors Hikma’s core fundamental belief that good quality medicine should be available to anyone, anywhere. This has been brought to life with a differentiating digitally-enabled visual identity system that clearly signals and supports a new chapter for the business.

Results

Winner of the coveted Grand Prix at the 2019 Transform Awards Europe, along with Gold awards for Best Brand Architecture Solution and Best Brand Consolidation, the new Hikma brand is getting remarkable recognition and seeing results both inside and outside the organization.

In the six months following the new brand launch, the share price has increased by 130% – tracking well above its competitors. Not only have Prophet helped to position Hikma more prominently in the competitive marketplace, but internally the feedback from employees and leaders across the globe has been overwhelmingly positive. Pride in the company has grown, the primary benefit being the unifying sense of ‘One Hikma. One Culture,’ that has worked to bring those sites that were previously under a legacy brand or sub-brand name into the embrace of the unified Hikma family.

‘The move to a single enterprise brand, paired with the new positioning and visual identity, has been truly transformational for our company,’ commented Brooke Clarke, VP Corporate Affairs at Hikma. ‘Employee feedback from across the globe has been incredible. The new brand has created a real momentum and focus on being more connected, finding efficiencies and better ways of working together, and building our ‘One Hikma.’ It has really set us up well for the future.’

“The move to a single enterprise brand, paired with the new positioning and visual identity, has been truly transformational for our company.”

Brooke Clarke
VP Corporate Affairs at Hikma

CASE STUDY

The Water Trust

Building a brand strategy and visual identity for a unique nonprofit organization

Challenge

The Water Trust is a nonprofit organization that teams with communities in the developing world to create sustainable, effective water hygiene and sanitation systems. Their operating model educates East African communities about proper sanitation practices and empowers them by providing access to freshwater. The Water Trust envisions a world where access to water, sanitation and basic hygiene knowledge is universal. But what makes their organization unique is how they pursue their mission. We wanted to help The Water Trust build a brand strategy that mirrored not just what they provide but how they provide it, and more importantly what it means for the people they help, their staff on the ground, partner organizations and donors.

Solutions

Prophet volunteered its services and expertise to help The Water Trust clarify its distinctive brand positioning and attributes, which emphasize transparency, empowerment and delivering measurable, lasting results. The accompanying visual system was chosen to reinforce this spirit; putting water at the center while implying that it is shared, reinforcing the collaborative nature of the organization. The visual identity we developed is a clean, strong wordmark featuring a blue droplet symbol at the center, underscoring the central role that water plays in the organization’s mission. The visual system and renewed brand positioning will support the organization as it explores new technologies and geographies in the future.

Results

The launch of their new website combined with the renewed visual system will enable The Water Trust to provide better education and drive awareness about the need for clean water and sanitation in East Africa.

“As a small and growing nonprofit, first impressions matter a lot. The Water Trust brand strategy and visual system has been instrumental in getting us conversations with granting organizations we typically wouldn’t.”

Chris Prottas
Executive Director, The Water Trust

CASE STUDY

Alteon Health

Creating a customer-centric healthcare brand

Challenge

In 2017, New Mountain Capital, a private equity investment firm, brought together Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) and Island Medical Management (IMM), two U.S.-based leaders in outsourced healthcare practice management services, to create a best-in-class organization focused on delivering the highest quality healthcare. Prophet helped New Mountain Capital and IMM/EMA executives create a new brand—including the brand strategy, name and visual identity, as well as a dynamic website to act as a recruiting tool for the new organization —in only five months’ time.

Solutions

We began by articulating the brand’s strategy. The positioning needed to speak to the positive impact the integrated organization creates for its patients, physician employees and hospital customers, while reflecting its core differentiators — most importantly, the passion, loyalty and expertise of its physicians and medical professionals, as well as the use of cutting-edge data analytics to empower them to be at their best. Reflecting on these strengths, we articulated a simple, compelling positioning: “Positive Outcomes, Powered by People.”

We then translated this positioning into a new name. We explored around 1,000 name candidates across territories and styles, but one name stood out from the beginning: Alteon Health. A coined name, Alteon brings together “alta,” speaking to heights, and “eon,” which signals constant or continuous forward momentum, telling a story about the relentless passion of Alteon’s people and partners in delivering better outcomes for their patients.

Our next step was to bring the name to life visually. We created a graphic logo mark with a horizontal notch in the “A”, creating an upward arrow that reinforces the meaning of the name. We complemented this mark with a bright color palette and graphic system that uses neon concentric circles, which suggest the organization’s ongoing impact and create a device for highlighting data.

We then coupled the visual system with the brand strategy and messaging to create a dynamic website that introduces Alteon Health to the world.

Results

The Alteon Health brand launched in October of 2017, and now supports 125 hospitals and facilities in delivering high-quality medical care to more than three million patients each year. With its new brand in place to unite, inspire and galvanize its people, Alteon Health is looking to the future, continuing to find new ways to help its partners deliver better outcomes to their patients and communities, every day.

CASE STUDY

Encompass Health

Driving brand-led transformation of organization and culture

Challenge

After HealthSouth, a leading provider of inpatient rehabilitation expanded its position in post-acute care by acquiring Encompass Home Health & Hospice, the two companies needed to align on a brand that would support their business strategy. The new brand would have to stand out in the crowded U.S. healthcare space and work to unify a combined 35,000 employee workforce.

Solutions

Prophet helped to create a distinct brand strategy that communicated HealthSouth’s commitment to driving integrated care and improving health outcomes. As a result, a powerful new brand emerged, one that drew upon the strengths of both HealthSouth and Encompass Home Health & Hospice to communicate something bigger, stronger, and more united: Encompass Health.

The decision to rebrand represented a significant change, as employees felt great pride in the companies they had respectively built. Prophet worked to define a new purpose to function as the guiding North Star and to inspire employees and the broader set of stakeholders, including patients and healthcare partners. Through thousands of employee submissions and interactive group sessions, Prophet uncovered the critical elements of the culture and ways of working that need to be transformed into a core set of values. These values would be shared across the business to equip employees to lead the change. To do so, Prophet developed and activated a  detailed engagement and communications program, that reached from the company’s executive leadership team, as well as to local leaders and front-line employees.

The company’s employer brand also needed to reflect the promise and opportunities of a more integrated and forward-thinking healthcare company. Prophet teams developed an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) to align the enterprise brand and worked to refine messaging and experiences for recruiting talent.

Finally, the company did not have a marketing and communications function but recognized the importance of having a dedicated organization to steward the new brand and optimize the company’s investment. Prophet designed the organization and operating model needed for a new marketing and communications division and stood up this team throughout its first year with the planning, processes and governance needed to create sustained impact.

Results

The Encompass Health brand launched on January 1, 2018, with the Encompass Health brand gradually rolling out across all 127 hospitals and 237 home health and hospice agencies through the first quarter of 2019.

The transformation is already realizing a tremendous impact. 100 percent of Human Resources Directors surveyed agreed the company was successful in defining a set of values that represented the strengths of the employee culture. In the initial markets to transition to the Encompass Health brand, including Alabama and Texas, job applications increased by 18 percent year-over-year in the first six months after the rebrand because of the new EVP and recruiting experiences. Finally, the new marketing and communications function at Encompass Health made a number of hires to round out needed capabilities – following Prophet’s plans. Its leader was promoted to VP from within and now sits on the company’s Strategic Council.

“Throughout this process, we worked closely with Prophet to define a brand strategy that would improve awareness of our business strategy and the value proposition for each of our business segments.”

Mark Tarr
President and Chief Executive Officer, Encompass Health

Impact

100%

approval rating on values by HR Directors

18%

year-over-year increase in job applications

CASE STUDY

Formula E

Reframing a racing championship for an electrifying future

Challenge

The brainchild of Formula 1 supremo Alejandro Agag and John Todt, FIA Formula E is the world’s first fully-electric, single-seater racing championship. Developed as a means of accelerating the transition to sustainable mobility, its inception was splitting opinions across the racing world and beyond. Formula E engaged Prophet to creatively reframe the series, requiring a more relevant and distinctive proposition and visual identity to help widen the sport’s fan base and distance this progressive world player in the electric revolution from traditional motor racing.

Solutions

The answer was to stop trying to compete with Formula 1 and move the goalposts completely. By conducting extensive primary research, and specifically talking to fans, we honed in on the single big idea to make Formula E distinct and famous: electric street racing. “It was about taking a perceived shortcoming – the lack of noise and lower speeds – and turning it into a differentiator: being able to race in the heart of a city!” said the responsible partner at Prophet. “It’s bold, innovative, and highlights boundary-pushing electric performance in a way that better connects emotionally with mainstream and younger audiences who are attracted by this new, gritty form of motorsport and digital interactivity of the race.”

We then translated the spirit of the evolved Formula E brand into a more contemporary visual identity. Inspired by urban visual cultures – fly posters, street signs, road markings – we dramatized this gritty edginess by layering elements within the identity to create interruption, dynamism and energy, whilst a refreshed color palette moved away from the dated and expected toward one imbued with confidence and the power of electricity.

Results

This identity was the winner of two Transform Europe awards, two Transform APAC awards and was recognized within the Creative Review Annual as one of the best brand identities.

Beyond the clear positioning, smarter and sharper visuals and modernized logo, the award-winning new brand shed any outdated perceptions and helped Formula E to tell its story –  what Formula E is and what it stands for – in a distinct and exciting way.

Not only has the more compelling proposition drawn new spectators but it’s also attracted leading car brands to join the series, including BMW, Mercedes and Porsche, as well as iconic cities such as Hong Kong, New York and Rome, with more hotly anticipated in the coming year. With such established companies committing to the Championship, in the future city street racing won’t be perceived as a curiosity sport but a mainstream spectacle.

CASE STUDY

Gatorade

Rehydrating an iconic beverage brand

Challenge

Gatorade, the one-time leader in the $5BN hydration category, was losing relevance among competitive athletes. The landscape was proliferated with energy drinks, enhanced waters and other sports drinks, and athlete needs were changing.

Prophet partnered with Gatorade to rehydrate this iconic brand, and create an unprecedented path for growth through new athlete needs, occasions and categories.

Solutions

We conducted extensive elite athlete research – attended (and participated) in marathons and triathlons, conducted digital ethnographies and hired videographers to journal athletes’ journeys in training and competition.

Through this research, we uncovered eight functional needs that athletes had in addition to hydration, as well as what they consumed, when, where, why, etc. We learned that Gatorade was the #1 most trusted brand in sports fuel, yet only participated in hydration. And although Gatorade continues to dominate the hydration category, less than 10% of athletes’ consumption needs are related to hydration.  For the remaining 90% of athletes’ consumption needs, there is no trusted brand. Gatorade is one of the most trusted brands in the category, but it didn’t even have a product.

By understanding the wide range of need states for athletes, it enabled us to build a plan for Gatorade’s growth from a “hydration brand” to a “sports fuel company” which included the launch of a variety of new products.

Results

As a result of our work, Gatorade has embarked on its most aggressive brand transformation ever from hydration to sports fuel and achieved remarkable business impact such as:

  • Double digit volume declines reversed to 15% growth in year 1 for Gatorade base brand.
  • Over $3B in franchise revenue increases since launch of the strategy.
  • Expanded frame of reference beyond $6B hydration market into the $72B sports fuel market.
  • Launched new product forms with new benefits -gels, bars, shakes, chews, powders, etc.
  • Expanded into technology enabled wearable/durable goods.
  • Fastest growing brand in the PepsiCo portfolio.

Impact

15%

growth for base brand

3b

dollar franchise revenue growth

1

fastest-growing brand for Pepsi

CASE STUDY

Funimation

Helping reinvent & remarket a next-generation entertainment studio

Challenge

Funimation, the leading anime distribution company in the world, wanted to make the transition from an analog DVD business to a digital-first, streaming-driven company. To succeed with their next wave of enterprise growth, the company knew they needed to take on today’s increasingly digital entertainment landscape with fresh products, and a new approach to how they went to market amidst a rapidly changing landscape and consumer fan base.

Solutions

We started by refreshing their traditional segmentation with a digital-first lens to better understand how their consumers engage and interact with brands, fellow fans and media in the online space. Development of digital profiles provided a more detailed perspective of digital behaviors, informing the customer experience journey, value proposition and go-to-market strategy. Based on what we learned from research, Prophet refined the brand positioning, grounding it more substantially in fans’ insatiable appetite to discover extraordinary anime content.

We designed a fan-first digital value proposition anchored on flexibility and customization – a highly differentiated position in a crowded anime market. This new model entirely reshapes product, pricing, content and community.

Prophet then drafted new customer experience journeys by identifying the target audience’s needs and pain points throughout, with an eye towards addressing key gaps. Each phase of the experience inspired signature product and experience offerings that brought the value proposition to life. The various experience touchpoint and offering ideas were prioritized based on technical feasibility and business impact. Experiences and ideas were codified and prioritized based on both technical feasibility and business impact. We worked with management and media teams to estimate revenue impact, design a marketing plan, including a revamped social strategy.

Results

Our project culminated in the development of a digitally-driven go-to-market plan and detailed roadmap and actionable playbook, which is enabling staff and repositioning Funimation and strengthening their lead in the streaming anime market. Funimation achieved its company subscriber goals, paving the way for its recent acquisition by Sony for $143mm.

CASE STUDY

Thyssenkrupp Elevator

Strengthening a global brand in the Asia Pacific region.

Challenge

German technology and materials conglomerate, ThyssenKrupp, turned to Prophet for help developing a stronger brand for their elevator division across the Asia Pacific region. It was a multifaceted challenge as the brand needed to resonate across a range of diverse markets, including China, India, South East Asia and Australia.

As well as cultural and linguistic differences, each market had a different product and service portfolio, maturity level and construction market focus. The company has an engineering culture with a low level of brand understanding, yet as a latecomer to Asia, brand building was an essential strategic priority to help raise awareness, drive consideration and make the company the preferred employer in the category.

Solution

Following an audit where we interviewed internal and external stakeholders including customers and influencers such as architects and elevator consultants, we co-created a clear, ownable positioning for the brand around the territory of ‘customer-centric solutions.’ This was expressed through the brand idea, ‘With you all the way’ and four principles: helpful, ingenious, reliable and rigorous.

These principles would shape the desired employee behaviors as well as the wider brand experience. Then we developed a simple, bold, icon-driven identity system that allowed the brand to communicate complex stories in a simple way. We redesigned the entire customer experience from marketing communications, website experience, customer showroom journey, trade show stand and merchandise look and feel.

Results

The new brand has helped ThyssenKrupp Elevator become the fastest-growing player in Asia’s elevator market, enjoying multi-year, double-digit growth. Internally, through an Asia-wide employee engagement survey, we found that 95% of employees say they felt inspired by the new brand and understand how to live up to it in their daily work.

CASE STUDY

Indiana University Health

Creating a new hospital system brand

Challenge

Following a long series of mergers and acquisitions, Clarian Health had a vision. It wanted to become the most comprehensive and preferred healthcare provider in the state of Indiana and the most highly-respected and sought-out source for medical expertise on a regional and national level. A crowded and increasingly competitive local market meant that a stronger brand was critical. The organization needed a unified brand strategy, name and architecture that was grounded in stakeholder needs and could deliver a consistent experience across all member organizations.

Solutions

Prophet worked extensively with the marketing and executive leadership teams to develop and implement a new, system-wide brand and customer experience strategy to help achieve this vision. This work included qualitative and quantitative research across different stakeholder audiences as the foundation for strategy development.

Prophet focused on building a deep understanding of emotive drivers for patients and referring physicians and worked to understand how these groups accessed the healthcare delivery system. We also weighed the implications of engaging customers under a new brand strategy and name.

Results

In the end, we delivered a comprehensive brand strategy to the health system. This strategy involved a new positioning that highlighted the breadth and depth of the entire system, changing the name of the brand to Indiana University Health, defining the patient experience to be consistent across the system and activating key brand elements that help convey the new brand and deliver the desired patient experience. Five years later, a thorough customer and employee research project was undertaken to determine how the brand was performing and to realign the messaging. We found that the Indiana University Health brand messaging was still perceived as highly relevant, and highly believable by employees and patients.

CASE STUDY

Schneider Electric

Driving demand for a global energy management company

Challenge

Schneider Electric is a global specialist in energy management with operations in more than 100 countries. The company recognized that future business growth depended upon driving demand among end customers and the contractors who work most closely with them.

Solutions

In a complicated and multi-layered value chain, digital communications are crucial to forging relationships with end customers and contractors, while enhancing relationships with existing channel partners. By driving a deep understanding of how customers make decisions, and the role that digital plays in helping them, Prophet partnered with Schneider to identify and pursue opportunities to better engage customers across the entire value chain.

Results

Despite challenging market conditions and a slowdown in new economies, the execution of this strategy saw revenues increase by 6.6%. Customized online portals enabled Schneider to increase the share of wallets among contractors by helping them make smarter project execution decisions. The organization also drove greater demand with end-users through tools such as Building Insights – a building energy management platform.

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