Experience

CASE STUDY

Suning International

Creating an immersive social commerce experience

Challenge

Best known for their mass-market electronics stores, Suning’s brand was limited in terms of its perception and stretch. They saw an opportunity with their Suning International group to create a new innovative brand that would not only be attractive for their new customer but also help to elevate perceptions of the group itself as being more pioneering and innovative.

The company approached Prophet to define a clear brand philosophy and retail experience concept for Suning International’s O2O offering. The concept would be launched as a pop-up exhibit for Salon del Mobile Milano Exhibition in Shanghai, debuting the upcoming store concept.

Solutions

Prophet worked closely with Suning International to help develop an innovative experience and optimize its brand strategy towards the global market. We created a philosophy around a global community of curators, who believe that life should be culturally enriching, openly inspiring and actively shared. The exhibition design brought this idea to life as ‘Issue:01 – Found goods from Italy’, a lenticular hallway of inspirational products, curated video and multi-sensorial experiences, which documented a day in the life of two global citizens and their daily experiences in Italy.

“We’re responding to a new generation of consumers who love to discover and experience new things and share their finds with others. With the rise in global travel and access to more products and experiences than ever before from around the world, we want to create a brand and platform that empowers this global community of curators. We are bringing together select items of substance, from around the world, that will bring small moments of joy to everyday life,” said Young Kim, partner and executive creative director at Prophet.

Results

Within the exhibit, visitors could collect and share their own personal online journal of products and stories through a WeChat mini program that showcased the seamless O2O journey that Suning International offers.

The Suning International concept debuted in November 2018 in Shanghai, generating significant media interest and visited by over 22,000.

Our work with Suning International was awarded bronze for ‘best brand experience’ at Transform Awards Asia-Pacific 2019.

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

FORA

From co-working to pro-working

Challenge

London is leading the global market in the co-working sector. With over 1,000 spaces, the competition is intense. After investing close to £400 million to acquire a number of striking buildings across central London, Brockton Capital, the investor behind Camden Lock, Curzon Street and Realpubs, was ready to bring something new and unique to the market. They engaged Prophet to identify a gap in the co-working space that Brockton could uniquely fill and to achieve new growth opportunities within an already crowded market.

Solutions

Prophet moved beyond the hipster, t-shirt and jean crowds of WeWork to a new professional or ‘pro-working’ space that goes beyond just supplying a desk. The spaces offer a more curated, members’ club approach to cater to a different kind of co-working clientele. The solution reimagined the brand experience and redefined what the term co-working could mean with premium hotel-style hospitality, destination restaurant, lobby bar, yoga studios and tech-enabled boardrooms.

“We started by speaking to the people that matter most – those potential customers who would be using the space – to begin the journey of developing the relevant value proposition and customer experience to address their needs,” said Gregg Finlay, Associate Partner and Creative Director at Prophet. “Extensive research and insights led us to the simple truth that became the core and driving force behind the brand: space to be brilliant.’’

From these insights came the inspiration for the name we developed: FORA. A Latin word and plural of ‘forum’- where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.

Results

From developing the name to defining the brand identity and superior value proposition, the FORA brand clearly differentiates itself from its competitors by standing out as a working space for high-achieving professionals across industries. It has become the fastest growing player in the co-working space, expanding its locations in London and beyond as customers champion the premium experience.

CASE STUDY

Electrolux TasteOS

Creating digital product and service design for a best-in-class experience

Challenge

As a longstanding partner to Electrolux in their digital transformation efforts, Prophet introduced Electrolux to Innit, a San Francisco-based data food startup, as part of an annual event with Electrolux’s Digital Transformation leadership team. At the event, Electrolux was impressed with Innit’s scalable, software-based connected cooking platform. They decided to pursue a partnership to combine the data-driven world of taste and food (Innit) with physical moments of delight created by best-in-class appliances (Electrolux) that deliver an incredible cooking experience.

Prophet was brought on board as Electrolux’s ‘sparring partner,’ representing the interests of Electrolux and the target consumers’ needs in the design of the connected cooking service experience.

Solutions

Over the course of seven weeks, we did the following:

  • Identified consumer needs and innovation opportunities
  • Brainstormed use cases
  • Developed and prioritized concepts into one MVP experience
  • Defined features and requirements
  • Built storyboards and wireframes
  • Developed a business case and partnership strategy to support implementation.

First, we immersed in the core consumer insights, using existing insights and collaborative workshops to identify unmet needs and pain points across the cooking journey. From there, we turned to competitive analysis, surveying established and new players in the market and identifying where consumer needs overlapped with white space to prioritize innovation opportunities.

Armed with insights on consumer pain points and market opportunities, we brainstormed a series of specific use cases detailing the actions, interactions, and steps consumers want or need to take as part of the connected cooking experience. Armed with these use cases, we identified overlap and ways they might come together into distinct value propositions, bringing to light the offering from both Innit and Electrolux. This resulted in three core concepts, each with its own set of features and front-end requirement considerations.

We then developed sketches, wireframes, and full storyboards that detailed each concept. Two consumer co-creation sessions helped validate and refine our initial thinking around unmet needs and potential solutions in the cooking space.

Once we developed and validated experience concepts, we gathered with all parties for a week-long workshop to finalize the technical requirements of the ideal state experience design. As part of that workshop, we collaborated with the technical teams from both Innit and Electrolux to align on the product roadmap, functional and operational requirements, and necessary delivery capabilities, for the MVP experience. We then identified revenue streams, quantified top-line impact, and provided guidance on key elements of the partnership agreement (e.g. branding, data ownership, etc.) to bring the experience to life.

Results

The joint experience was officially announced in April 2018 at Eurocucina and will be available to consumers starting in Q1 of 2019.

CASE STUDY

Sun Life

Developing a brand story that resonates in Hong Kong

Challenge

Sun Life engaged Prophet to reposition its brand and develop a new marketing campaign that would help cut through the clutter and inspire customers to engage with Sun Life versus competitors. Sun Life couldn’t compete in terms of spending and scale, so they needed to develop a brand story that would resonate and a campaign that would stand out.

Solutions

Prophet realized that what the industry was communicating was at odds with what consumers really wanted. Insurance providers spoke about fear and the need to hedge against life’s inherent risks, whilst people hoped for bright futures for themselves and their loved ones. Prophet identified an opportunity to frame insurance as an enabler of dreams rather than a guardian against inescapable peril.

Prophet created Sun Life’s brand positioning leveraging one key insight: consumers in Hong Kong want to dream bigger and live brighter lives—and they want their financial services provider to help. To bring the positioning to life, we translated “Dare to Dream. Live a Brighter Life” into the creative concept of the #BE campaign – “Be everything you want to.” The #BE campaign expressed Sun Life’s promise, that they are here to encourage and challenge people not just to dream, but to turn their dreams into a reality. The campaign was executed across channels including television, print and at various out-of-home touchpoints including street billboards and the MTR.

Results

The new brand positioning and the #Be Campaign drove a lot of impact, increasing brand awareness among target customers and energizing the Sun Life employee and agent base to rally around a refined and inspiring brand story. It gave Sun Life the ability to target the right customers, better articulate the value of their products and deliver a consistent, engaging brand experience for agents and customers alike.

Our work with Sun Life won GOLD for ‘Best creative strategy’ at 2018 Transform Awards APAC.

CASE STUDY

Hikma

Building a brand as big as its business

Challenge

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

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

Solutions

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

Brooke Clarke
VP Corporate Affairs at Hikma

CASE STUDY

Formula E

Reframing a racing championship for an electrifying future

Challenge

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

Solutions

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

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

Results

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

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

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

CASE STUDY

Funimation

Helping reinvent & remarket a next-generation entertainment studio

Challenge

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

Solutions

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

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

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

Results

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

CASE STUDY

Thyssenkrupp Elevator

Strengthening a global brand in the Asia Pacific region.

Challenge

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

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

Solution

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

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

Results

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

CASE STUDY

Indiana University Health

Creating a new hospital system brand

Challenge

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

Solutions

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

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

Results

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

CASE STUDY

Schneider Electric

Driving demand for a global energy management company

Challenge

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

Solutions

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

Results

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

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.

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