Prophet

CASE STUDY

Electrolux

Creating an integrated and engaging customer experience

Challenge

Savvy, digitally-enabled consumers expect great brand experiences online, in-store and after purchase. Electrolux, a global leader in household and professional appliances, realized the need for an integrated and engaging branded customer experience that would leapfrog the competition, and to do this, they needed a digital transformation.

Solutions

Electrolux leaders partnered with Prophet to map the consumer experience and seamlessly integrate and activate the brand’s digital and physical shopping experience touchpoints.

With a focus on the consumer, experience teams worked across business sectors and geographies to examine the consumer experience throughout the purchase cycle and identify key needs and pain points. With so many different opportunities, brands and geographies to explore, the main challenge was applying a razor-sharp lens to the channels (e.g., mobile, retail, etc.) and identifying signature touchpoints to create a multi-year, step-by-step customer experience roadmap to drive transformation and business impact.

Creating a culture of experience innovation was also a priority. To empower and energize the delivery of the experience, Prophet worked with the CMO, CEO and sector business leaders at Electrolux to deliver a unique growth leadership development program for the top 350 brands, experience and product innovators across the company. The program provides experiential learning and access to capabilities/ knowledge from across the organization in exciting formats that engage their leaders and build ambassadors for the transformation to a consumer-driven company.

Results

After Electrolux put the customer first, shopper experiences improved and the organization mobilized around a clear and common consumer vision.

As a result, The Electrolux Group delivered its ninth consecutive quarter of organic growth. The organization has produced a step-change in the number of products and experience innovations that exceed new, aggressive standards for meeting consumers’ needs.

CASE STUDY

Electrolux

Developing a demand-driven business growth strategy

Challenge

Electrolux, a global leader in household and professional appliances, set out to leapfrog competitors through a demand-driving business growth strategy. They viewed the emergence of digitally-enabled shoppers, the growth in new retail formats and the surge in consumer buying power in emerging markets as a unique opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

Solutions

Electrolux leaders partnered with Prophet to drive demand among targeted consumers through offer innovation, improvements to the shopping experience, new digital marketing tools and post-purchase experience upgrades. Working across business sectors and geographies, growth teams started clarifying the growth agenda and uncovering insights into the key drivers of consumer demand for offers and experiences. Global and sector teams developed multi-year, step-by-step roadmaps for innovation, digital marketing, consumer shopping experiences, post-purchase experiences and internal talent development. Individual sectors are now implementing several of these programs, piloting initiatives in new capability areas and rolling out focused new product launch programs.

The transformation includes building internal capabilities as well as launching programs in-market. Prophet worked with Electrolux’s CMO, CEO and sector business leaders to deliver a unique growth leadership development program for the top 350 brand, experience and product innovators across the company. They have become ambassadors for the transformation of Electrolux to a consumer-driven company.

Results

In the quarter after activation, the company delivered its ninth consecutive period of organic growth. The organization has produced a step-change in the number of products and experience innovations that exceed new, aggressive standards for meeting consumers’ needs; resulting in North America sales growth of 1.1%, and margin increases of 4.3%.

Impact

9

consecutive quarters of growth

1.1%

North America sales growth

4.3%

increase in margins

CASE STUDY

Crate&Barrel

Driving double-digit sales growth for a home goods retailer

Challenge

After several years of disappointing performance and a lack of brand clarity, Crate&Barrel reached out to Prophet to help diagnose the issue and determine a solution to turn the business around.

We worked with the Crate&Barrel team to transform its retail branding strategy and implement it across the key aspects of the business – brand, merchandising, store experience and service offers.

Solutions

Our retail branding work began by developing a deep understanding of the market and customers. Our segmentation research uncovered the opportunity for Crate&Barrel to win by focusing on an under-penetrated high-value segment. Based on this new target, we repositioned the brand to be relevant to its needs, defining the critical product and experience elements – both unique brand assets and critical gaps to invest behind – required to win and drive growth.

Part of the formula for success meant Crate&Barrel needed to inspire and engage this target customer, while also making the stores more profitable. As part of this new retail brand strategy we identified opportunities to make the store more effective through SKU optimization, cross-merchandising and product distortion recommendations. Crate&Barrel moved quickly to bring it to life in new social media stories and marketing campaigns to capture attention and encourage the target to take another look at the brand.

At the same time, Prophet began to focus on a longer-term plan to create a more engaging, impactful and immersive store design for Crate&Barrel. It would deliver on the brand strategy and result in increased cross-shopping, dwell time and traffic. We also identified opportunities for growth through new design services offering to increase transaction size while also better serving the consumer.

Results

From insights gathering to strategy to execution, Prophet collaborated closely with Crate&Barrel leadership to diagnose the issues and develop solutions to support the in-market execution of the new retail strategy. After less than 12 months in the market, the business began to see significant improvement in sales and traffic. In fact, the brand saw double digits growth in sales.

CASE STUDY

Olive Garden

Building a relentlessly relevant brand

Challenge

Olive Garden, Darden Restaurant’s largest brand, is the leader in casual dining – a category they created over 3 decades ago. With a rich history and over $3.5B in annual sales, they were facing a daunting challenge – how to remain relevant in a world that’s changed drastically since the inception of casual dining?

It’s a category-wide challenge: a sea of sameness with “food at a price” promotions, increased competition from fast-casual options, and decreasing relevance and consideration for their core guests and Millennials. The Olive Garden leadership team knew they needed to get out ahead of these challenges in order to remain the category leader and drive growth.

The challenge was clear – how to grow brand relevance with their loyal fans while building relevance with new audiences? How could they force re-consideration and build equity for the Olive Garden brand while staying true to their heritage and driving growth through their strongest assets?

Solutions

We believe relentlessly relevant brands need to obsess over their customers, so we took it a bit further: We became them. We ate bowl after bowl of pasta in the restaurants, talked to dozens of guests, and scoured the social media landscape. One thing became strikingly clear – the passion for Olive Garden stems from some of their most important assets –family and breadsticks. (C’mon… who doesn’t love those breadsticks?!)

To amplify that passion, we found innovative ways to bring breadstick fans closer to the food and family they love. In partnership with the Olive Garden marketing, PR, and Culinary team, we developed “Breadstick Nation” as a platform for new breadstick products and experiences, such as breadstick sandwiches and Olive Garden food trucks. Citizens of Breadstick Nation unite!

Results

The proof is in the dough. Breadstick Nation received over one-billion social media mentions before any products launched and it has now been featured by major media outlets from NPR to Buzzfeed. Breadstick fans are already lining up at food trucks across the country, and tracking the Breadstick Nation summer tour via Olive Garden’s new Breadstick Nation website. Darden Restaurants’ stock surged 15% and hit a new all-time high in the weeks following the #breadsticknation launch.

The celebration of Olive Garden’s key assets isn’t ending with the breadstick. We also focused on family and togetherness to develop “Little Italy,” an engaging kids club with fun activities for kids in the restaurant and online, which is being tested in select markets. And several other yet-to-be-launched platforms.

By obsessing over the guest, staying true to the brand, and creating inspired new ideas that align with the passions of core guests, Olive Garden is charting a path of relentless relevance and business growth for generations to come.

CASE STUDY

Salt

A new name and brand for Orange Switzerland

Challenge

Fresh from success in the UK in the early 1990s, Orange entered the Swiss mobile market in 1999. Setting up as the third operator in the country, they grew to a 20% share, despite the market being renowned for extreme customer loyalty.

In 2012, Orange Switzerland (now Salt) was sold to private equity firm Apax providing the perfect opportunity to create a new brand aimed specifically at their Swiss customers and free from the constraints of the parent company.

Solutions

We started working with Orange in 2013 to create the new brand. Through research and sessions with the executive team at Orange, we discovered three key tenants that the new brand was built upon:

  1. Sole focus on the customer, not itself, and communicated with attitude in order to stand out. Want the new iPhone? No problem.
  2. An understanding of the network’s predominantly young and urban customers. They are accustomed to great food in restaurants without stuffiness, the best coffee served in an understated and swift fashion and new digital services that measure success in as few user interactions as possible. Less is definitely more.
  3. The brand should communicate a sense of new Swissness. An alternative to the clichéd mountain top imagery.

This formed the basis of the brand personality. Instead of promising to save the world or make your day, this is a network that is there when you need them and not when you don’t. A network that doesn’t over promise and under deliver, that doesn’t distract and pitch upgrades but one that accepts and embraces their role as an essential ingredient in the lives of their customers. From this personality, we created the name — Salt. Short, but big on attitude and a world away from their rival networks.

Results

To bring the new brand to life, we worked simultaneously on advertising, digital experience, retail design, point of sale and employee engagement. We designed approaches for everything from above the line to point of sale, website and accompanying smartphone apps and retail design principles.

In January 2015 Apax Partners sold the company to Xavier Niel, the owner of French mobile phone company Iliad, for €2.3bn — an €800 million profit on their 2012 purchase. In April 2015 the new brand launched across all 200 retail outlets in Switzerland and online at Salt.ch. Click the image below to see a slideshow of our design work.

CASE STUDY

The Cosmopolitan

Launching a new brand in a commoditized market

Challenge

As a new player in an overcrowded, commoditized market, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas leadership team faced an uphill battle. Not only were they charged with bringing a new offer to market in the face of a severe global economic downturn, but they were also an independent single-property enterprise competing against a host of well-established companies possessing multi-property portfolios.

Further, time was of the essence. A new ownership group had recently taken over the development of the property and needed it to open in December 2010 – allowing only 15 months for the team to create a compelling new vision for the offer and in turn, translate that into reality.

Solutions

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Prophet teams worked in partnership to transform the entire casino-resort experience. By challenging existing conventions, inspiring new ways of thinking and unlocking insights about what was missing in the market we were able to reimagine every aspect – restaurants, retail, casino, hotel rooms, pools and entertainment venues.

The key to success was the importance of redefining luxury for the Las Vegas market. By conceiving of an experience that would resonate with “people who feel at home all over the world” we created an offer that was contemporary, authentic, energizing and welcoming – setting a new standard for the category for years to come.

Results

The resort has launched to acclaim from hospitality experts and customers alike. The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has achieved the highest combined average daily hotel room and occupancy rates on the Strip. In addition, the resort has been named to Conde Nast Traveler’s global “Hot List Hotels 2011”, was featured on Travel and Leisure’s 2011 “It List” of the world’s best hotels, received the Design Grand Prix award from the Cannes International Festival of Creativity and in 2016 was named as the #1 “Most Instagrammed Luxury Hotel” by Bloomberg.

CASE STUDY

UBS

Repositioning the brand and engaging 60k employees

Challenge

Bigger and broader than previous brand campaigns, the one UBS launched was designed to communicate the company’s transformation under CEO Sergio Ermotti. In the several years since he’d assumed the role, Ermotti led UBS through brand repositioning and aligned all business divisions around a single strategy. UBS was finally ready to share its transformation with the outside world and use the brand relaunch to drive further change.

Before launching a more modern, human and unique brand and ad campaign, UBS had to first win over and prepare its most important advocates – the more than 60,000 employees who live and breathe the brand. UBS looked to Prophet for help developing and implementing an employee engagement campaign that informed, inspired and engaged employees.

Solutions

To engage employees, Prophet created a microsite on UBS’s employee intranet and regularly published relevant content. The topics and formats of posts varied, including quirky educational videos on tone of voice, a brand guidelines game and a series of intimate video portraits of UBS leaders and clients discussing the new positioning and direction. Additionally, we struck a partnership with a young, up-and-coming graffiti artist to immerse employees in the brand’s ethos through four large-scale artworks.

Using rigor and strategically-inspired creative thinking, we applied the same best practices of external marketing to deliver effective internal employee communications:

  • Equal effort applied to creating and promoting the site
  • All content must be easy and fun to assimilate
  • Select a few simple messages to communicate and repeat them

Results

The employee engagement campaign has been and continues to be a resounding success, with UBS continuing to win preferred employer awards every year. We initially defined success as having 30,000 employees visit and engage with the microsite, but have far exceeded that expectation as the microsite has now reached more than 62,000 employees. Both employees and top management have expressed how impressed they’ve been with the employee engagement program.

When asked about the brand relaunch, Hubertus Kuelps (group head of communications and branding) told Forbes, “This particular campaign has definitely energized the employee base. It has brought them to a level of pride…I haven’t seen in my communications career.”

Download UBS’ brand relaunch employee engagement content timeline.

“This particular campaign has definitely energized the employee base. It has brought them to a level of pride…I haven’t seen in my communications career.”

Hubertus Kuelps
Group Head of Communications at UBS

CASE STUDY

Chick-fil-A

Reimagining an experience for a quick-service giant

Challenge

Chick-fil-A, a leader in the quick-service industry, was growing faster than it ever imagined. With double-digit sales growth year after year and new restaurants opening up all over the country, it was becoming increasingly important that the thousands of restaurant operators and headquarter employees were aligned around a vision for the future of the company.

One of the most important channels Chick-fil-A uses to communicate its business vision is its annual event that brings the entire organization together for four days. This event had been occurring for over 40 years, however, the approach and experience had become predictable and was losing relevance. Prophet was engaged to provide a “fresh set of eyes” to this event with the goal of rethinking how it could more effectively inspire Chick-fil-A Operators to take their businesses, and even their lives, to the next level.

Solution

Prophet took leaders at Chick-fil-A through a strategic process to reimagine and redefine this annual event, and to elevate its purpose and impact well beyond just a few short days. Prophet then helped design an entire experience with multiple formats that reflected how Operators wanted to engage with each other and the organization. The result was a newly branded and newly defined event called NEXT.

At NEXT, key leaders and external speakers were able to share inspirational perspectives and a vision for the future through bite-sized TED-style talks during “Common Ground” time. Breakout sessions became “Labs,” and the “Expert Corner,” and gave attendees the chance to work together to hone specific skills and engage with speakers in a more intimate format. The typical corporate expo became the “Garages,” which brought the most critical initiatives across the organization together into a highly experiential and hands-on format.

Results

Prior to NEXT and Prophet’s involvement, there was a sense of frustration from Operators that the event, which was once meant for them, had lost its focus. However, following the first reimagined event, attendees and especially Operators felt re-engaged, empowered and inspired to be part of such an incredible organization. In fact, more than 80% shared they were likely to make a change in their business or their lives as a result of NEXT.

CASE STUDY

Zurich

Bringing a financial services brand back to life

Challenge

Zurich Financial Services was becoming just another commoditized insurance company in a sea of undifferentiated providers. Like the rest of the industry, Zurich was too internally focused, with Underwriters, Risk Engineers and Claims Adjusters calling the shots, and a brand positioning that lacked relevance in customers’ lives. Customers who told us they saw insurance providers as non-responsive, slow and untrustworthy – “little more than an organized crime syndicate”. We knew we needed a dramatic change in order to stand out.

Solutions

The idea was simple: We’ll help you deal with the most important things first, like securing a rental car or a place to stay.  Then we’ll help you through the process of restoring your world to order. We’ll put you at the center by delivering REAL help. And in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Zurich launched one of the most extensive global campaigns, introducing Zurich HelpPoint externally and internally.  Our unequivocal promise to customers was that Zurich delivers when it matters.

This could have been seen as yet another empty promise were it not for the vision of transforming 60,000 employees into authentic evangelists of the brand, armed with the permission to identify and execute proactive, spontaneous touchpoints, unheard of in the world of insurance.

Results

In a few short years, the sheer size and ambition of the transformation have been astounding, ranging from internal engagement programs, brand ambassadors, employee awareness-raising tactics, customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics, and the launch of hundreds of new product propositions globally. Revenue, margins and brand tracking scores are all up; and ten years later, Zurich ranks 7th in global insurance brands, and 206th in brands globally by Brand Finance.

CASE STUDY

Novant Health

Transforming the patient experience

Challenge

Novant Health, an integrated network of physician practices, hospitals and outpatient centers, had the vision to provide remarkable healthcare and transform the patient experience. While Novant Health had started to deliver on this vision, the system was represented by over 400 local brands, leaving no way for patients to connect the pieces and really understand what the brand stands for.

Solutions

We worked alongside our client, using a combination of traditional research methods and creative ideation sessions, to help define a brand positioning that would highlight Novant Health’s unique strengths. We developed a master brand strategy, aligning all points of care across the system under one Novant Health brand.

Prophet then crafted a brand identity and visual system that reflected the new strategy. We brought the strategy to life through employee engagement tools and launch communications that shared the Novant Health story with internal and external audiences. We also recommended new ways to deliver the remarkable patient experience, including patient resources, digital tools and signature touchpoints.

Results

The end result was a start-to-finish brand strategy and identity for Novant Health, including a plan to launch the new positioning and visual identity and to compellingly communicate the brand story. Its brand awareness increased by 130% from Q3 2013 to Q4 2013 and has resulted in a steady number of online searches, and a highly positive social media presence.

CASE STUDY

Kellogg School of Management

Inspiring growth through brand strategy

Challenge

The Kellogg School of Management has been ranked among the top five U.S. MBA programs by leading publications for decades. However, beginning in 2008 the school began to see slippage in its rankings. Pushed out of the top 5 in 2013, Kellogg realized it had to re-energize the brand and align the program and the curriculum around the renewed brand strategy. Prophet was brought in to help Kellogg revive its brand and to drive more students to consider and ultimately choose Kellogg as their top choice program.

Solutions

From the results of a robust customer study involving hundreds of interviews with faculty/staff, current students, prospective students, alumni and employers, we identified what makes a program a student’s top choice and where Kellogg could improve and understand what the vision for Kellogg was and what elements of Kellogg’s history the school wanted to leverage as they rewrote the school’s future.

Regardless of who we asked there was a belief that Kellogg’s MBA program inspires growth in many facets – personally, professionally within organizations and across markets. With the big idea nailed down, we turned to help Kellogg activate its new brand strategy of ‘inspiring growth’ across key audiences. We mapped out every touchpoint from the time before a student applies to Kellogg to the time after they cross the stage at graduation to determine the implications of this new brand strategy and the plan to activate it across key stakeholders.

Results

Kellogg has a renewed sense of purpose and a clearly defined strategy with which to move forward – and that is the first step in the right direction.

CASE STUDY

Club Marriott

Enhancing the guest experience for Chinese travelers

Challenge

Club Marriott, Marriott International’s Food and Beverage membership program in APAC, was looking for opportunities to grow. The program, where members get discounts on food and beverage in their local market, needed a new strategy. The goal was to expand the program beyond local food and beverage discounts to a more holistic membership program that was better tied to Marriott Rewards and offered consumers more benefits. Marriott enlisted Prophet to help redefine the brand strategy and also create a new, refreshed visual identity that would appeal to a broader audience and help explain the newly expanded membership program.

Solutions

Prophet worked with Marriott to create a new brand positioning for the Club. “We Bring More to the Table” plays on Club Marriott’s core offering around food and also includes a set of new services and experiences that the Club would offer – bringing to life the idea of “more.” These included broader hotel benefits like access to the gym, pool and spa, as well as dining benefits like exclusive dinners, chef’s tastings and more. The idea was to create a more holistic local program for people who wanted exclusive membership to a club in their local hometown without all the pomp and pretense.

We also worked with Marriott to re-design the Club Marriott visual identity to bring this new strategy to life. The icon-based system provided flexibility for each of the local markets to illustrate their individual offerings while showing the potential total offerings of the Club Marriott program.

Results

To date, the new program has attracted over 200,000 members and is reaching larger scale with new hotels being added every month. Following its success, the program will be rolled out in other key countries in the Asia-Pacific region including Singapore, India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, The Philippines, Indonesia, Guam and Thailand.

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