Technology/Telecom

CASE STUDY

PagerDuty

Positioning the brand for its next stage of growth

Challenge

Since its founding in 2009, PagerDuty had grown from an on-call management tool for developers to a company-wide platform for real-time operations indispensable to teams in DevOps, IT Ops, Security, and Business and Industrial Ops. The company’s user-centric product innovation, 300+ platform integrations and product leadership in on-call management and incident response had earned it a loyal community of core customers. But as it began to approach the capital markets to help fund its next stage of growth, PagerDuty needed to clarify its corporate positioning in order to establish relevance with enterprise buyers, new technology partners and the analyst community to help “future-proof” the brand as the company innovated in event intelligence, visibility and analytics.

Solutions

Prophet developed a range of hypotheses for PagerDuty’s corporate positioning by considering inputs ranging from traditional sources (competitive audits, product deep dives, category expertise) to sources unique to PagerDuty’s culture and ethos (customer celebrations at its annual Summit). The CEO and leadership team were incredibly engaged in the process because they truly believed that the positioning needed to be anchored not just in the value PagerDuty delivers to customers, but also in the shared interest that the company and its customers have to improving the everyday experiences and lives of people on its platform. Prophet worked with the PagerDuty team to craft a positioning recommendation anchored in both customer insight and company values, and to define a category – Digital Operations Management – that PagerDuty could own, shape and win as it achieved its growth over the coming years.

Results

The corporate positioning was activated in Q2 2019 as a key input to PagerDuty’s S-1 filings and analyst communications prior to its April 2019 IPO. The positioning and has acted as a clear, concise and compelling frame of reference in conversations with new Enterprise buyers and with new teams at existing customer accounts. It has helped favorably expand buyers’ perceptions and understanding of PagerDuty’s core, emerging and planned customer-centric innovations.

CASE STUDY

Poly

Creating the “We’re a go” digital campaign

Challenge

When the words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” were uttered, they were heard by millions of Americans through Plantronics audio.  To celebrate its part in Apollo 11’s spaceflight on the 50th Anniversary of this momentous event, Poly asked Prophet to create a campaign that would connect their past to the present, and the Poly and Plantronics brands together.

Solution

Working as an integrated team, Prophet crafted three campaign concepts before selecting one to build into a multi-channel campaign. Executions included a microsite, paid and organic social media posts including video, display advertising and materials for a gala event and launch at the NYSE.

Results

The campaign far exceeded the goals established by Poly – with more than double the number of social engagements and over five times the number of views on the microsite. Together we built a powerful, engaging campaign that shared Poly’s unique story and relentless relevance 50 years later.

In Nov. 2019, the Prophet team won two North America Transform Awards for their work with Poly.

  • SILVER award for ‘Best corporate rebrand following a merger or acquisition’
  • BRONZE award for ‘Best visual identity from the technology, media and telecommunications sector’

Five Wins at the North America Transform Awards

CASE STUDY

COLMO

Designing a simply extraordinary brand of smart home appliances

Challenge

Midea Group approached Prophet to create a new premium home appliance brand for an upcoming range of smart, connected kitchen products. Planned as a standalone brand, the opportunity was open to create a new name, strategy, story and visual look and feel.

Solutions

Prophet defined the essence of the brand as ‘Simply Extraordinary,’ a big idea that captured the philosophy of highly crafted products that are effortlessly simple in delivering an extraordinary user experience.

With this idea in mind, Prophet created the name ‘COLMO’, derived from the Italian for ‘summit’ or ‘crown’ to highlight the ambitions and quality of the brand and to add some international, European flavor.

The visual identity is also born from this idea, with an abstract crown symbol and elegant matching wordmark. Color is used sparingly to create a modern, sophisticated look with contemporary iconography and typography to support product descriptions and features.

Results

COLMO was unveiled in October 2018 on Mont Blanc and launched its first range of beautifully designed, award-winning products in December. It was launched at AWE 2019 (Appliance and Electronics World Expo) in Shanghai, showcasing a full new range of 13 Kitchen appliances.

Our work with COLMO won four awards at Transform Awards Asia-Pacific 2019, including Gold for ‘best visual identity’, Silver for ‘best strategic or creative development of a new brand’, Bronze for ‘best naming strategy’, and a Highly Commended award for ‘best creative strategy’.

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

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

T Mobile

Addressing telecom customer frustrations

Challenge

T-Mobile wanted to clearly differentiate itself from its wireless competitors and from tried and tired industry practices. Company executives were contemplating a radical new approach to address customer frustration and challenge industry norms.

Solution

T-Mobile tapped Prophet’s deep expertise in brand strategy and analytics to supplement its own efforts aimed at addressing customer frustration with the unnecessary cost and complexity of the wireless industry. Prophet helped T-Mobile conduct extensive market research that identified ways in which the brand could inspire, influence and compel consumers to act.

Prophet’s research and counsel helped T-Mobile confirm a core tenet of its “Un-carrier strategy” – there was a distinct opportunity for a wireless carrier who didn’t act like one. Research showed consumers were generally fed up with what they saw as wireless carrier apathy toward their needs. The resulting T-Mobile brand strategy differentiated the company from its competitors by emphasizing simplicity, fairness and value. Prophet also helped T-Mobile carry its Un-carrier efforts forward through an activation plan that included customer experience design and a development and measurement system to track progress and inform performance targets.

Results

Since the Un-carrier launch in March, T-Mobile has steadily brought this strategy to life at every brand touchpoint. The comprehensive brand program extends from positioning, messaging and communications to customer experience and employee engagement.

The company has gained 1.1 million customers in the quarter following the announcement of its new Un-carrier strategy, the largest customer growth in four years, and Fast Company named T-Mobile as one of 2014’s Most Innovative Companies.

Impact

1

fastest-growing wireless company in the U.S.

17

quarters of customer and revenue growth

5B

dollars in annualized revenue growth

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

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