Design

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%.

CASE STUDY

Bank of East Asia

Creating a bold statement in retail banking

Challenge

Bank of East Asia (BEA) is the largest independent local bank in Hong Kong with a large retail branch network. In light of new competition, BEA hoped to extend its reach to customers and enhance its retail visibility. Prophet worked with BEA to create a coherent and impactful brand communication system to help the bank stand out across all channels.

Solutions

The new look is based on a band of five colored “light rays” symbolizing the five core values of the bank. It is designed to project a forward-looking image, making a bolder statement on a street level. As part of the branding campaign, a new tagline “Enriching your world” and four secondary messages have been developed.

Together, they communicate BEA’s commitment to helping customers improve their lives and achieve their goals through the provision of quality banking and financial services. BEA launched its new image through a high-profile advertising campaign including print, bus advertisements, outdoor billboards in the Central, TST, Hong Kong MTR Station, TST Piers and online advertisements.

Prophet ensured consistent delivery throughout the process, from concept to execution, as a long-term partner dedicated to elevating the brand to the next level.

Results

The end result is a dynamic visual and verbal communication approach that brings the brand to life, and significantly differentiates BEA from its competitors in retail environment, enhances the brand visibility and favorability.

Overall, the customers feel very positive about the change, more than 80% of customers reckon that the new look has enhanced the BEA brand image, and the majority of current customers are willing to recommend BEA to others.

Interested in learning more about how Prophet helps companies develop unique brand strategies, create engaging customer experiences and drive business growth? Explore our collection of case studies.

CASE STUDY

MET-Rx

Creating an aspirational brand in a functional category

Challenge

30 years ago, MET-Rx invented protein powder. But, as competitors caught up, MET-Rx didn’t continue as innovators of the category. Over time, the brand lost its relevance and limited its growth by focusing on the culture of professional body-building. So, Met-Rx partnered with Prophet to revitalize its messaging strategy in order to take back the category it created and regain relevance in mainstream culture.

Solutions

We designed a research strategy to better understand the MET-Rx customer—who they are, what matters to them and what they’re looking for. We engaged them in intimate co-creation focus groups and mobile shop-alongs to get ideas for how MET-Rx could begin to speak to them. Then, leveraging the strengths of our business in strategy, marketing and design, Prophet developed various brand messaging platforms and tested them in qualitative sessions with consumers and stakeholders alike. The rich feedback, suggestions and insight we gleaned from the testing sessions gave us specific direction so we could create the final brand idea.

Results

Since launching its new messaging strategy, Met-Rx has revitalized its brand by comprehensively rolling out the Prophet-created “You Can’t Fake Strong” brand idea. This new direction includes a new website, logo refresh, brand line, brand story, updated product packaging and partnerships.

Prophet was also engaged to help create a name and key messaging for their latest product innovation which reinforces the brand idea. With their new direction, Met-Rx has developed a clear path forward for both innovation and communications. With the strategic partnership of Tough Mudder, MET-Rx is living the “You Can’t Fake Strong” brand and quickly regaining relevance with mainstream athletes.

CASE STUDY

Optum

Uniting employees around a new brand strategy

Challenge

UnitedHealth Group offered a portfolio of business services unmatched in breadth and depth in the healthcare industry. However, its businesses had traditionally acted independently of one another and employees were focused on their business units, limiting the group’s ability to engage clients more comprehensively. To address this, Prophet aided in the creation of a unifying brand that translated the new vision into a new to the world business and brand.

Solutions

Prophet brought together three distinct businesses under a new logo, visual system and employee engagement strategy to guide the customer experience and communicate what the new company could deliver to the market. To deliver on this new promise, the company needed to make sure that the employees understood the new brand strategy and could begin delivering on this promise and experience. A strategic launch process brought the new brand to life and captured the hearts of necessary stakeholders in order to establish the brand from the inside out.

Results

The new brand, known as Optum, organized 500+ products, solutions and services under a single brand with the promise to make the health system work better for everyone. With Prophet’s help, UnitedHealth Group launched a dynamic $30-billion dollar brand in less than 6 months.

CASE STUDY

Friesland Campina

Doubling revenues for a beverage company across international markets

Challenge

Royal Friesland Campina was looking to profitably double revenues from its dairy-based beverage division by 2020 and become the world’s leading naturally healthy beverage company. The company faced tough competition due to increasing commoditization across the industry and needed an effective brand-led strategy to break through the category and command higher margins.

Solutions

We conducted a comprehensive market assessment across seven Southeast Asian, MENA and African markets, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Dubai/UAE, Nigeria, and developed a segmentation based on consumer needs, product consumption habits, and brand perceptions. Based on executive interviews and beverage category consumption data, Prophet provided strategic recommendations to realign RFC’s brand portfolio and rationalized it to focus on fewer, stronger, core brands.

In addition, based on consumer need states research and beverage consumption data, Prophet identified several growth opportunities for RFC’s Dairy Based Beverages business. Twenty opportunities were distilled down to eleven highly attractive ones. These prioritized innovation platforms were brought to life by defining the opportunity’s points of consumption.

Results

The client accepted and applauded both the portfolio and dairy-based beverages growth strategy recommendations. Prophet was selected to lead a global multi-city road show to gain internal stakeholder buy-in for the implementation of both recommended strategies.

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