Prophet

CASE STUDY

Gourmet Burger Kitchen

Creating a new visual and verbal identity

Challenge

Founded in 2001, Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) helped move the burger from grease to gourmet indulgence in the UK. But, after a period of rapid growth as customers’ expectations changed and the market began bustling with new competitors, GBK was beginning to lose its personality and direction. Already tackling some of the issues head on, the senior team brought us on board to help define a clear purpose that could drive real change across a large, multi-lingual service organization.

Solutions

Through a series of workshops, we helped GBK rediscover what brought them together, what mattered most to them and what would help them stand out in the market – their burger obsession. This key insight led to five core beliefs and a brand strategy that would be applied across every aspect of the company’s operations from menu creation, retail environment design and hiring practices.

Results

The result is a brand platform that the GBK leadership has personally invested in and has been passionate about advocating across the company. We created a new visual and verbal identity to reinforce the idea of this gang of obsessives coming together to spread burger joy. With inspiration from existing clubs — from Hell’s Angels to the Boy Scouts — the new identity never takes itself too seriously but venerates the gourmet burgers at the heart of everything they do.

CASE STUDY

General Electric (GE)

Deepening customer penetration in B2B markets

Challenge

GE Healthcare (GEHC) became a global leader in diagnostic equipment by selling best-in-class engineering to department heads at large hospitals. But the decision-maker was changing, making the sell more complex. A diversity of hospitals and clinics were entering the market, department heads were no longer the sole decision-makers and information technologies were growing in importance.

Solutions

Prophet helped GEHC seize the opportunity to tailor integrated solutions to the needs of different segments. A first-in-kind industry segmentation uncovered three high-potential hospital/clinic segments and revealed the requirements of new influencers within each. Segment “plans-to-win” were developed, including:

  1. Developing new product lines for each segment
  2. Creating new segment sub-brands
  3. Reorganizing the sales/service force
  4. Launching a new selling approach to target hospital heads
  5. Integrating diagnostics and information services to provide more complete segment solutions

Results

GE Healthcare gained the ability to penetrate a greater portion of the market and impact more decision influencers. By expanding the dialogue from engineering to needs-based solutions, GEHC is now a stronger partner to healthcare providers and has amplified its ability to develop future solutions.

CASE STUDY

Emart Traders

A Winning Retail Format in Just 100 Days

Challenge

Ranking 10th among the world’s largest economic powers and fourth in Asia, South Korea’s retail market may be fast-growing, but so is the influx of competitors.

Emart, the country’s largest retailer and Korea’s first hypermarket, wanted to ensure it could maintain its competitive advantage and provide customers with novel new ways to shop. Besides sharpening the value proposition of its hypermarket flagship, Emart knew it needed to explore new retail concepts to achieve transformative growth.

Solutions

Prophet worked with Emart to explore alternate retail formats that would resonate with consumers’ unique and evolving behaviors. One of the three new businesses our team developed was a warehouse shopping concept to compete with the likes of Costco and Sam’s Club launching in the region. The biggest challenge? Emart wanted to launch the warehouse format in just 100 days.

Prophet was tasked to develop the customer strategy, brand positioning and design the store concept. With just over three months to take the initial idea from the Chairman’s whiteboard sketch to the doors opening, Prophet’s agile team moved fast.  We worked closely with Emart in weekly sprints to create the name, Emart Traders, and develop a differentiated brand identity. We then partnered with Emart’s implementation teams to build out the first store.

To stand out against the competition, Traders’ customer experience needed to make consumers feel like smart shoppers. It had to offer the emotional thrill that comes from getting a good deal on top-quality items. And it had to be fun.

Traders launched with a significant competitive difference – unlike Costco or Sam’s Club, it has no membership fees. The store features a warehouse aesthetic, including pallets, industrial fixtures and wood finishes suggestive of packing crates. The merchandising strategy is founded on a distinct shopping experience of discovering unbeatable offers. With right-out-of-the-box freshness in every aisle, Traders offers a tailored product mix seeing value-priced and high-quality store brands housed side-by-side.

Results

The first Traders store opened with great success, generating $100 million in sales in its first year. It has subsequently grown to include 20 locations, creating a $1 billion brand in five years. With gross sales up 26.4% year on year, Traders has become a continuous growth engine for Emart, helping it outpace other retail formats in the market and contributing nearly a fifth of total revenue for the group.

Impact

100m

USD Sales generated in the first year

20x

Stores opened since launch

1b

Dollar-brand created in five years

CASE STUDY

Cathay Pacific Airways

Driving true customer loyalty

Challenge

Cathay Pacific has long been known for delivery of exceptional customer service and experiences, voted “World’s Best Airline” more times than any other. However, they found that their loyalty program, Marco Polo Club, was outdated. Passenger recognition and reward were based on sectors and miles flown system that was not properly recognizing the contribution from fares that passengers paid.

The rewards and benefits offered by Cathay Pacific were out-of-sync with passenger value and competitor customer loyalty programs. This resulted in a missed opportunity to create stronger loyalty and patronage – particularly for leisure and family travelers. Our challenge was to help Cathay Pacific better understand its customer base and create a program that would drive share of wallet and desired behaviors – and ultimately bring balance back to the loyalty equation.

Solutions

Prophet helped by improving the fairness and transparency of the Marco Polo Club. We revisited program benefits to determine which would align with Cathay Pacific’s customer-oriented nature and how they could offer other unique and inspiring loyalty benefits.

We aimed to create a long-term, sustainable solution for Marco Polo Club by employing a “parallel-path” approach:

  1. An analytical investigation using over three million customer transactions.
  2. Ideation of key benefits for each program tier to identify what matters most for different customer types.

The synthesis of creative insight and analytical modeling informed the final Marco Polo Club redesign – new program tiers supported by business cases to help Cathay Pacific bring the new model to life.

The revamped scheme uses club points to replace club miles and sectors, providing benefits and a customer experience more accurately aligned with customer profiles. Points are based on a combination of fare class, cabin and distance flown; and the program offers the most valued benefits for lower tiers plus additional benefits for elite members.

Benefits span the customer experience, from reservations to check-in and baggage, to lounge access and more. There are new rewards for mid-tier customers such as additional companion benefits, and a renewed sense of exclusivity for their most high-value customers.

Results

Cathay Pacific rolled out its new strategy and believes the redesigned loyalty program allows optimal rewarding of its most valuable customers while providing the most important benefits to today’s frequent flyers.

CASE STUDY

BMC

Repositioning to support business transformation

Challenge

After being taken private by a group of investors, BMC was restructured into five distinct business units representing key product lines. Management was given the mandate to drive growth with core IT audiences and emerging business buyers.

But BMC was poorly positioned to win, due to low awareness and consideration in several key product areas. There was a lack of clarity in the market about what BMC stood for and even a lack of conviction that the brand could become relevant in a digital-first economy.

Prophet was hired to develop a “Golden Thread” brand strategy that would unite BMC’s product system under a common umbrella, differentiate the company against existing and emerging competitors, and ultimately, position BMC as a relevant brand across all lines of IT and digital service management.

Solutions

We started by mapping the IT and digital service management categories, laying out buying center dynamics, customer needs and competitive solutions in a holistic view of the current state. This mapping enabled us to identify entirely new possibilities for the brand – ones that could be credible for BMC to deliver based on its production system and capabilities.

We identified and explored four territories that could drive relevance, credibility differentiation, and ultimately devised a new positioning for BMC as the “DNA of the Digital Enterprise” that significantly modernized the brand, re-ignited relevance and consideration, and established a platform for differentiated growth. The positioning squarely established BMC as a key player in helping businesses become more digital.

Working in partnership with Moving Brands in San Francisco, we used the strategy to help guide the development of BMC’s updated logo and identity system. Prophet then worked with the GMs across the company to develop BU-specific narratives and product messaging aligned to the new brand strategy.

Results

The strategy has helped drive incredible business impact for BMC and its investors. The company has achieved:

  • $1B in new revenues and a number of new global customer accounts
  • An emerging reputation in digital
  • Share gains vs. large-cap competitors
  • Worldwide acclaim from industry analysts
  • Significant ROI on private equity investment

CASE STUDY

Keurig Green Mountain

Energizing an iconic brand portfolio

Challenge

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR), a small Vermont coffee company, acquired Keurig, a manufacturer of single-serve coffee brewers. A few years later, GMCR realized that in order to unlock growth, they needed a strategy that would successfully bring the two businesses together. The company engaged Prophet to support the large-scale transformation required to manage and accelerate business growth.

Solutions

We began our journey by setting the strategic foundation — designing a best practice marketing organization and clarifying the brand architecture required to drive growth. Once the internal structure was established, Prophet re-energized the flagship product brands, Keurig and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, with a strategy grounded in their heritage but positioned for their future. We set out to transform Keurig into a brewing system that could stand for much more than just coffee and aspired to expand Green Mountain from its New England roots to a globally recognized brand.

By spending time with Keurig advocates, we uncovered how valuable the product has been for reinventing consumers’ ordinary routines. Building off of the characteristics of simplicity, consistency, convenience and personalization, we developed a positioning centered on how Keurig makes it easy to make the things that make your day. We designed a new brand identity inspired by the ease of the push of a button and the choice of pods offered by the Keurig system.

Green Mountain Coffee, with its strong roots in Vermont, has a rich history in fair trade, social responsibility and carefully selected and roasted coffee. The new branding, inspired by its birthplace, honors its legacy but with a more contemporary look and feel. The new symbol embodies the company’s roots featuring the region’s signature geography and the core of its business — the coffee bean.

We helped Keurig Green Mountain come to life through two unique visual systems, united by a new corporate identity and logo that combines elements of their two main brands.

Results

Keurig Green Mountain has launched its new branding and is leveraging this new identity to expand its offerings into new products, and take Green Mountain Coffee into a new line of Organics.

“Prophet has been critical in the growth of our marketing capabilities, especially in a part of our business where we were trying to go from one brand to another very quickly. The company is filled with great strategists who happen to operate in a marketing realm. But the thinking transcends marketing and has a much greater impact.”

TJ Whalen
Former Chief Strategy Officer at Keurig Green Mountain

CASE STUDY

Electrolux

Refreshing a global icon and modernizing the brand

Challenge

Electrolux is on a journey to become a world-class consumer marketing company – but the brand’s visual identity felt out of date and undifferentiated. Electrolux worked with Prophet to create a visual platform that modernizes the brand and stands out in the market.

Solutions

Equipped with a deep understanding of Electrolux’s consumers, resulting from a long-standing partnership, Prophet worked with Electrolux’s team to build a brand identity that would appeal to consumers on an emotional level. A key insight led to the idea; consumers want to see the benefit of a product not just the features – a beautifully poached egg, a pile of soft, fluffy towels or a perfectly crisp white shirt.

Each aspect of the identity was modernized. The logo was stripped of superfluous shapes and the tagline, maximizing its visibility and impact. The font was updated to a custom, modern sans serif, echoing the shapes in their iconic brand symbol. The symbol was given a new lease on life, creating stopping power wherever it is encountered. The letters in the logo were extended into a custom brand typeface, creating a look that is distinctive in appearance on anything from billboards to product stickers. Their core color blue was darkened to have a more premium and modern appeal supported by a palette of bold, vivid colors that will stand out in busy retail environments.

Results

The new visual identity has been embraced by all corners of the organization and will change the way customers interact with Electrolux – in-store, online, on packaging and through mobile devices.

Read more about Electrolux’s redesign in Design Week, Creative Blog and Little Black Book. In the period after activation, Electrolux saw sales in North America grow by 2.2%, and margins increase by 3.9%.

CASE STUDY

Bank of East Asia

Creating a bold statement in retail banking

Challenge

Bank of East Asia (BEA) is the largest independent local bank in Hong Kong with a large retail branch network. In light of new competition, BEA hoped to extend its reach to customers and enhance its retail visibility. Prophet worked with BEA to create a coherent and impactful brand communication system to help the bank stand out across all channels.

Solutions

The new look is based on a band of five colored “light rays” symbolizing the five core values of the bank. It is designed to project a forward-looking image, making a bolder statement on a street level. As part of the branding campaign, a new tagline “Enriching your world” and four secondary messages have been developed.

Together, they communicate BEA’s commitment to helping customers improve their lives and achieve their goals through the provision of quality banking and financial services. BEA launched its new image through a high-profile advertising campaign including print, bus advertisements, outdoor billboards in the Central, TST, Hong Kong MTR Station, TST Piers and online advertisements.

Prophet ensured consistent delivery throughout the process, from concept to execution, as a long-term partner dedicated to elevating the brand to the next level.

Results

The end result is a dynamic visual and verbal communication approach that brings the brand to life, and significantly differentiates BEA from its competitors in retail environment, enhances the brand visibility and favorability.

Overall, the customers feel very positive about the change, more than 80% of customers reckon that the new look has enhanced the BEA brand image, and the majority of current customers are willing to recommend BEA to others.

Interested in learning more about how Prophet helps companies develop unique brand strategies, create engaging customer experiences and drive business growth? Explore our collection of case studies.

CASE STUDY

MET-Rx

Creating an aspirational brand in a functional category

Challenge

30 years ago, MET-Rx invented protein powder. But, as competitors caught up, MET-Rx didn’t continue as innovators of the category. Over time, the brand lost its relevance and limited its growth by focusing on the culture of professional body-building. So, Met-Rx partnered with Prophet to revitalize its messaging strategy in order to take back the category it created and regain relevance in mainstream culture.

Solutions

We designed a research strategy to better understand the MET-Rx customer—who they are, what matters to them and what they’re looking for. We engaged them in intimate co-creation focus groups and mobile shop-alongs to get ideas for how MET-Rx could begin to speak to them. Then, leveraging the strengths of our business in strategy, marketing and design, Prophet developed various brand messaging platforms and tested them in qualitative sessions with consumers and stakeholders alike. The rich feedback, suggestions and insight we gleaned from the testing sessions gave us specific direction so we could create the final brand idea.

Results

Since launching its new messaging strategy, Met-Rx has revitalized its brand by comprehensively rolling out the Prophet-created “You Can’t Fake Strong” brand idea. This new direction includes a new website, logo refresh, brand line, brand story, updated product packaging and partnerships.

Prophet was also engaged to help create a name and key messaging for their latest product innovation which reinforces the brand idea. With their new direction, Met-Rx has developed a clear path forward for both innovation and communications. With the strategic partnership of Tough Mudder, MET-Rx is living the “You Can’t Fake Strong” brand and quickly regaining relevance with mainstream athletes.

CASE STUDY

Optum

Uniting employees around a new brand strategy

Challenge

UnitedHealth Group offered a portfolio of business services unmatched in breadth and depth in the healthcare industry. However, its businesses had traditionally acted independently of one another and employees were focused on their business units, limiting the group’s ability to engage clients more comprehensively. To address this, Prophet aided in the creation of a unifying brand that translated the new vision into a new to the world business and brand.

Solutions

Prophet brought together three distinct businesses under a new logo, visual system and employee engagement strategy to guide the customer experience and communicate what the new company could deliver to the market. To deliver on this new promise, the company needed to make sure that the employees understood the new brand strategy and could begin delivering on this promise and experience. A strategic launch process brought the new brand to life and captured the hearts of necessary stakeholders in order to establish the brand from the inside out.

Results

The new brand, known as Optum, organized 500+ products, solutions and services under a single brand with the promise to make the health system work better for everyone. With Prophet’s help, UnitedHealth Group launched a dynamic $30-billion dollar brand in less than 6 months.

CASE STUDY

Friesland Campina

Doubling revenues for a beverage company across international markets

Challenge

Royal Friesland Campina was looking to profitably double revenues from its dairy-based beverage division by 2020 and become the world’s leading naturally healthy beverage company. The company faced tough competition due to increasing commoditization across the industry and needed an effective brand-led strategy to break through the category and command higher margins.

Solutions

We conducted a comprehensive market assessment across seven Southeast Asian, MENA and African markets, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Dubai/UAE, Nigeria, and developed a segmentation based on consumer needs, product consumption habits, and brand perceptions. Based on executive interviews and beverage category consumption data, Prophet provided strategic recommendations to realign RFC’s brand portfolio and rationalized it to focus on fewer, stronger, core brands.

In addition, based on consumer need states research and beverage consumption data, Prophet identified several growth opportunities for RFC’s Dairy Based Beverages business. Twenty opportunities were distilled down to eleven highly attractive ones. These prioritized innovation platforms were brought to life by defining the opportunity’s points of consumption.

Results

The client accepted and applauded both the portfolio and dairy-based beverages growth strategy recommendations. Prophet was selected to lead a global multi-city road show to gain internal stakeholder buy-in for the implementation of both recommended strategies.

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