Digital

CASE STUDY

Global Investment Advisory Firm

Developing a revamped direct marketing strategy to drive sales and ROI

Challenge

The client, a major investment advisory firm, had a history of successfully executing aggressive direct marketing tactics. In fact, nearly all of its customers were acquired through direct advertising.

While the company was experiencing steady growth, it had an ambitious goal of doubling its assets under management within just a few years. To achieve this, the organization needed help attracting new client profiles and successfully moving prospects through the marketing funnel.

Solutions

Through qualitative and quantitative consumer research of prospects in four countries, our team of financial services experts partnered with the investment advisory company to gain a deep understanding of the existing prospect journey and identify the conversion gaps on the way to becoming a paying customer.

By taking a digital approach, we uncovered that our client could:

  • Better reach prospects with varying degrees of familiarity with the company
  • Add interventions at key decision points of hiring a financial advisor
  • Develop engaging direct marketing content

To bring the strategy to life, Prophet helped the client create an activation roadmap to illustrate how to convert prospects by focusing on both short-term ‘Quick Wins’ and longer-term initiatives. The roadmap is supported by a ‘test and learn’ pilot plan outlining specific processes, KPIs and resources needed to measure impact.

Results

Our project had a few key impacts on our client’s business. First, we transformed their view of the prospect journey. We helped the team of leaders see that the route from prospect to the client is dynamic, but it can be directed at key inflection points. Second, we demonstrated that a broader range of prospects could be converted into clients through our new view of the prospect journey and our market research analysis. As a result, our client changed their view of who qualifies as a ‘qualified prospect.’ Finally, our actionable activation roadmap accelerated the client’s direct marketing efforts and propelled it toward achieving its ambitious growth goal.

As a result of our project, our client observed a direct lift in sales and better ROI on direct marketing spending.

CASE STUDY

Sheraton Hotels & Resorts

Creating a customer experience that brings families together

Challenge

To win over leisure travelers in Asia, Sheraton wanted to offer an enriched experience specifically built for families. To do so, they developed Side by Side, a uniquely branded program, with dedicated activities & experiences that celebrate the gathering of families.

Solutions

The Prophet team supported Sheraton with the development of the Side by Side proposition and brand, including the development of the activity programming, a Chinese name for the program and visual assets – all of which assembled into a proof of concept (POC) toolkit to bring the program to life.

We conducted a co-creation workshop with Hotel GMs to develop a set of signature activities that multi-generational families could enjoy together. We then developed a distinct visual system, in keeping with the Sheraton brand, along with a detailed activity calendar and activation assets to guide the program piloting in four initial resorts.

Staying true to Sheraton’s positioning “The World’s Gathering Place,” we designed a visual identity system for the Side by Side program to convey the message of “togetherness” in a warm, fun, and modern way. The wordmark is paired with the symbol of holding hands, illustrating a universal gesture of gathering in an abstract form. While staying consistent with Sheraton’s master brand look and feel, Prophet’s creative team infused playful and fun elements into the Side by Side family program through a collection of simple line icons and graphic elements.

Results

The Side by Side program will be rolling out to all Sheraton properties Asia-wide after a successful proof-of-concept launch in 2020.

CASE STUDY

Multinational Manufacturer

Modernizing customer engagement through digital selling

Challenge

Our client, a large global manufacturer, sells a wide range of materials used in consumer products, medical devices and more. As a top-200 private U.S. business, this company had achieved a great deal of success by driving product innovation founded on scientific excellence.

Although the company’s seasoned team of field sales representatives had historically driven solid performance results, the global health crisis (COVID-19) severely impacted its access to key buyers.

The business was in urgent need of a new approach to selling and hired Prophet to modernize its digital experience and the engagement capabilities of its salesforce.

Solution

As Prophet’s team of Marketing & Sales consultants dug into the issues facing this organization, they uncovered that by taking a digital-minded approach, our client could:

  • Better reach its core target audiences
  • Develop content that was more engaging to its customers
  • Leverage engagement data to inform offline sales interactions
  • More efficiently orchestrate the sales process

To get started, our team focused on how sales and marketing could partner to improve its digital selling capability through digitally-powered content, stronger messaging effectiveness and the use of data and platforms to improve the sales experience.

Prophet delivered a compelling business case for change and proved the value of evolving its digital selling capacity against a defined set of use cases with pre-post-defined outcomes. The business case was supported by a new operating model which detailed the requirements for developing, maintaining and optimizing the proposed new digital selling capabilities. Our consultants partnered with the client’s marketing, sales and customer experience teams to roll out the new digital selling capability, including new digital tools for frontline sales teams.

Results

Our work for this client extended beyond strategy to provide a detailed, sustainable operating model to deploy and sustain its digital selling transformation. We helped to accelerate this client’s vision, maximize its investment and ease the implementation of its new digital selling capabilities.

Following this project, this manufacturer observed a direct lift in sales, improved customer satisfaction and increased sales associate productivity.

CASE STUDY

U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT): OOSA

Creating a brand that pushes for progress on and off the field

Challenge

For decades, the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) has been leading the charge for equality, both on and off the soccer field. They’ve elevated the level of the women’s game on the global stage and fought for causes like gender equality, parity to the US men’s team in terms of pay, coaching and medical treatment, frequency of games, field quality, and even how they train and travel to matches.

Knowing that their performance at the highly anticipated 2019 FIFA World Cup tournament meant more than demonstrating athletic prowess, the USWNT needed a brand to bolster their equal pay and equality agenda on the global stage.

Solution

As part of our Prophet Impact initiative (formerly P4NP – Prophet for Nonprofit), a team of strategists, designers, copywriters and developers from Prophet partnered with USWNT players to create a new brand and digital experience that captured the essence of the team—both as world-class athletes and as passionate activists. All the spirit, hard work and positive energy were channeled into a new brand: OOSA.

The name OOSA is a nod to the team’s 20-year-long tradition of players chanting “OOSA, OOSA, OOSA-AHHHH,” as a rallying cry before they take the pitch. The OOSA brand capitalizes on the collective value of the players while providing an avenue for supporters to get involved in their efforts to push for meaningful progress. The brand provides something tangible to rally behind, while also helping to defray the cost each player incurs to lead the cause for change.

Results

The new OOSA website and brand video launched just before the 2019 Women’s World Cup, where the team became four-time FIFA World Cup Champions with their win over the Netherlands. Twenty-two percent more U.S. viewers tuned into the final match than the 2018 men’s final, with a total of 263.62 million unique viewers globally.

In Nov. 2019, the Prophet team won two SILVER awards for “Best strategic and creative development of a new brand” and “Best use of audio branding” at the North America Transform Awards. And in 2022, the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team won equal pay, eliminating a long-time pay gap.

Learn more about how we build brands and transform society through Prophet Impact.

CASE STUDY

AXA

Meet Emma, the future of humanized insurance experience

Challenge

AXA is one of the world’s leading insurance companies offering diverse financial services globally. To successfully grow its business in Asia, the client recognized the need to create a more consistent and human brand throughout the region.

On the back of a new global vision – from Payer to Partner – AXA partnered with Prophet to develop an Asia-specific solution that would deliver on their ambition to:

  1. create a more consistent customer journey and brand experience across the region
  2. develop a new customer engagement proposition that also humanize the experience through a new digital platform
  3. develop digital touchpoints to drive greater engagement with existing and potential customers.

Solutions

Through deep consumer research and segmentation, Prophet partnered with AXA to create a regional well-being strategy, develop a new customer experience, and run UX & UI sprints to design a new digital product.

We began by conducting a multi-country regional segmentation, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative research across five key markets in Asia (China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Thailand and Japan). Over 4,000 customers were surveyed to better understand what they wanted from an insurance company when it came to their health, well-being and mental health. This research created the foundation for the development of a value proposition that defined the future of digital customer experience (DCX) at AXA.

To bring the strategy to life, we set out to reimagine the customer experience, taking a fresh look at how to create a new insurance platform that combined insurance e-servicing, 3rd party health and wellness digital services and a new conversational chatbot and virtual concierge. Importantly, at the core of this new experience was an empathetic and human approach on well-being topics for customers, elevating the AXA brand on an experience level never attempted at the organization.

From this strategic foundation, Emma was born — AXA’s first humanized user interface, which became the core of the brand’s new digital customer experience. This seamless experience – from claims to servicing, health content, symptom checker, and more – was embodied in a single Emma ecosystem for current AXA customers as well as prospects.

With Payer to Partner at the core of its proposition, Emma’s persona was designed to be an Empathetic Navigator, helping individuals find the solutions and content most relevant to their well-being needs. Prophet further “personified” Emma, crafting a real-life avatar, her tone of voice, and the visual expression across a full identity system.

A key highlight of the process was a two-day Hackathon to create “Emma”. Over 70 global leaders and stakeholders across diverse disciplines gathered together to “hack” the Emma experience. It was the first time in AXA’s history and probably the largest cross geographic collaboration of its kind.

Results

Emma was piloted then launched in Hong Kong in Q4 of 2019.

Emma is bridging the gap between digital engagement and financial advisor partners. As of 1H of 2020, Emma’s launch in Hong Kong drew more than 2 million logins, exceeding expectations. Emma is now being rolled out across the rest of Asia.

The digital brand experience we created for AXA won the gold award for “Best Use of Digital in the Financial Services Sector” at the 2021 Digital Impact Awards Asia, as well as two awards at the 2020 Transform Awards Asia, including a gold award for “Best Brand Experience” and a silver award for “Best Visual Identity” from the financial services sector.

CASE STUDY

MMRF

Developing a direct-to-patient engagement model

Challenge

The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) is the largest non-profit in the world dedicated to finding a cure for multiple myeloma, cancer of the blood. To advance its mission, MMRF needed to collect more patient data to identify the right treatment options for each patient. This meant the business would need to build a new, direct-to-patient model, requiring a deeper understanding of their patients to create the right value in exchange for data.

Solution

We partnered with MMRF to launch the MMRF “CureCloud” – an at-home testing kit and digital dashboard displaying personalized treatment options for myeloma patients. We also developed an end-to-end patient experience strategy based on primary research, to identify the right moments to introduce the program, and build a relationship with them over time as patients undergo their journey from diagnosis to remission.

Customer research uncovered that the most important benefits to patients in a partner like MMRF is personalized communication and recommendations in exchange for their data, followed by the prospect of helping the entire multiple myeloma community drive toward a cure. These insights helped us build an engaging CureCloud experience and MVP and product roadmap for the future. As part of this, we refreshed the MMRF website, a primary entry point for patients to learn about their disease and become aware of the MMRF brand before becoming a CureCloud participant.

Going hand-in-hand with a patient-centric experience, the MMRF also needed a brand refresh. We developed a modern look-and-feel, bolder tone of voice and creative marketing platform – ‘Expect More’ – to signal to the market that MMRF has once again elevated expectations of the myeloma community, bringing the innovation necessary to find a cure.

Results

The MMRF CureCloud MVP launched July 14. The revamped website is live and has generated 29,789 unique users in the first month, a 22% improvement in bounce rate and a 6%  increase in SERP. It also won Web Marketing Association’s 2021 WebAward for outstanding achievement in web development. Through our partnership, MMRF has learned how to work in agile to create value through a direct-to-patient, experience-led model.

CASE STUDY

Emart

Driving retail growth through customer data strategy

Challenge

Over the past decade, Emart, the leading general merchandise retailer in South Korea, has been on an aggressive format expansion drive to address competitive and regulatory pressures on its core hypermarket business. As they have expanded into new formats and increased their licensed businesses, they have assembled a diverse portfolio of affiliate companies that fit into consumers’ lives in many ways.

With an over 90 percent penetration rate among South Korean shoppers, Emart was looking to improve current customer relationships and spend across all its affiliate businesses to fuel its next wave of growth. Emart needed to gain a deeper understanding of its customers’ needs and preferences, strengthening its ability to deploy a micro-targeted marketing approach. Emart engaged Prophet to define a comprehensive customer data strategy, as well as the roadmap for transforming their businesses to be more data-driven.

Solutions

Prophet defined a customer data strategy with a detailed roadmap of initiatives to help Emart drive impact across the business.

The Prophet team helped Emart uncover revelatory data that helped define new experiences along the customer journey. Then, Prophet identified the capabilities and organization structure needed to manage, analyze and act on these new data insights. Based on our detailed mapping of Emart’s current state and our knowledge of best practices in leading global organizations, we were able to design a future state model for Emart, as well as the roadmap to build the required capabilities and organizational model.

To demonstrate the value of data and justify future investments, we took a large sample of Emart’s existing transactional and CRM data to identify clear behavioral profiles that could be targeted in pilot marketing experiments. We were able to prove that targeted marketing could have an impact on two levels – increasing spending on the targeted category (e.g. increasing spending on health & beauty), as well as increasing total basket size (e.g. how much they spent on their weekly shop overall).

Results

For a duration of 6 months, Prophet supported the Emart team in conducting a series of test and learn marketing experimentations based on customer data insights with continuous proven success in driving business impact. Since then, Emart has established a dedicated team to run targeted marketing at scale as the full organization at Emart is committed to investing in becoming a data-driven company.

Impact

20%

Increase in sales by non-category

15%

increase in sales by targeting in declining categories

10%

increase in sales in key categories

CASE STUDY

MB Bank

Creating and launching a new brand to tell MB’s transformation story

Challenge

In 2018, MB Bank (Military Commercial Joint Stock Bank), one of the largest financial groups in Vietnam, initiated a multi-year transformation program in partnership with Prophet, to become a digital-first, customer-centric bank with an ambitious goal of aggressively growing its customer base.

After in-depth customer research, MB learned that it was seen as dated and uninspiring. The bank needed a more modern and fresh brand to attract new customers.

The bank’s hallmark 25th anniversary in November of 2019 presented the perfect opportunity to launch the new brand, reflecting the bank’s transformation to become more modern, digital and customer-centric.

Solutions

In line with their ambition, we developed a new brand platform that captured the essence of MB’s transformation to be a modern bank that enriches the future of people and businesses. The new brand is anchored in the promise that customers will get access to banking that is innovative, trustworthy and as convenient as possible. We also created a tagline to sum up the essence of the new brand: Intelligent Banking. Enriching Your Future.

In parallel, Prophet also created a new logo and designed a comprehensive visual system with key assets to bring the new brand to life.

We then worked with MB and local partners to plan and launch the new brand in the market. We designed a suite of internal assets to educate and generate excitement among employees, including an internal website, posters, videos and photobooths. We also supervised the creation of an external advertising campaign, including a brand video and OOH assets to be displayed throughout Vietnam through strategic media planning.

Results

Following an internal rollout to inspire and educate employees, the MB Bank rebrand was then officially launched to the public on the day of MB’s 25th anniversary, marking the next chapter of their growth on their journey towards transformation.

MB Bank was awarded ‘Most Improved Bank of the Year’ for its refreshed brand platform along with two other awards at The Asian Banker Vietnam Awards 2020.

Our work with MB Bank was awarded gold at the 2020 Transform Awards Asia for “Best Brand Development Project to Reflect a Change of Mission/Values/Positioning”.

“We are delighted to have a trusted strategic partner in Prophet and they have played a crucial role in our very important transformation journey as we evolve towards becoming a digital-first bank.”

Mr. Thai
CEO, MB Bank

Impact

48.8%

increase in revenue in 2021

23.4%

increase in ROE in 2021

8.3m

newly acquired customers in 2021 and 2022

CASE STUDY

Poly

Creating the “We’re a go” digital campaign

Challenge

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

Solution

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

Results

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

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

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

Five Wins at the North America Transform Awards

CASE STUDY

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

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

Regal

Evolving an entertainment icon

Challenge

Regal Cinemas, one of the leading movie theater chains in the U.S., turned to Prophet to change its brand identity to reflect its evolving theater experience. With an ever-expanding media landscape and entertainment channels to choose from, the Regal brand needed to communicate that their theaters were ‘The Best Place to Watch a Movie’.

Solutions

Prophet created the new Regal brand to have a connection back to the Regal crown of the past but viewed from a new perspective. The seven sides of the symbol tie back to the aperture of a movie camera and can easily live around the dynamic imagery associated with movies and entertainment. With a sleek wordmark and dramatic visual elements, the system was designed to unify messaging with visual design, allowing the brand to reflect the passion and energy of the movies and legion of movie fans.

With Regal Cinema’s preeminence in the marketplace, the brand name was also truncated to only Regal, to maximize impact and brand memorability.

Results

Prophet helped envision how the brand could be activated across touchpoints from the theater façade to concessions and the digital experience. The brand program was launched in December of 2018 and will be executed in all-new theater renovations throughout 2019.

In Nov. 2019, the Prophet team won a GOLD award for ‘Best visual identity from the travel, leisure and tourism sector at the North America Transform Awards.

Five Wins at the North America Transform Awards

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