PODCAST
On the Healthcare Rap podcast, Jeff Gourdji, co-author of the new book Making the Healthcare Shift, breaks down the 5 necessary shifts for becoming consumer-centric, and how marketing and technology are involved. All that, plus an inside look at launching his book and a shout-out to little moments that make a big difference.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
PODCAST
These days, there are countless ways for consumers to conduct research on a brand. But before social, review sites, and other online directories, a company’s About Us page was really the only digital space that provided insight into its mission and identity.
Mat Zucker, Partner at Prophet, analyzed the About Us pages of some of the world’s top companies and was surprised to find how many fail to deliver real value with the stories they tell there.
In this interview with Zucker, he shares some vital takeaways from his analysis of successful About Us pages. You’ll learn steps for clarifying your brand’s voice and communicating that identity to your audience in the most intentional way possible, using one of the most essential (and undervalued) components of your online presence.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
PODCAST
7 min
Jeff Gourdji, co-Author of the book “Making the Healthcare Shift, The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity” speaks on the This Week in Health IT podcast discuss the five shifts that healthcare organizations need to make to adapt to this movement sweeping across healthcare.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
REPORT
Get new insights into demand generation, driving digital commerce and optimizing customer experience.
Digital marketing has come a long way from simply putting banner ads on the internet. It has evolved from mass messaging to personalized messaging, and finally to integrated communications in blended physical and digital environments.
In addition to the traditional goals of creating awareness about the brand, marketers can now choose from a new range of goals, ranging from demand generation, driving digital commerce, and optimizing the customer experience of products and services.
In order to deliver on these new goals, marketers need a next-gen digital marketing strategy, one that goes beyond the scope of what marketers could traditionally achieve and harnesses the power and complexity of today’s marketing technology and data platforms.
This report defines the key characteristics of a next-gen strategy, and identifies 6 drivers of its successful implementation to help you evaluate your team’s readiness for the next phase of its digital evolution.
In this report, you will learn:
Download the report below.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
Thank you for your interest in Altimeter’s research!
BLOG
It’s time to listen closely to customers, build better models and look beyond your industry for comparisons.
As customer experience (CX) becomes a central battleground for financial services companies, a number of new questions have been hounding experience leaders, product owners, marketers and operations heads:
We have worked with clients across a broad spectrum of measurement sophistication. On the one end, some have spent millions on sophisticated measurement software, only to then struggle with translating their firehose of data into actionable insights. And on the other end, some still rely on a mix of CSV files and manually-generated reports across disparate systems – and struggle with finding meaning across the disjointed, hard-to-compare data.
“In our work, we have sought to make measurement more actionable by defining a unified CX measurement framework.”
We have found that there are five key tenets that can help companies measure CX in ways that provide clarity, improve decision-making, and ultimately drive business impact.
Leaders at large organizations will know all too well that it’s tempting to only measure interactions and transactions that sit within their domain. Yet, this common mindset produces an incomplete view of what truly matters to customers across their entire journey.
For a large financial institution in North America, we discerned what was meaningful to measure by starting with a customer-led view of what truly mattered to them across their end-to-end experience journey. We used qualitative techniques such as in-depth interviews and ethnographies to reveal pivotal moments across the experience. We then used quantitative research to sharpen our understanding of customer behavior at key moments and clarify how these influenced specific business outcomes.
Most large organizations have multiple CX measurement frameworks, techniques, KPIs, and reporting mechanisms. While each of these might serve the purpose of distinct management levels and functions, they also create multiple and different versions of ‘what truly matters.’ This makes it particularly difficult for cross-functional teams to translate insights into action.
In our work, we have sought to make measurement more actionable by defining a unified CX measurement framework. Such a framework can typically span different management levels and functions while also identifying relationships across key measures that allow a more cohesive view.
With such a framework in place, senior executives, managers and front-line operators can all form a shared narrative about the firm’s CX performance, issues and opportunities. Executives can use high-level KPIs to measure the overall company CX priorities. Managers can use more detailed KPIs to define actionable milestones in service of the overall priority and allocate investments. Front-line operators can leverage a highly detailed subset of metrics to mobilize plans, establish service-level targets and track progress.
The process of developing a unified CX measurement framework requires a sharp eye toward identifying the right measures that accurately describe customer impact and eventually business impact. Getting this part right often falls on ensuring we consider a broad range of data (ideally, data related to operational measures, customer sentiment/perception, customer behavioral response, and business outcome) as well as robust econometric models and analytics that connect CX measurement explicitly to financial value.
For example, in developing a model that derived relationships across different CX metrics for a large U.S. financial services firm, our data and analytics team made sure to:
Our analytics team was also able to parse out what leading indicators managers should frequently look at (such as engagement, digital activity) and how these eventually predicted lagging indicators (such as customer acquisition, retention, advocacy) and ultimately financial performance. Most importantly perhaps, the model was translated into a what-if simulator that allowed our client to assess the likely financial impact from a variety of potential CX improvements.
Competitive benchmarks are useful when trying to understand the areas of the experience to invest in. However, we believe it’s a mistake these days to compare your CX to just your competitors alone. Your customers are certainly going well beyond and comparing it with leaders across multiple categories – and this is especially true in sectors where satisfaction is systemically low.
For example, for a large global insurance provider, our research revealed that their CX scores within a key market in Asia were higher than most of their competitors – especially in parts of the journey that mattered most. However, a closer look also revealed that industry-wide scores in this market were significantly lower than other comparable markets, reflecting a more systemic, sector-wide level of customer dissatisfaction.
Despite temptations of proclaiming that they were providing a “leading experience,” managers at this insurer quickly agreed that they had no appetite for being “the best of the worst.” Instead, they recognized this as a clear opportunity to leap-frog their competitors and newer disruptors by doubling down on their relative strength in CX.
The most sophisticated of measurement strategies can end up failing if they are not accompanied by a governance model to deploy, maintain and ultimately act upon insights that evolve or transform the CX.
In our experience, a successful governance model typically solves for three key questions:
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Ultimately, we believe that in the battle for winning on experience, firms that are able to combine a cogent experience measurement strategy with a robust governance model have a significant leg up. Such firms can see their end-to-end experience through the eyes of their customers. They can spot customer needs and opportunities in areas that matter most.
They can empower the right teams and executives with this insight quickly so they can act in real-time. And when they act, they can use customer insight to go beyond fixing what’s broken and deliver experiences that surprise and delight customers – and may even self-disrupt their model with more transformative innovation.
Learn more about how Prophet can help with customer experience to increase impact on your business.
REPORT
Most transformation efforts continue to focus on modernizing customer touchpoints and enabling infrastructure.
Now in its fifth year, our annual “State of Digital Transformation” research continues to document the constantly evolving enterprise. As disruptive technologies and their impact on organizations and markets continue to progress, our research aims to capture the shifts and trends that are shaping modern digital transformation.
In 2019, strategic digital transformation is only becoming more pervasive moving beyond IT to impact competitiveness throughout the organization. Budgets are soaring. The list of disruptive technologies on the radar of stakeholders is expanding. Ownership is moving to the C-Suite and managed by cross-functional, collaborative groups. Customer experience (CX) continues to lead digital transformation investments, but as we observed in 2017, employee experience and organizational culture are also rising in importance to empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.
This year, it’s clear that digital transformation is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement. Digital transformation is modernizing how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy.
What’s also evident is that there is still much work to do as companies are, by and large, prioritizing technology over grasping the disruptive trends that are influencing markets and, more specifically, customer and employee behaviors and expectations.
Download the full report below.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
Thank you for your interest in Altimeter’s research!
BLOG
Voice, naming and nomenclature all factor into making choices with the most potential.
In today’s digital, always-on world, words are an increasingly powerful currency for brands to create real-time value and demonstrate relevance.
But finding the right words—and using them effectively—requires rigor and structure. Deploying a thoughtful verbal branding strategy (sometimes called a verbal identity) can help bridge your brand strategy to in-market execution through content, communications and experiences.
From finding the right voice, to building equity in key messages, to creating a methodical approach to portfolio naming, a clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications. Which, when done right, have the power to influence opinion, shift perceptions and ultimately help drive business growth.
Simply put, names are one of the quickest ways for brands to tell their stories. A great name provides a glimpse into what a brand stands for and gives audiences a preview of the experience to come. And while good names can come from anywhere, the best ones are just as strategic as they are creative. Taking an art and science approach to naming ensures names not only signal a compelling story but also connect back to their strategy.
Before ideating names, it’s important to get strategically grounded by thinking through questions like:
And because naming is inherently an emotional, subjective process, it’s key to align on these questions at the outset with all relevant stakeholders and decision-makers and bring them along for what will surely be an iterative process.
But while most organizations aren’t naming or re-naming their company or hero product every day, almost all organizations are tasked with managing product, service or feature naming.
This is particularly true in today’s world of mergers, acquisitions and rapid innovation, where portfolios across categories have become complex and inconsistent, ultimately creating a confusing customer experience.
Nomenclature, also known as Naming Systems or Naming Architecture, allows brands to create order and hierarchy across their portfolios to provide internal clarity around offerings and how they work together as a whole. This creates a more simplified way for customers to better navigate a brand’s breadth of offerings, ultimately driving choice.
At Prophet, we take a considered, strategic approach to nomenclature that ensures existing portfolio names are optimized and streamlined, while also providing clear systems and constructs for creating new names. This creates efficiencies in naming and managing names internally while providing a system for growing and evolving portfolio names in the future.
Just like people, brands also have unique personalities, styles and quirks that define their behaviors and relationships. Brand voice is the art of conveying that personality through how its people write and speak.
By using a distinct voice consistently across touchpoints, brands are able to make connections, strengthen relationships and build loyalty and affinity over time. Brand voice can also help you stand out and grab attention in a crowded or commoditized category. But creating a voice isn’t just a creative exercise—it’s also a strategic one. To be truly successful, your voice should be rooted in your brand strategy and organizational DNA, optimized for your industry, and reflective of your customers’ needs and attitudes.
“A clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications.”
But while your voice is a hardworking asset, simplicity and utility are key to successful execution. We recommend avoiding “attribute soup” and boiling your voice down to just 2-3 core components. If you were tasked with writing, say, a piece that must be Trusted, Friendly, Insightful, Bold, and Engaging—would you know where to start? Instead, try to identify the main hallmarks of your voice, and distill them into a persona and 2-3 directive principles that give your writers a clearer understanding of what “right” sounds like.
Now, onto messaging. First things first, messaging themes aren’t copy—they guide copy. As high-level communications points, they can be dialed up and down across communications and adapted for different audiences—ensuring a flexible, cohesive expression, rather than a static, repetitive one.
Because messaging should help convey your strategy, your positioning or value proposition should be your starting point for developing your messages. If you don’t have that in place, you can still derive messages by thinking about the intersection between what your brand wants to say, and what your audience wants to hear—leaving room for how you’ll grow and evolve in the near future.
By prioritizing those ideas down to a focused set, you can bolster them with proof points, keywords or phrases that help writers and marketers bring them to life.
It can be easy to see how voice and messaging come to life in high-impact touchpoints like advertising or your website, but it’s equally, if not more important, to use these tools in more functional touchpoints, like customer service call center scripts and chatbots, so that on-strategy voice and messaging becomes an integral part of the entire customer experience.
Finally, don’t forget employee touchpoints. A compelling approach to voice and messaging can go a long way towards shaping internal communications and experiences that keep employees feeling engaged, informed, and inspired to live the brand more fully.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Defining your verbal branding strategy is a critical step in creating your brand expression. Once these assets are defined, make sure to bring them to life through steps like training and global adaptation. Because when done right and put in the hands of your marketers, your verbal branding strategy is a critical asset, connecting the dots between your strategy and expression, and shaping how your audiences perceive, engage with, and choose your brand going forward.
Learn more about using verbal branding to express your brand and business strategy.
VIDEO
Relevance matters more, and differentiation counts for less. Here’s what’s behind the shift.
2 min
Bernhard Schaar, an associate partner at Prophet, talks about how to create a relentlessly relevant brand. He lists the four key dimensions that make up brand relevance: pragmatism, innovation, inspiration and customer obsession, as well as offers advice to companies to increase their brands’ relevance.
One important thing to note, according to Schaar, is that digital is an opportunity that can be utilized along all four of these key dimensions. From social media to artificial intelligence, Prophet can help to support these areas of growth in brand relevance.
Learn more about the importance of brand relevance for business growth.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
VIDEO
That means focusing on agile and dynamic design systems, and modern representations of brands.
2 min
Clive Rohald, Executive Director and Partner at Prophet, shares what we mean by the term ‘living brand’ and why creative teams today need to move towards more agile, responsive systems. When it comes to design, it isn’t just about a specific color palette, or how the logo looks – it’s more about the interaction and how a brand fulfills a need or gap in your life.
Becoming a living brand is no longer an opportunity, but an obligation in order for brands to stay relevant to consumers. That being said, this strategic shift must not only be made but also maintained in order to remain a relevant brand year after year.
Learn more about how you can start to make this shift in your brand strategy.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
VIDEO
See the continuous animated drawings we made for UBS, capturing its entire history in a single-line.
10 min
Try telling the 156-year story of the world’s largest wealth management firm in a simple yet engaging way, it sure isn’t easy. Prophet built this dynamic and digital portrait gallery for UBS, which now takes centre stage at its newly renovated HQ in Zurich.
A continuous single-line of animated drawings, it captures their pioneering leadership, progression and iconic moments in an elegant and arresting way.
Learn about our other work with UBS: https://prophet.com/case-studies/ubs/.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
VIDEO
Drugs and devices are important. But holistic solutions bring brand, digital and patient experience in, too.
3 min
The healthcare industry is continually changing, which makes succeeding hard, so how can your organisation or brands win? Fred Geyer, a Senior Partner at Prophet, shares the importance of bringing digital innovation, patient experience, and brand together in order to create better solutions and cost efficiencies. The relevance of the device or treatment is important, but it’s now about incorporating it effectively into the larger system and creating an experience, that will set winning brands apart.
Learn more about how you can succeed in the healthcare industry, by creating a winning brand.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
VIDEO
From distinctive inspiration to relentless pragmatism, our relevance research offers healthcare insights.
2 min
Healthcare organisations are struggling to keep their finger on the relevance pulse. Results from the Prophet Brand Relevance Index® show that the NHS and other healthcare providers are lacking in the innovation stakes and are falling behind when it comes to aspects of the patient experience. Fred Geyer, Senior Partner at Prophet, offers advice on where these organisations should be focusing their efforts in order to drive relevance and unlock business growth.
Learn more about how to develop brand relevance as a healthcare organization by consistently improving upon patient experience.
Sign up to receive our latest insights.
Sign up and receive our latest thinking, insights and strategies to help your business grow better.
Your network connection is offline.
