Innovation

CASE STUDY

T Mobile

Addressing telecom customer frustrations

Challenge

T-Mobile wanted to clearly differentiate itself from its wireless competitors and from tried and tired industry practices. Company executives were contemplating a radical new approach to address customer frustration and challenge industry norms.

Solution

T-Mobile tapped Prophet’s deep expertise in brand strategy and analytics to supplement its own efforts aimed at addressing customer frustration with the unnecessary cost and complexity of the wireless industry. Prophet helped T-Mobile conduct extensive market research that identified ways in which the brand could inspire, influence and compel consumers to act.

Prophet’s research and counsel helped T-Mobile confirm a core tenet of its “Un-carrier strategy” – there was a distinct opportunity for a wireless carrier who didn’t act like one. Research showed consumers were generally fed up with what they saw as wireless carrier apathy toward their needs. The resulting T-Mobile brand strategy differentiated the company from its competitors by emphasizing simplicity, fairness and value. Prophet also helped T-Mobile carry its Un-carrier efforts forward through an activation plan that included customer experience design and a development and measurement system to track progress and inform performance targets.

Results

Since the Un-carrier launch in March, T-Mobile has steadily brought this strategy to life at every brand touchpoint. The comprehensive brand program extends from positioning, messaging and communications to customer experience and employee engagement.

The company has gained 1.1 million customers in the quarter following the announcement of its new Un-carrier strategy, the largest customer growth in four years, and Fast Company named T-Mobile as one of 2014’s Most Innovative Companies.

Impact

1

fastest-growing wireless company in the U.S.

17

quarters of customer and revenue growth

5B

dollars in annualized revenue growth

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

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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