Experience

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.

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

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.

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