Design

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

Addiko Bank

Regaining brand reputation & customer trust

Challenge

How do you revitalize a bank that’s had serious reputation issues? Following the fallout from the financial crisis and being nationalized by the state, Austria’s Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank (Hypo Bank) was dealing with serious legacy issues. By the time Advent International, a private equity investor, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) acquired it in 2015, consumers’ consideration of Hypo was very low.

Solutions

The new owners knew it needed a brand-new bank, and in January of 2016, Prophet was enlisted to help rebuild it from the ground up. In a matter of weeks, we worked with bank executives to rename it Addiko. A clear signal of change, the new brand name gave the bank a blank slate and a second chance with consumers.

Our research uncovered a crucial customer insight that people in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia felt confused by overly complex banking products. We realized that while most banks pile on more products and paperwork, customers actually want less. They want a simpler, hassle-free way of banking. This led to Addiko’s new brand promise: Straightforward banking that focuses on essentials. That meant becoming more efficient, with shorter queues, and more digital and mobile options. And it called for communicating simply, eliminating jargon, shortening contracts and avoiding asterisks. A clever graphic character, cleanly drawn, walked consumers through the changes, as did a complete advertising campaign.

We also helped Addiko coach employees to “acknowledge and tackle” the challenges they faced. This approach to straightforward banking, which stands for a proactive, optimistic and down-to-earth way of doing business, has become the bank’s mantra.

Results

Since its launch Addiko has seen a robust turnaround, posting positive net results and a listing on the Vienna Stock Exchange, confirming the demand for a specialist player that challenges the traditional universal banks with a simpler and focused model.

Serving its clients with convenience and speed, not only is Addiko now a strong and profitable retail and SME bank, it’s an award-winning one too after scooping six Transform Europe Awards, acknowledging the brand’s transformational journey. The Financial Brand also named it among the most beautiful brand identities in banking.

Addiko’s CEO said, “Strategy is about making choices. It’s about deliberately choosing to be different and we decided to be straightforward. But the Addiko brand does not only represent a name change. It is our new business strategy, our unique positioning, our desire to introduce and implement new, higher business standards, and a new corporate culture. But first and foremost, it is our commitment to improving and changing the way we feel banking should be done. The Addiko brand and this transformation is the starting point for building a better bank. A straightforward bank.”

With brand recognition levels far surpassing that of its predecessor, as well as higher levels of employee retention and customer loyalty than its main competitors, Addiko is on a successful path toward continued growth, with a commitment to improving and changing the way banking should be done.

“The diversity of the Prophet team ensured a very vibrant creative environment, generating genuinely very different alternative creative routes, rather than variations on a single idea.”

Razvan Munteanu
CEO at Addiko Bank

Impact

48.6%

brand awareness in the market 3 months after launch

10.94%

customer consideration after 3 months in market

5x

increase in GAP compared to market average

CASE STUDY

Alight Solutions

Bringing to life a new company’s brand purpose and positioning

Challenge

Aon Plc, a leading global professional services firm, providing a range of risk, reinsurance and human resource solutions, decided in early 2017 to sell its benefits administration and HR BPO platforms. The new company had to determine how to define itself in a relevant, fresh and genuine way, in an ever-changing, tech-savvy and increasingly B2C world.

This task required balance: leveraging the incredible experience of the company and its people, while taking a fresh look at health, wealth, HR and finance solutions; harnessing the power of technology and data, while appreciating that they ultimately exist to take care of people and their families. The leadership team needed to preserve the things that made the new company special while pushing toward a new frontier. The new company needed to define its point-of-view and quickly align around the vision. With three and a half months to do what would typically take a year, it was a race against time, and Prophet and the leadership team needed to be in lockstep in every phase of work and decisive at every juncture.

The challenge was clear – how to articulate and bring to life the new company’s purpose and brand positioning with a new brand name and visual identity that reflected its spirit and intention.

Solutions

Prophet conducted a variety of research studies to inspire the development of the new company and brand. We interviewed stakeholders and customers, and looked at close competitors and emerging startups both inside and outside the category. The research pointed to one important insight – the new company wanted to not only provide security to people, but to leverage its technology platform, data and ecosystem of partners to make it easier for people and their families to thrive in work and life.

Prophet partnered closely with the new company’s marketing group to guide the executive leadership team in defining its brand purpose, values, positioning, new brand name, visual identity and brand voice.

Results

Within three and a half months, the new company defined its reason for being and aligned on how it would express itself. On June 6, 2017, Alight Solutions was introduced to the world. Reflected in its bold visual identity, Alight promises to simplify and enhance work and life by “reimagining how people and organizations thrive.”

By relentlessly focusing on the end-user, leveraging its strong heritage and expertise and creating inspired new ways of working, Alight is charting a course for business growth.

“The work we’ve done together here resonates because we didn’t let the truncated timeframe excuse us from the fundamental steps in the process. We committed to validating across all stakeholder groups: colleagues, customer-care representatives, leaders and clients. The enthusiasm and energy reflects the care we’ve taken to define this bold, new day for Alight.”

Maggie Lower
EVP, Marketing at Alight Solutions

Impact

275k

users of alight.com

18k

followers on social properties

1k

inquiries stemming from website since brand launch

CASE STUDY

Salt

A new name and brand for Orange Switzerland

Challenge

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

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

Solutions

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

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

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

Results

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

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

CASE STUDY

The Cosmopolitan

Launching a new brand in a commoditized market

Challenge

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

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

Solutions

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

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

Results

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

CASE STUDY

Novant Health

Transforming the patient experience

Challenge

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

Solutions

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

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

Results

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

CASE STUDY

Club Marriott

Enhancing the guest experience for Chinese travelers

Challenge

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

Solutions

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

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

Results

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

CASE STUDY

Turkish Airlines

Launching a delightfully different experience

Challenge

Turkish Airlines had doubled its yearly passenger load, revenue skyrocketed from $2.33bn to $11.4bn, and the carrier had been crowned Europe’s best airline 3 years in a row. In an industry plagued by bankruptcy, consolidation and government bailouts, Turkish Airlines wanted to build on this momentum and compete with airlines having larger destination networks, newer planes and higher recognition.

Solutions

We started by learning about the ambition and business strategy of Turkish Airlines, which was to draw more international transfer passengers into Istanbul and better compete with other transfer hubs in the region. In parallel, we started to build a picture of how the aviation industry might evolve in the future. Through that research, we learned that cities were an important piece of the strategy, as increased urbanization is leading to more air travel.

We realized that Turkish Airlines had the opportunity to highlight its urban credentials, in particular Istanbul, a city with a rich heritage and a modern, vibrant and entrepreneurial community. Istanbul is a place of contrasts, and compared to the cities of competitor airlines from Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha this was a huge differentiator.

Results

We created a unique customer experience and brand identity for Turkish Airlines around the idea of being “Delightfully Different” involving every part of the customer journey before, during and after the flight. We created moments that surprise and delight; whether it’s serving traditional Turkish coffee and tea at 35,000 feet with Flying Chefs or making the arrival lounge at Ataturk Airport as special and relaxing as the flying experience. Our ambition was to create memorable occasions that reminded passengers why Turkish is different.

We developed briefs using the new positioning for a new visual identity and corporate design, advertising, PR and digital campaigns, along with sponsorship opportunities for the brand. The rollout of the new concepts began with a new advertising campaign featuring Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi (already viewed over 140 million times on YouTube) and the launch of the new in-flight catering concepts.

Turkish Airlines continues to soar. Since the launch, passenger numbers increased 24%, revenue 28% and operating profit 12%. In the often-turbulent business of airlines, that’s some Delightfully Different news we can all toast to.

Impact

24%

more passengers

28%

increase in revenue

12%

increase in operating profit

CASE STUDY

Gourmet Burger Kitchen

Creating a new visual and verbal identity

Challenge

Founded in 2001, Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) helped move the burger from grease to gourmet indulgence in the UK. But, after a period of rapid growth as customers’ expectations changed and the market began bustling with new competitors, GBK was beginning to lose its personality and direction. Already tackling some of the issues head on, the senior team brought us on board to help define a clear purpose that could drive real change across a large, multi-lingual service organization.

Solutions

Through a series of workshops, we helped GBK rediscover what brought them together, what mattered most to them and what would help them stand out in the market – their burger obsession. This key insight led to five core beliefs and a brand strategy that would be applied across every aspect of the company’s operations from menu creation, retail environment design and hiring practices.

Results

The result is a brand platform that the GBK leadership has personally invested in and has been passionate about advocating across the company. We created a new visual and verbal identity to reinforce the idea of this gang of obsessives coming together to spread burger joy. With inspiration from existing clubs — from Hell’s Angels to the Boy Scouts — the new identity never takes itself too seriously but venerates the gourmet burgers at the heart of everything they do.

CASE STUDY

Emart Traders

A Winning Retail Format in Just 100 Days

Challenge

Ranking 10th among the world’s largest economic powers and fourth in Asia, South Korea’s retail market may be fast-growing, but so is the influx of competitors.

Emart, the country’s largest retailer and Korea’s first hypermarket, wanted to ensure it could maintain its competitive advantage and provide customers with novel new ways to shop. Besides sharpening the value proposition of its hypermarket flagship, Emart knew it needed to explore new retail concepts to achieve transformative growth.

Solutions

Prophet worked with Emart to explore alternate retail formats that would resonate with consumers’ unique and evolving behaviors. One of the three new businesses our team developed was a warehouse shopping concept to compete with the likes of Costco and Sam’s Club launching in the region. The biggest challenge? Emart wanted to launch the warehouse format in just 100 days.

Prophet was tasked to develop the customer strategy, brand positioning and design the store concept. With just over three months to take the initial idea from the Chairman’s whiteboard sketch to the doors opening, Prophet’s agile team moved fast.  We worked closely with Emart in weekly sprints to create the name, Emart Traders, and develop a differentiated brand identity. We then partnered with Emart’s implementation teams to build out the first store.

To stand out against the competition, Traders’ customer experience needed to make consumers feel like smart shoppers. It had to offer the emotional thrill that comes from getting a good deal on top-quality items. And it had to be fun.

Traders launched with a significant competitive difference – unlike Costco or Sam’s Club, it has no membership fees. The store features a warehouse aesthetic, including pallets, industrial fixtures and wood finishes suggestive of packing crates. The merchandising strategy is founded on a distinct shopping experience of discovering unbeatable offers. With right-out-of-the-box freshness in every aisle, Traders offers a tailored product mix seeing value-priced and high-quality store brands housed side-by-side.

Results

The first Traders store opened with great success, generating $100 million in sales in its first year. It has subsequently grown to include 20 locations, creating a $1 billion brand in five years. With gross sales up 26.4% year on year, Traders has become a continuous growth engine for Emart, helping it outpace other retail formats in the market and contributing nearly a fifth of total revenue for the group.

Impact

100m

USD Sales generated in the first year

20x

Stores opened since launch

1b

Dollar-brand created in five years

CASE STUDY

Keurig Green Mountain

Energizing an iconic brand portfolio

Challenge

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR), a small Vermont coffee company, acquired Keurig, a manufacturer of single-serve coffee brewers. A few years later, GMCR realized that in order to unlock growth, they needed a strategy that would successfully bring the two businesses together. The company engaged Prophet to support the large-scale transformation required to manage and accelerate business growth.

Solutions

We began our journey by setting the strategic foundation — designing a best practice marketing organization and clarifying the brand architecture required to drive growth. Once the internal structure was established, Prophet re-energized the flagship product brands, Keurig and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, with a strategy grounded in their heritage but positioned for their future. We set out to transform Keurig into a brewing system that could stand for much more than just coffee and aspired to expand Green Mountain from its New England roots to a globally recognized brand.

By spending time with Keurig advocates, we uncovered how valuable the product has been for reinventing consumers’ ordinary routines. Building off of the characteristics of simplicity, consistency, convenience and personalization, we developed a positioning centered on how Keurig makes it easy to make the things that make your day. We designed a new brand identity inspired by the ease of the push of a button and the choice of pods offered by the Keurig system.

Green Mountain Coffee, with its strong roots in Vermont, has a rich history in fair trade, social responsibility and carefully selected and roasted coffee. The new branding, inspired by its birthplace, honors its legacy but with a more contemporary look and feel. The new symbol embodies the company’s roots featuring the region’s signature geography and the core of its business — the coffee bean.

We helped Keurig Green Mountain come to life through two unique visual systems, united by a new corporate identity and logo that combines elements of their two main brands.

Results

Keurig Green Mountain has launched its new branding and is leveraging this new identity to expand its offerings into new products, and take Green Mountain Coffee into a new line of Organics.

“Prophet has been critical in the growth of our marketing capabilities, especially in a part of our business where we were trying to go from one brand to another very quickly. The company is filled with great strategists who happen to operate in a marketing realm. But the thinking transcends marketing and has a much greater impact.”

TJ Whalen
Former Chief Strategy Officer at Keurig Green Mountain

CASE STUDY

Electrolux

Refreshing a global icon and modernizing the brand

Challenge

Electrolux is on a journey to become a world-class consumer marketing company – but the brand’s visual identity felt out of date and undifferentiated. Electrolux worked with Prophet to create a visual platform that modernizes the brand and stands out in the market.

Solutions

Equipped with a deep understanding of Electrolux’s consumers, resulting from a long-standing partnership, Prophet worked with Electrolux’s team to build a brand identity that would appeal to consumers on an emotional level. A key insight led to the idea; consumers want to see the benefit of a product not just the features – a beautifully poached egg, a pile of soft, fluffy towels or a perfectly crisp white shirt.

Each aspect of the identity was modernized. The logo was stripped of superfluous shapes and the tagline, maximizing its visibility and impact. The font was updated to a custom, modern sans serif, echoing the shapes in their iconic brand symbol. The symbol was given a new lease on life, creating stopping power wherever it is encountered. The letters in the logo were extended into a custom brand typeface, creating a look that is distinctive in appearance on anything from billboards to product stickers. Their core color blue was darkened to have a more premium and modern appeal supported by a palette of bold, vivid colors that will stand out in busy retail environments.

Results

The new visual identity has been embraced by all corners of the organization and will change the way customers interact with Electrolux – in-store, online, on packaging and through mobile devices.

Read more about Electrolux’s redesign in Design Week, Creative Blog and Little Black Book. In the period after activation, Electrolux saw sales in North America grow by 2.2%, and margins increase by 3.9%.

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