Prophet

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

Josun Hotels & Resorts

Creating a winning brand portfolio strategy

Background

Established in 1914, Josun Hotel has become an exemplary hospitality brand, transforming into the current Josun Hotels & Resorts while maintaining its original “First & Best” mentality.

In a market where new entrants have raised the bar on hospitality, Josun Hotels & Resorts wanted to position its brands at the forefront of hospitality experiences in South Korea. Prophet worked closely with Josun to create an independent portfolio of brands, each targeting different consumer groups.

Approach

Prophet helped Josun Hotels & Resorts define a winning brand portfolio that captures distinct opportunities in the Korean travel market, with clearly defined roles and relationships for each of their hospitality brands. Understanding that each hospitality brand needs to meet the unique needs of Josun’s varied audiences, fresh insights were uncovered to define distinctive concepts for each brand. Through extensive research, expert interviews and in-depth audits, we created a hybrid brand architecture with a series of flagship brands with reimagined concepts appealing to different target audiences in Korea.

Each hotel brand is tied to its unique idea, name and story that delivers a hospitality experience like no other. L’Escape was born for those who wish to get away from reality and create their own dreams and fantasies, a true Parisian escape in the heart of Seoul. Gravity was created to become a thriving social hub for Millennials, a center of gravity in the community to foster creativity, collaboration and inspiration that blends work and play together. Combining Josun’s legacy with fresh modernity, Grand Josun reflects a refined sensibility for premium customer experiences while catering to families. Lastly, Josun Palace represents the group’s highest-grade luxury offering, encapsulating the key essence of the hotel’s heritage and appealing to “The Cultured Connoisseur.”

We brought the different brand strategies to life by carefully crafting distinctive visual identities for each hotel. We also developed complete branding concepts for some of the food and beverage offerings within the hotels.

Impact

The four new hotel offerings by Josun Hotels & Resorts – L’Escape, Gravity, Grand Josun and Josun Palace – were subsequently launched between 2018 and 2021 to great success. The optimized portfolio and architecture strategy maximized revenues across the brands and serves as a growth engine for the group, unlocking new possibilities in its journey to become a global hospitality brand.

Our work with Josun Hotels & Resorts received critical acclaim including multiple awards from Transform Magazine’s Transform Awards Asia ^[1][2][3].

L’ESCAPE

Creating a Parisian escape in the heart of Seoul

GRAVITY

From hotel to Millennial experience hub

GRAND JOSUN

Extending the Josun heritage to create a premium hotel brand for families

JOSUN PALACE

Creating a luxurious hotel brand under a winning portfolio

Let’s grow together

Have questions about your next growth move? Prophet has answers.

CASE STUDY

Mineral

Helping a stealth-mode X project “graduate” into a stand-alone Alphabet company

Challenge

To discover more about the magic of Mineral, visit their website.

Mineral is developing artificial intelligence that can transform agricultural data into understanding to increase the resilience of the planet’s food production systems. Founded in 2017 as a bet within Alphabet’s X, the “moonshot factory,” Mineral had a planet-sized ambition and the technology and talent to get there. It also needed a partner to help them craft the market presence needed to launch—and grow—as a stand-alone company.

Mineral chose Prophet as its end-to-end partner to launch a brand to represent Alphabet’s commitment to sustainable agriculture. In January 2023, Mineral successfully “graduated” as a stand-alone company and is already making an impact on the food system humankind needs to survive.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. If humanity doesn’t change how we produce food, then, by 2050, feeding the population will clear most of the world’s remaining forests and push the earth’s temperature past its 1.5°C warming limit. But innovating farming practices to be more resilient and ensure our planet can provide for lifetimes to come is complex. The diversity of the ag value chain and its industry practices have not been data-rich nor shared across silos—let alone globally—for the last century. The agriculture industry is at a juncture where data-informed decision-making is required to innovate key efforts like traceability and demand forecasting.

Solutions

Mineral is reimagining how food is produced more resiliently and sustainably by turning a world’s worth of agricultural data into new understanding.

They’re working relentlessly with partners across the ag value chain to enable every farmer, researcher, crop breeder, and advisor to overcome the challenges they face, and build a more productive food system—together. 

“Mineral’s ambition is not about adding technology to agriculture. It’s about helping adapt the agriculture system to a changing climate and switch to a more sustainable path. We’re doing so by leveraging AI to deeply understand the plant world and unlock the possibilities of embracing complexity.”
Elliott Grant, Chief Executive Officer, Mineral

Mineral is unique: while within the Alphabet ecosystem, it has the freedom to navigate the realities of being an early-stage company. It has the permission to build boldly, from the ground-up.

In addition to a strong brand, to show up in the world as an independent Alphabet company, Mineral needed a modern marketing organization to drive momentum and, ultimately, commercial success. Prophet helped Mineral leadership drive a stake in the ground—navigating through the foundational commercial realities of launching a business.

“Prophet helped us lay the brand foundation to mature from experimentation to commercialization and share with the world who Mineral really is. Prophet quickly diagnosed our brand needs, our in-market ambition, and the road that would get us there. They not only asked the right questions about our go-to-market approach, they also weren’t afraid to iterate with us; Prophet felt like an extension of our team.”
Elliott Grant

Prophet kicked off in March 2022 with a “graduation” checklist, which included building the business, brand, and marketing foundations to define, position, and externalize themselves to partners across the ag value chain and the world:

Developing a thoughtful business strategy and visual and verbal brand, rooted in research to uncover key industry and customer insights to determine how best to position Mineral in the AgTech space.
Externalizing the brand, mission, and vision on internal and external channels, including Alphabet-internal announcements and spotlights at high-profile events.
Identifying and integrating the tech stack required to stand-up, design, and operationalize owned digital channels as they scale.

“There are nuances of being an Alphabet company. Prophet took a true partnership approach to helping us navigate our launch strategy and execution, which required flexibility and a willingness to take feedback and adapt to our needs. After only a few weeks, the Prophet team had a firm grasp of who we were and who we aspired to be. They cleared the way for us and were patient every step of the way.”
Megan Fallon, Marketing Lead, Mineral

Throughout the partnership, Mineral realized they would need so much more to achieve their goals, which included:

1. Co-developing and co-authoring a rich pipeline of content with various business area leaders to continuously position Mineral as a reputable thought leader in ag.

2. Building muscles across the full commercial spectrum (e.g., developing multi-purpose sales materials for marketing teams and business development teams).

3. Supporting product teams with market-facing customer knowledge to inform portfolio strategy and feature development decisions.

“Prophet has shown aptitude not only for delivering brand and marketing assets, but also for helping our teams build the muscles required to grow and run the commercial side of our business.”
Megan Fallon

Results

Together, we crafted a business and brand identity that embraces the complexity of our agriculture ecosystems and showcases how Mineral’s breakthrough technology can create a more sustainable and productive food production system for our future.

“As our product portfolio matures, our Mineral x Prophet team continues to add value through sourcing customer insights that inform commercial and product decisions.”
Elliott Grant

Beyond graduation, Mineral continues to work with Prophet in its first year: prioritizing joint product-commercial goals, executing in-market activations, co-authoring content strategy (incl. thought leadership), conducting market-back research, and enhancing website features—all in close partnership with teams on the ground to reflect pivots as the company tests, learns, and grows.

Impact

+7k

impression in the first 24 hours

press articles published on graduation day alone

+7%

engagement rate on first post (vs. -2% benchmark)

Client Testimonial

“Our relationship with Prophet has continued to evolve alongside the progression and positioning of our business in market. The team deeply understands what we are trying to do—and are so passionate about it. We’ve been fortunate to have them.”

Megan Fallon
Marketing Lead, Mineral

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

Vialto Partners

Helping a 170-year-old brand gain new ground in global mobility

Challenge

Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) has been a well-respected professional services network and thought leader for over 170 years. In response to the rapidly changing needs of global workforces—and in partnership with a Private Equity sponsor—PwC identified a unique opportunity to unlock greater value through the spin-out of a dedicated global mobility business. So we combined Vialto Partners’ vast global reach and institutional credibility with the vigor, speed, and ambition of a CD&R Capital -backed NewCo—creating a hybrid solution designed to capture growth and maximize enterprise value from day one.

Solutions

As part of the Vialto launch, we weren’t just launching a website—we were building the brand foundation for a newly independent, CD&R Capital-backed company. Following a comprehensive discovery phase, a key finding among Vialto’s employees and clients was the deep belief that global mobility has the power to be a force for good. Guided by both cultural insight and investor ambition, we helped Vialto Partners shift their frame of reference from offering Global Mobility Services to Global People Solutions—supporting the firm’s human-centric mission and expanding the brand’s relevance and commercial scope.

The MVP site comprehensively positioned Vialto Partners as trusted experts—critical for a Private Equity-led spin-out aiming to reassure clients and accelerate market credibility. That effort began with the name. The NewCo brand name needed to be forward-looking and communicate the company’s ambition while honoring the legacy and expertise that shaped it. The crossbar of the “A” in Vialto evokes a bridge, depicting a sense of connection and upward momentum, while the bespoke and extended typeface conveys a sense of gravitas, trust, and expertise—striking the right balance between innovation and stability.

For the website, we laid out the Vialto story in a scannable, hierarchical way that unfolded a breadth of offerings—reassuring potential clients, investors, and partners that although this was a new company, it was far from an unknown entity. We established a future-ready design system that could scale with the business—essential to the Private Equity sponsor’s growth thesis—while maintaining accessibility best practices throughout. Then we built day-one launch anticipation through commercials, sizzle and campaign videos, paid search, and a variety of content across social media outlets—driving visibility, engagement, and early pipeline momentum.

Results

With proven results from the first phase, we are currently working on their 2.0 launch and beyond. We continue to interview stakeholders to get a holistic view of what works, what needs improvement and business goals that the web experience should address.  

A three-phase road map was developed to design and implement a strategic taxonomy system and to introduce languages and customized content for different global regions. Thus, further personalizing and improving the user experience for Vialto Partner’s customers.

Impact

48M

Viewable impressions 2.5 months after launch

79%

Increase of traffic within 3 months from launch MoM

100+

Interactions 2.5 months after launch

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

Kibo Foods

Ingredients for a Successful CPG Product Launch

Challenge

Colombian CPG conglomerate, Grupo Nutresa, was launching its first North American product, Kibo Foods—nutritious, delicious chickpea chips—to the U.S. market, exclusively through Amazon.

They needed a partner that could bring a modern approach to all aspects of their U.S. launch—branding, marketing, owned and paid media, content development, website, e-commerce, fulfillment, media management, performance measurement and optimization. 

Solutions

Since Kibo Chickpea Chips had no previous brand presence in the North American market, it was crucial to determine their potential consumers. We identified online tribes of healthy snackers to understand possible target audiences based on their affinity for similar brands and likelihood to buy snacks on Amazon.com. Three “Healthy Snacker” target profiles were built with hyper-focused demographics—including interests, brand affinities, personality traits, shopping behaviors, influencer relationships, media channel consumption habits and most-engaging content types.

We then refined the Kibo brand positioning, crafted relevant messaging themes, and established a distinct, playful voice and visual design system. Detailed message maps overlaid the brand strategy to the shopper journeys and confirmed which omnichannel assets, experiences and messages would engage audiences most. We then created an all-in-one visual web design platform that allowed us to build and take the site live without a long development and testing process. Working closely with the Kibo team, we established their digital storefront on Amazon, providing consultation, SEO-backed copy, product imagery, offers and ad assets.

Then, we created a media strategy to put the right message in front of the audience at the right time. We selected channels, allocated the spend and modeled against goals to ensure a drive to purchase. To get the brand in-market quickly, we conducted a three-day video and photo shoot strategically organized to capture an entire asset library, which included motion graphics, product photography, lifestyle imagery and video assets, allowing us to build a seamless customer experience across the website, social channels, email and display—and setting up the Kibo team for ongoing social engagement.

Results

We helped Kibo get its start in homes across America with continuous optimization through analysis that fueled robust sales growth. To enable internal marketing and creative teams to execute and extend the brand effectively, we developed an activation playbook that synthesized the brand strategy and summarized brand guidelines. Performance reports and optimization recommendations were delivered monthly to guide ongoing content, theme and messaging decisions.

Impact

23%

over sales growth projections

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Growing a donor base to help homeless women rebuild their lives

Challenge

Homelessness in the U.K. is on the rise as the cost of living crisis pushes more people onto the streets. Homeless women – often fleeing violence – are even more vulnerable on the street. St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a London-based charity, started the ambitious 18 Keys project to raise £1.8 million to re-develop a hostel in London to provide stable accommodation and services to help homeless women rebuild their lives.

To make this initiative a success, 18 Keys needed to reduce its dependence on institutional contributions and grow its donor base. The project needed a distinctive fundraising campaign strategy to expand its reach and mobilize new donors.

Solutions

Prophet started by analyzing the communications of other charities, isolating the best practices of the most successful fundraisers. With those insights, we interviewed current and potential donors to better understand why, when and how they donate and their perceptions about the explosion of homelessness in London. Then we huddled with the 18 Keys team, ideating new audience segments and key messages for each group. And we revisited the team’s approach to collecting testimonies, knowing that real women telling their stories will have more impact than any other form of marketing.

We distilled those diverse findings into a comprehensive new strategy. That included tone-of-voice principles and vital messages they could use going forward. We helped prioritize the highest-impact channels where they could achieve maximum ROI, and developed tools for creating future content.

Results

Armed with the thinking and tools to enable them to compete with the larger charities, the 18 Keys team has been using Prophet’s guidelines to create distinctive and motivating fundraising campaign messages that compassionately illuminate the plight of women struggling with long-term homelessness. In March 2023, the project surpassed its £500,000 donation target by 6%, keeping it on track to hit £1.8 million by the end of the year.

“This is revelatory. Such a clear and insightful strategy with a weight of detail we simply would not have had access to without your help.”

Caroline Muir
Major Gift Fundraiser at St Martin-in-the-Fields Trust

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

Coherent

Uniting science and technology leaders under a powerful new brand

Challenge

In 2021, II-VI, a global leader in engineered materials and optoelectronic components, announced its intent to acquire Coherent, a global laser technology leader. Integrating these two powerful organizations would create a global leader in materials, networking and lasers—shaping markets from communications to industrial, electronics and instrumentation.

II-VI engaged Prophet at this critical inflection point to help them define the strategy and expression for the new company, signaling to the market why it came together, what it stands for and what it promises to deliver.

Solutions

Leadership wanted to clearly signal its intent to create a truly integrated organization
and elected to adopt the Coherent name. The word “coherent” has a technical meaning in laser technology, but also means being united or forming a whole—which served as an apt metaphor for the companies coming together.

From there, we helped them articulate the brand strategy, using leadership perspectives and category analysis as key inputs. For decades, both companies helped their customers develop and design groundbreaking products. Coming together created an unrivaled combination of technologies, platforms and deep expertise that positioned the new Coherent to be their customers’ design partner of choice—helping them not only respond to current demands but anticipate where their customers and industries would go next. With that insight, we developed a brand strategy focused on helping customers shape the future and create a world that’s safer, healthier, and more connected than ever before. We used the brand strategy as the foundation for a modular messaging framework and adapted it for key audiences.

We brought this idea to life with a powerful new visual identity. The new logo celebrates the atom, foundational to all of Coherent’s products. The new logo features the atomic structure embedded in the typography to represent the full breadth of the integrated Coherent offering. Combining a vibrant Neptune blue with a striking, high-contrast color palette, the dynamic graphic system brings the design language of science to life.

Finally, we supported the brand’s launch with a communications rollout plan and an extensive library of assets, from banner ads to signage to a launch video.

“Rebranding a multi-billion-dollar company was an opportunity of a lifetime that required the support of a top brand firm. Prophet was a great partner all along the way. Prophet’s process helped us converge towards a bold and highly relevant new visual identity that felt like it would stand the test of time and potentially become iconic in our industry.”

Mark Lourie
Global Vice President of Corporate Communications & Brand Development

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CASE STUDY

Swiss Re

Future-proofing the brand in a rapidly changing world

Challenge

The world – and what needs to be insured and reinsured – is fundamentally changing. Swiss Re, a world-leading provider of reinsurance and insurance, had seen the needs of its clients and partners reshaped by the likes of global warming, the expanding role of digital and data in consumers’ lives, new types of risk and an increasingly disruptive competitor set.

Swiss Re had already evolved its business strategy to better address these new, emerging realities and the changing risk landscape. But, with a new customer-centric business strategy in place, it was vital that the Swiss Re brand better connected with its audiences in a more compelling way.

Solutions

Prophet partnered with Swiss Re to redefine their brand strategy, including a refreshed brand positioning, an evolved visual identity and a first-in-kind audio brand. Collaborating with all corners of the global Swiss Re team – and with a deep understanding of the challenges that the brand needed to address – we set about developing a more relevant and differentiated position in the market.

The refreshed brand positioning now reflects the dynamic, digital-first Swiss Re has become and demonstrates the firm’s growth ambition. This distinctive positioning brings its tech and innovation, data and insights and societal leadership strengths to the fore to better reflect new types of risk that clients face, as well as attract new talent and partners.

To support the new brand strategy, there was a need to advance the visual identity to embrace all facets of the business and build a sense of ‘oneness’ in today’s digital world. Prophet partnered with the team to activate the identity with a suite of design assets including bespoke imagery, to act as a metaphor for how Swiss Re powers progress and their unique perspectives on the world. And – rather atypical for a business-to-business brand – an audio brand was introduced to strike the right tone and deliver a more contemporary expression of the brand.

Results

Awarded a prestigious Red Dot Design Award in 2022 and a German Brand Award in 2023, the sophisticated refreshed brand reaffirms Swiss Re’s leading position in the industry as a future-ready business, working to attract new talent, stand out against the competition and unlock new opportunities for the company. Well received internally, it is also resonating with employees, enforcing the unifying notion of ‘oneness.’

“Prophet’s unique approach to strategic design has delivered a far more contemporary and sophisticated expression of the brand. We couldn’t be more proud of the outcome.”

Dr. Jan Dietrich Müller
Head Group Communications, Managing Director

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CASE STUDY

Cool Earth

Developing a diversity, equity and inclusion playbook to unite employees around the world

Challenge

Cool Earth, a UK rainforest conservation charity, needed to grow faster. It wanted to achieve that growth by increasing donations and working more effectively as a team. An inherently diverse organization, with active initiatives ranging from Peru to Papua New Guinea, it hoped to increase inclusion and connection to drive impact across its geographies.

Solutions

We started with stakeholder interviews at all organizational levels, and in all regions. Those led to collaborative working sessions, where we helped co-create a revised set of corporate values and behaviors. With those clarified values, the team developed a new plan for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to unite employees around the world. And to help these new efforts take hold faster, we developed signature DEI experiences, such as a buddy system. Each employee now has a go-to support person, which improves engagement and increases communication and connection between local teams.

Results

Cool Earth is putting this playbook and change roadmap to work, including initiatives to provide equal opportunities and localized and empowered leadership. With knowledge-sharing forums, DEI education policies, communication plans and processes to track employee engagement, it’s poised for faster growth. That means it can have more impact where it matters most: protecting the world’s rainforests and the indigenous people who live there.

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

UGG

Building a relentlessly relevant brand

Challenge

A beloved brand known for its iconic boots, UGG was looking to expand its relevance and connect with Gen-Z consumers in an emotive and ownable way. With a mix of established and emerging markets across the globe, UGG wanted to not only identify their target customer but understand where and how to create deeper engagement and drive further growth with them. The brand needed to show up as a more assertive and compelling brand— inspiring its consumers to join a community that stood for something beyond trendy footwear.

But creating a relentlessly relevant brand for UGG meant balancing several key challenges. We had to reach (and win with) Gen-Z consumers without alienating UGG’s existing core customers. Which meant managing the tension between making bolder moves to meet the self-expression of younger consumers and maintaining the classic UGG brand for legacy consumers.

Solutions

We began our immersion by conducting internal stakeholder interviews to understand the vision and aspirations for the brand. We then conducted global consumer qualitative research to better understand consumer perspectives on the brand, their lifestyles and communities, and to generate a hypothesis for a global brand direction.

Using this as a foundation, Prophet implemented a rigorous quantitative process to deliver consumer target segmentation for UGG driven by customer style attitudes and core emotional & functional needs. Out of the 6 segments identified, we prioritized 3 unique segments that UGG could act on and start driving engagement with. Our team also provided targetable Micro-Communities built around passions, hobbies and other interests with these segments for future activation. From these inputs, we worked iteratively with the UGG team through workshops to define UGG’s global brand positioning and voice, and how to activate this newly defined brand.

Results

Prophet worked with UGG to identify and prioritize consumer target segments along with a global brand strategy to align the product, marketing, and overall consumer experience across all of its brand touchpoints.

Prophet delivered a brand book used to communicate and rally the new strategy internally and guide activation efforts across functions and organizational teams. Our work aligned UGG and the parent company, Deckers, to have a unified focus on their brand’s “north star” and their primary consumer targets.

“The Prophet work was a rallying cry for the entire organization to galvanize around our primary consumer target. We’re all speaking the same language now and that was almost indescribable in terms of how far we’ve come in a very short period of time.”

Carole Diarra
Vice President of Marketing

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CASE STUDY

ASUS

Defining a compelling ESG story to lead a sustainable future

Challenge

ASUS is a leading technology manufacturer that has set an ambitious sustainability goal to achieve 100% renewable energy in global operations centers by 2035. With a focus on creating positive impacts on the environment and society, ASUS has championed data-driven and scientific management methodologies to optimize sustainability practices.

Having invested heavily into its ESG initiatives over the past few years, ASUS saw an opportunity to better communicate its ESG strategy and success to the market. Prophet partnered with ASUS to create a compelling ESG narrative to demonstrate the tech leader’s strong commitment to sustainability and a better future.

Solutions

We started by understanding ASUS’s ESG vision and current strategy through in-depth interviews with executives and stakeholders across multiple business units. Our key focus was to better understand ASUS’s underlying strategic motivations and unique competitive edges in ESG. We also conducted audits on how ASUS and other leading technology brands communicate their ESG efforts and identified key trends and best practices to inform future communication strategy.

Based on internal and external perspectives, we developed three potential creative territories to articulate ASUS’s ESG narrative and crystalized a unique and future-ready ESG narrative that’s deeply rooted in the company’s DNA. The new ESG slogan – “Sustaining an Incredible Future” – underscores ASUS’s commitment to creating shared value for everyone, with reference to its brand essence “In Search of Incredible”. A variety of activation ideas were co-created to guide ASUS’s key divisions in developing future initiatives to underpin its ESG strategy.

To bring our narrative to life, we transformed the new ESG principles into a comprehensive visual system and flexible key visual. Our core visual pattern concept starts from a single pixel that symbolizes ASUS’s singular focus on technology advancement, and evolved into a grid system that signifies the accumulation of experience to create an incredible future for all stakeholders. A living brand flexible enough to anticipate and solve any environmental needs, representing ASUS’s focused areas for ESG. The color palette comprised of ASUS blue and a fresh teal, balancing contemporary and sophistication. Additionally, we created a comprehensive icon library, including recommendations on how the iconic visual patterns can live and expand with ASUS.

Results

In January 2023, ASUS hosted an inspiring launch event with its new ESG value proposition , “Sustaining an incredible future,” at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), sharing with the world its commitment to a sustainable future. The ESG narrative creates a strong and compelling purpose for the tech leader to connect its organization, products and employees.

Prophet continues to explore new initiatives and activation ideas with ASUS to bring its ESG ambition to life.

Client Testimonial

“It was a pleasure to partner with Prophet on the journey driving sustainability at ASUS. Prophet’s experts understood deeply the core of ASUS’s DNA and ESG strategy and developed a sophisticated ESG narrative through storytelling and visual expressions. The updated ESG strategy was launched at the CES as the keynote of ASUS’s exhibition with wide attention and acclaims.”

Eunice Chou
Global Commercial Marketing Head, System Group, ASUS

Let’s eat together: building a global brand strategy for everyday giving

A brand refresh to help AEG challenge the expected

Building an iconic leader in the Korean beer category

CASE STUDY

The North Face

Defining a unique proposition for the iconic brand’s loyalty program in Greater China

Challenge

Since its inception in 1968, The North Face has become an iconic global outdoor sports and lifestyle brand. For years, the brand successfully operated a loyalty program called XPLR Pass, but the team determined that the program needed to be revamped in the Greater China market to create deeper engagement with its broad Chinese consumer base. The North Face hoped to expand on the types of benefits provided by XPLR Pass beyond monetary rewards, ensuring representation of the organization’s brand DNA while elevating consumer perceptions, building greater engagement and further differentiating itself from competitors.

The North Face partnered with Prophet to craft a unique positioning for its loyalty program while ideating new benefits to bring it to life.

Solutions

We started by immersing ourselves in the current state of the brand, conducting stakeholder interviews and reviewing past strategy efforts. In addition, we ran an immersive competitor audit to understand best practices around loyalty programs and interviewed industry experts to identify opportunities for differentiation.

Through our research, our team identified key insights that allowed us to develop a unique positioning for XPLR Pass. We anchored the program on The North Face’s authentic history, providing trusted guidance to fuel exploration, which helped to reinforce the brand’s DNA while clearly articulating its distinctive values in Greater China. We then facilitated discussions and co-creative workshops across The North Face’s teams to clearly define XPLR Pass’s strategic objectives, design targets and customer journey roadmap. This helped us align on the key priorities of the revamped program, which was brought to life through four strategic pillars: outdoor empowerment, expert guidance, community and exclusivity. These pillars were then used to guide the ideation of the benefits provided by the program.

A key ethos of our approach was to work collaboratively to ensure cross-functional buy-in of the new strategy. Our team leveraged innovative digital tools to facilitate interactive virtual sessions to drive alignment on the refreshed positioning. Once the strategy was set, we helped codify all elements of the updated program into a playbook, that could be used to inform all stakeholders about the program’s strategic components.

Next, we developed an engagement strategy for next-gen high-potential brand lovers, to cultivate future growth potential. We defined identifying metrics, preference metrics and engagement tactics for the next-gen consumers. Also, we examined the existing engagement strategy of the brand and provided recommendations on how to build solid customer profiles that combine membership and transactional data with broader engagement data. Lastly, with our digital experience expertise, we recommended best practices for consumer tagging through advanced social media tactics, such as WeChat CRM, to help The North Face team drive ongoing engagement.

Social media assets created by the North Face

Results

Our strategic work with The North Face set the foundations for the success of the revamped XPLR Pass program, serving as a key pillar of future growth for the brand in the Greater China market. The North Face team used the playbook to drive socialization across business functions and begin implementation of the new strategy.

The strategy was then translated by the North Face team into customer-facing messaging. The revamped loyalty program was announced to Greater China consumers on WeChat in August 2022. The WeChat mini program was also designed to capture customer engagement data to help set the foundations for rich, actionable customer profiles to drive future personalization.

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