See the continuous animated drawings we made for UBS, capturing its entire history in a single-line.
10 min
Summary
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.
Drugs and devices are important. But holistic solutions bring brand, digital and patient experience in, too.
3 min
How Can You Set Your Healthcare Business Up for Success?
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.
The Importance of Brand Relevance for Healthcare Organisations
From distinctive inspiration to relentless pragmatism, our relevance research offers healthcare insights.
2 min
Why is Brand Relevance Important to Healthcare Organisations?
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.
How to Help Your Business Counter Market Disruption
As disruptors have grown into dominators, they continue to flex muscles that come from customer obsession.
3 min
How Can You Help Your Business Counter Market Disruption?
From disruption to domination. Spotify, Netflix and Fitbit all feature in the top 10 of our latest UK Brand Relevance Index. What’s interesting is that each one of them is a start-up and each one has disrupted an entire industry, but it’s one thing to be a disruptive business start-up, and another to turn that disruption into an established global business. In the meantime, those large traditional players that used to be the leaders 50, 100, even 20 years ago, are fast losing their relevance. Tosson El Noshokaty, Partner & EMEA Regional Lead at Prophet, shares his thoughts on how traditional players can keep up, and the long-term strategies needed in order to successfully compete and remain relevant to consumers.
He’s been called “The Father of Modern Branding.” If you’ve ever read anything about branding or brand strategy, my guest today requires no introduction. I’m talking to David Aaker, author of over a dozen books and hundreds of articles about marketing and branding, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and Vice-Chair at Prophet, a global marketing and branding consultancy.
Given this season is about positioning and brand platforms, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask David directly about his brand vision model, which most people refer to simply as “the Aaker Model.” We also talked about two of his most recent books, some of his favorite brands, a few books, and his advice for junior people in the branding industry.
A Content Strategy Framework for the Evolved Enterprise
Super-detailed content programming and a sincere commitment to test-and-learn thinking result in higher impact.
Figuring out how to do enterprise content well is no small undertaking. Often, there’s a lot of experimentation and one-off initiatives that don’t reach their intended audiences and are not conclusively worth the effort and investment.
In 2016, Altimeter analyst Omar Akhtar and digital partner Mat Zucker published the report, “Key Elements of a Unified Content Strategy.” The research aimed to help companies jump-start their content strategy development. Findings recommend prioritizing audiences and selecting one of five content archetypes that can serve them best.
5 Simple Steps to an Effective Content Strategy
Since then, we’ve built on the methodologies based on various needs of clients across industries. We’ve developed a framework and 5 simple steps to help companies tackle the hairiest content challenges and create a modern, effective content strategy.
1. Get Your Brand On
Content is a powerful way to activate a brand strategy. It can help build awareness, engage audiences, and highlight how various brand levers are being received. We recommend anchoring on the brand’s purpose, promise and principles to connect diverse content needs back to the business. Your company story or mission could act as a proxy.
Establishing 3-5 key messaging themes is important to your strategic communications. A messaging strategy ensures teams are collectively covering key messages and clarifies ownership of messaging areas. They help marketers understand which of their messages resonate with audiences. Messaging themes may be tailored for execution, may change by year, but are foundational for content.
2. Commit to Business Value
A vision for content—what you need content to do inside and outside the company—helps build cohesion enterprise-wide. One of my favorites is Marriott’s “tell a story” which sparks excitement and passion to make Marriott the world’s favorite travel company. It anchors content on the brand’s mission to lead within the travel category while celebrating its audiences. For some clients, we also build content principles that create guardrails for how best to execute this vision.
“Content is a powerful way to activate a brand strategy.”
3. Tailor to Your Audience
We usually tackle 3-5 audiences at a time, building discrete content personas; identifying what each audience needs and wants as well as where and how they engage with content. For example, a corporate audience like job seekers would have very different needs from a line of business’s consumer audience. Picking a priority archetype like “Content as a Window” for job seekers, or “Content as Support” for consumers, helps teams make choices around what content to create, and keeps audience needs top of mind.
4. Get Organized
Content planning is a detail-oriented and coordinated effort. Often, various departments oversee paid, owned and earned activities, or manage disparate channels (e.g. web, social media, intranet, etc.). When teams align their efforts into shared content programs, their content is more likely to be encountered by their desired audiences and deliver value.
A content program is essentially a broad theme that meets a specific user-based need. They logically connect back to global messaging themes. A meaty program can inspire dozens of topics and experiences across paid, unpaid and earned; executing two or three programs at once can help meet multiple objectives.
Programs help guide holistic content experiences that drive the next best action. They tend to be more efficient to produce and can be linked to business impact versus a series of one-off content pieces which are less meaningful in the long run.
In early 2018, TurboTax launched “There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of”—an integrated marketing campaign focused on Latino empowerment. TurboTax wanted to reach Hispanic audiences and help them learn more about filing their own taxes. Besides running paid ads, the effort was supported by numerous content efforts. For example, they collaborated with influential Hispanic lifestyle bloggers and experts to create authentic educational content. They also erected a Hispanic community forum on their website and prepared relevant responses to topics that came up within the community. They developed the “#taxconfessions” sweepstakes encouraging the creation of user-generated YouTube content. And, of course, much of the content was in Spanish.
As with the TurboTax example, a holistic program is comprised of several components. Topics are specific content assets that cover various aspects of a program. They could be campaign-based (e.g., time-sensitive) or evergreen. The formats that are selected will often align with the content archetype that is chosen. If your audience needs “Content as Window”, you may choose case studies or video. “Content as Support” may include more selection guidance and post-purchase onboarding materials.
5. Ready, Test, Go
Coming out of content planning, teams are armed with fleshed-out programs and a set of prioritized activities that usually fall into one of two buckets:
Good test and learn opportunities (i.e., what can we execute and measure today)
According to a recent Content Marketing Institute report, about 90% of B2B marketers in North America were committed to content marketing, yet only 37% had documented it.
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Sources:
*Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing, 2018 Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends – North America.
It’s time for all marketers to create cohesion across the enterprise and take an audience-led approach to content marketing. If your content efforts have not been paying off, it’s probably time to get hyper-focused on a few key audiences that are critical to your success and begin understanding how you can use content to deliver value to them—in a highly focused and coordinated way—throughout their journey.
Learn how Prophet is strategically helping evolved enterprises across the globe create better content strategies that provide value to their audiences, align their organization and produce measurable outcomes for growth.
Gain insight into what goes into a content strategy and how it can take your business to the next level.
As the industry sits on the edge of disruption, healthcare organizations need to transform to stay relevant.
Healthcare organizations now have both the motive and means to empower, engage, equip and enable consumers. While healthcare organizations have recognized the need to change, they have struggled to get started and sustain the effort. Based on conversations with leading healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Geisinger, Anthem, Aetna, Pfizer, Novartis and more, the book identifies five required shifts organizations can make to better compete in this evolving landscape.
Through case studies and practical examples, Making the Healthcare Shift provides healthcare leaders across the healthcare ecosystem with a playbook to make their organizations more consumer-centric.
“Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play or wherever books are sold.
Highlights
Identifies the five shifts healthcare companies need to make to become more consumer-centric.
Offers case studies and practical advice on how to make these five shifts become a reality.
Reveals how traditional healthcare organizations (payers, providers, pharma companies) can prepare for the changes to come and re-invent how they engage with consumers.
Provides practical advice for healthcare leaders across the globe who have the fortitude to transform their organizations to both compete and win in the age of healthcare consumerism.
Endorsements
Andrew Dreyfus Chief Executive Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
“The time has come to put the consumer at the center of everything. Scott and Jeff offer a guide to that important change. It’s grounded in consumer relationships that are built on partnership and collaboration”
Kevin Kumler President of Health Systems, Zocdoc
“Our partners are getting more than the technology we provide – we help healthcare organizations become more digital and agile in nature. Scott and Jeff do a great job providing practical advice on how healthcare organizations can successfully partner with digital health companies.”
David Edelman Chief Marketing Officer, Aetna
“Living the transformation in health, I know the path is not simple” That is why it is so refreshing to see the learning Scott and Jeff have brought in an extremely useful guide for change.”
Peter Corfield Chief Commercial Officer, Spire Healthcare, U.K.
“…This book will help healthcare leaders – in any geography – win with consumers in their markets.”
About the Authors
Scott Davis
Scott is the Chief Growth Officer of Prophet, a leading strategic growth firm. In over 25 years of brand and marketing strategy consulting, he has worked across an array of clients, including, GE, Allstate, Hershey’s, Microsoft, Boeing, Sara Lee, NBC Universal, the NBA, Target, Gulfstream, United Airlines, the City of Chicago. His work in healthcare includes Johnson & Johnson, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Mayo Clinic, Novant Health and an array of provider systems in the US and across the globe. Scott is a frequent guest lecturer at MBA programs across the country and served as an adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Scott is a contributing columnist at forbes.com and is the author of 3 previous books, including The Shift: The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Leaders.
Jeff Gourdji
Jeff is a Partner and co-leader of the healthcare practice at Prophet. With over 20 years of leading high-impact marketing & strategy projects, Jeff brings a breadth of experience that comes from working across many industries as a marketing practitioner, management consultant and political strategist. Jeff has worked extensively across the health care value chain across an array of growth challenges. His current and past clients include Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medicine, Encompass Health, Anthem, Eli Lilly & Company and several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. Jeff is a frequent speaker and writer on healthcare topics and has been published or cited in Becker’s Hospital Review, Modern Healthcare, Medical Marketing & Media (MM&M), PM 360 and the Chicago Tribune. Jeff received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Connect
Want to speak to Scott or Jeff about how to become more consumer-centric? Contact us today.
Which Brands Truly Inspire? The 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index®
Pixar, Pinterest, Marvel, Disney and Nike move consumers as few others can.
Many brands attempt to inspire their customers by their energy, their purpose or by creating a customer experience that is uplifting. Being inspired is one of the most admired and sought-after brand achievements. What brands have gotten there? And which have disappointed on this dimension? Let’s take a look:
The Most Inspiring Brands of 2018
The new 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index® (BRI), having the strength of 299 top brands from over 39 categories, was conducted by Prophet. Respondents, who were active in the category and familiar with the brand, provided some answers to key questions surrounding brand relevance. One of the 16 measures in the survey was “whether the brand inspired me”. From here we looked at the “inspiring” brands from last year and decided to take another look using the 2018 BRI data.
“Being inspired is one of the most admired and sought-after brand achievements.”
Pinterest, again, was the most inspiring brand. They are on a mission to help people discover the things they love and inspire them to go do those things in their daily lives. It stretches boundaries by fostering a person’s creativity and desire to try something new with projects—an activity such as cooking for kids, decorating a room in your home, building something new, starting a craft, learning a new exercise, creating a social program, with the list going on and on. One is connected with ideas and people that are also interested in this challenge.
Many of the other inspiration-led brands also enable a person to do or learn something. This includes Food Network (#2), Etsy (#3), Lego (#4), FitBit (#10), NPR (#11) and M.A.C. (#15). The experience of these brands promises to deliver connection with others, discovering the new, and create a feeling of creative accomplishment or meaning.
3 Key Routes of Inspiring Brands
Three routes are suggested by the other top “inspiring” brands.
Providing entertaining stories of role models, real or fictitious, that are inspiring. Pixar at #5, Disney at #6 and Marvel at #9, all provide characters and vicarious experiences that can inspire.
Being inspired by themood or feelings that are put in place. Spotify at #7 and Pandora at #16 create music experiences that can add inspiration to the enjoyment of the moment and even contribute a mindset that leads to excelling in other activities. It is noteworthy that Spotify and Pandora, like Pinterest, also personalize content.
Earning status forbeing inspiring with products, personality, message, and expectations for customers, which is illustrated by #9 Apple and #12 Nike.
The Category Effect on Inspiring Brands
There is also a strong category effect. Some categories, such as apparel (Nike, Zara, Adidas and Victoria’s Secret), or electronics & gaming (Fitbit, Electronic Arts, PlayStation, Xbox, Bose), did well. Brands in other categories such as insurance, finance, and telecommunication, do not seem to inspire.
Most categories contain differences in the ability of brands to be inspiring. Can you explain these differences? Should the weaker brands attempt to close the gap? If so, how should they go about it?
Here are a few interesting notes collected from the data:
Airlines: Southwest was in the top quarter, while American and United were in the bottom.
Toys: In general, the toy brands did well, although LEGO and Fisher-Price were decidedly above Hasbro and Mattel.
Consumer Products: M.A.C. and Dove were in the top quartile, while mature, functional brands like Tide, Crest, Old Spice (despite some creative positioning), Ziploc, Palmolive, Windex, and Kleenex, were in the bottom quartile. A sidenote—Method, Band-Aid, and Clorox, were high on purpose, a closely-related dimension.
Food: Hershey’s, Betty Crocker, and Ben & Jerry’s, were above or close to the top quartile, while Cheerios, Campbell Soup, Oreo, and Dannon, were found in the lowest quartile.
Hospitality: The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Marriott were in the top quartile, while Carnival Cruise Line, Westin, and Harrah’s, were in the bottom half.
Drug and Grocery Stores: Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s were in the top quartile, while CVS, Walgreens, Safeway and 7-Eleven appeared in the lowest quartile.
Durables: KitchenAid was a top 20 brand, while Peloton and Keurig were close. Others like Frigidaire were in the bottom quartile, with Bosch, Haier, and Maytag coming in close.
Social Media and Internet Services: Although many of these brands have top inspirational scores; Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp were in the bottom half; Yahoo! and Tinder were in the bottom quartile.
Beverages: Folgers was in the top quartile but Aquafina, Mountain Dew, Monster, Red Bull, Nissan, and Pepsi appeared in the lowest quartile.
Automobiles: Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and Ford were in the top quartile, but Volkswagen was in the bottom quartile with Mercedes close-by.
Computing and Software: Apple was a top 20 brand; Sony, Android and Samsung were comfortably in the top quartile. This being said, Huawei, Cortana, Bixby, and Siri were in the bottom quartile.
Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index® – Who are the Innovative Brands in 2018?
Tech brands, led by Apple, Android, Google and Samsung, are perceived as the most modern and inventive.
In most categories, brands aspire to be perceived as innovative. Brands create new value propositions, new brand-driven promotions, and/or new programs to enhance the offering or support shared values. Brand innovation will lend credibility to brand promises and add brand energy, a key element in the quest to be relevant in a dynamic market.
What brands have done just that: created a perception of being innovative? Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index® (BRI) of 2018 provides some answers.
BRI 2018: How Did We Measure Brand Innovation?
In the U.S., the BRI measures the strength of 299 top brands from over 37 categories, among respondents that were active in the category and familiar with the brand. One of the 16 measures in the survey was “always finding new ways to meet my needs” and provides a measure of perceived innovativeness.
“Brand innovation will lend credibility to brand promises and add brand energy, a key element in the quest to be relevant in a dynamic market.”
Of the top 20 “innovative” brands, 15 of them come from high-tech categories involving computing, software, social media, Internet services, electronics, or gaming. These brands include, in order, Apple, Android, Pinterest, Google, Samsung, PlayStation, Xbox, Spotify, YouTube, Electronic Arts, Sony, Intel, and Bose. It is a remarkable testament to how the high-tech world has set a standard for innovation with new features, new offerings, and even new subcategories all happening at a breathtaking speed.
The other five brands, Amazon, Netflix, Nike, Lego, and Fisher-Price, were exceptional for their category on innovation. Their success reflects how hard it is to be recognized as innovative.
What Makes an Innovative Brand in Key Categories?
The value of this Index and others like it is to make successful role models visible and also provide examples of brands that have struggled. Learnings can come from each. Looking at specific categories and comparing winners and losers is instructive. Consider the following questions and in doing so, keep in mind that the respondents are familiar with the brand and many will be brand users:
Automobiles: Why are Mercedes, Nissan and Volkswagen in the lowest quartile for innovation while Toyota, Honda and Chevrolet are in the highest?
Restaurants: Why is Chick-fil-A in the top quartile and KFC in the bottom? And why are In-N-Out Burger and Shake Shack in the bottom quartile?
Media: Why are they all in the bottom quartile and, within that group, why are CNN, Huffington Post and USA Today significantly below the others?
Retail Banking and Investments: Brands in this group emphasize innovation but have only two brands that are even in the top half on “innovativeness”: Capital One and Fidelity, and five brands that are in the bottom 10%, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, U.S. Bank, Lending Tree, HSBC. Why are these brands unable to communicate their innovations?
Clothing: Why are Zara and The North Face in the top quartile while H&M and Patagonia in the bottom quartile?
Appliances: Why is KitchenAid a top ten innovation brand? Why are most of the rest in the bottom half of the innovativeness ratings?
Personal Assistant: Why is Alexa well above Siri on innovativeness while Cortana and Bixby are significantly lower ranked?
Hotels: Why are Marriott and Hilton high on innovativeness and substantially above Holiday Inn, Hyatt, and Westin?
Technology: Why are some technology brands like Twitter, LinkedIn and IBM Watson relatively low on innovativeness?
What emerges from such an exercise are some aha insights and some mysteries that can end up being the most instructive of all.
The goal of the BRI is not only to identify which brands are most relevant but why. Brand innovation is just one of the contributors to relevance that we concluded from the 2018 BRI; the four characteristics that make up relentlessly relevant brands are customer-obsessed, ruthlessly pragmatic, distinctively inspired, and pervasively innovative. For each, we dug into why one brand is relevant to consumers and another not. The result is actionable strategies businesses can implement and use to grow and gain relevance in the future.
What happens in those first 90 days matters more than you realize.
Customer Experience is increasingly at the center of the conversation around growth. While it has rapidly become a competitive advantage and focus of investment for retail and consumer products businesses, B2B organizations have been more reticent to jump in. Unsure of where to start, how to measure impact, and the challenge of aligning complex organizations, B2B businesses have tended to take a narrower, more opportunistic view of their customer experience.
From our view working with some of the world’s strongest B2B brands, we’ve seen a different approach- and these B2B growth leaders have found a way to balance long-term CX strategy with short-term wins and proven impact. These leaders have done this with a relentless focus on the ‘moments that matter’ to their customers. We define these moments as the intersection of a company’s distinct capabilities with an important decision and perception of the customer.
“These are decisions about how to make a strategic shift with new needs and requirements, what the universe of solutions to their challenges could look like and how to implement it into their complex business.”
Note, we’re not simply talking about the buying decision. These are decisions about how to make a strategic shift with new needs and requirements, what the universe of solutions to their challenges could look like and how to implement it into their complex business.
B2B businesses often focus their commercial efforts on the actual buying decision, relying on a strong sales force and product engineers to win the deal. There is no question, that the actual buying decision is critical.
3 B2B Customer Experience Moments That Matter
Let’s take a look at the other ‘moments’ of the B2B customer experience to understand where organic growth largely comes from.
1. Strategic Re-Definition
In the B2B customer experience, particularly for industrial and technology businesses, this part of the journey is too often untapped and misses significant growth opportunities. This step of the process is often invisible. The customer is looking to make a pivot: from a traditional approach to a new one to address an opportunity or threat in their market. They’re looking for ideas and approaches. These are often driven by top-down strategy and pursued by cross-functional teams. These ‘moments’ can take months, even years, to take shape. However, disproportionate growth happens when you’re the partner there to help your customer make this transition.
Look at Alcoa, the global aluminum supplier, who did exactly this with the Ford F-150 lightweight truck. Ford knew they needed to significantly reduce the weight and carbon footprint of this truck but were unsure of the technical design and operational implications of such a shift. They needed unconventional thinking and they needed it early before truck design even begins. Rather than focusing solely on the existing aluminum applications in Ford vehicles (think wheels, bumpers, and engine blocks), Alcoa stayed close to Ford’s upstream advanced engineering teams and was able to work with them on very early-stage testing to go to an aluminum-intensive vehicle. The collaborative approach led to the development of the world’s first aluminum truck built at scale and a significant growth source for Alcoa.
2. Shaping the Customer’s Consideration Set
This is the step in the journey where customers have a clearly stated ambition and defined set of requirements, but they have not precisely determined how to pursue it. While the ambition is clear, they are actively looking at alternative approaches to get to the end result. They’re looking for a thought partner to show them a better solution or perhaps a better way to do business.
An approach to this moment played out in recent years in the world of agriculture. When growers were looking for smarter, more effective ways to maximize their yield, a global seed provider was there to help them think differently about their alternatives. Growers needed more than seed, they needed the confidence of how to manage their business over the full year to optimize their yield. We helped this global seed company bring advanced technology solutions and insight to growers that helped them approach the planning, planting, growing, and harvesting seasons differently with more precision and personalization. This led to dramatic improvements in yields and risk management and helped this business shift how their business was seen- from quality seed provider to business partner.
3. Delivering in the “first 90 days”
From industrial products to technology and business services, perhaps the most critical moment is what we call the “first 90 days” from selection to implementation. The actual length of time varies by market, but invariably we have seen this play out across markets and it is a big determinant of future growth. When the first 90 days go well, your B2B customers are confident. They ask you to do more for them, they invite you in earlier to solve more problems and give you the position of primary supply. However, too often, we see this part of the journey is siloed, underfunded, and reactive. This step of the journey goes beyond traditional implementation and setup. It includes training, communications, a readiness assessment, and on-site transition and technical support. Too often, companies take a short-sighted view of those as hard costs, not a growth investment.
This isn’t about troubleshooting or retention- this is a growth moment. For example, when we worked with a leading B2B facilities services business, we saw the correlation between the first 90 days and long-term share of wallet. The more seamless the first 90 days were, the more services customers added over the next several years. As a result, this business invested heavily in the implementation and onboarding stage to ensure a uniform rental customer had a great experience which opened up opportunities in janitorial, safety, and document management. From relationship coordination to communications and syncing up with the customer’s business flow, the companies that do this well significantly outperform their peers on long-term growth. In B2B markets where the inertia and cost of switching providers is high, this can turn into a huge competitive advantage for the businesses that do it well.
How B2B Customer Experience Moments Lead to Growth
Time and time again, from materials to software to business services, these are the moments that we see driving disproportionate growth. So, what does the process look like to get started? When we look at B2B growth leaders, here’s how they’re approaching it:
Map the full journey from the customer’s perspective.
It’s critical to look at their complete journey, not just where they have touchpoints with you. Then, through research and analytics, determine what matters most to them, where pain points are most significant, and where your business has capabilities it can exploit.
Define your CX principles and strategy.
Rather than going after fixes and quick wins, start with an aligned vision of the type of experience your business can and will deliver. Define the principles that will become a signature for working with your business, and the strategy to tie all of the moves and important initiatives together.
Sequence the strategy with chain-link moves.
As you envision the future state experience and the strategy to get there, think about how you’ll establish momentum and the sequence of moves to get there. CX strategy is never done, it requires waves of interdependent initiatives and agility to fully execute.
Include everyone.
Particularly in B2B organizations, CX includes virtually everyone. Sales, Marketing, Technology, R&D, Engineering, Operations, Service, and Finance should all have a shared understanding of the customer journey and their role in bringing the enhanced experience strategy to life. Engage each group early, get their perspectives and ideas, and ensure they have a seat at the table when it comes time to prioritize and design the future state.
We believe there is no stronger, more sustainable growth opportunity available to B2B businesses than CX. These hypotheses on the moments that matter and what they could mean in your category offer a good starting point for your business.
Learn how Prophet helps companies across the globe to create memorable, unique customer experiences.
The Body, Mind and Soul of Digitally Evolved Organizations
Getting employees to believe in transformation efforts requires a bold new way of thinking.
Why Corporate Culture is the Biggest Impediment to Digital Transformation
When it comes to digital transformation, many companies say the hardest part is changing the culture itself. They often do a great job signposting new corporate values, like innovation and agility. They hold town halls and may even pour millions into expensive technology initiatives. At best, they get poor adoption rates. But often the worst happens: Nothing changes.
After a few rounds of announcements, disappointed (and increasingly cynical) employees sit back and wait. Their leaders tell them that things must change, but then offer platitudes about their position as traditional industry leaders. “There will always be a need for pharmaceutical sales reps,” they might say, or “Those start-ups don’t even make money.”
Meanwhile, employees watch, keenly aware of digital natives that threaten to disrupt their own industry. They have few choices: They can leave for fleeter firms, or stay put, watching the clock tick.
Do Your Employees Believe in Your Digital Transformation?
For most older organizations, the digital age presents a very specific challenge: How might we compete when the assumptions about where and how value is created have changed? They know the answers lie in digital, and it’s not as though these born-before-the-Internet companies have been standing still. Most have many digital things–websites, sophisticated email strategies, social media and probably at least one mobile application.
Still, progress is slow. And employees, who spend their outside time experiencing companies like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify, are painfully aware of how behind the curve their own employers are. Convincing them that true digital transformation is even plausible, never mind possible, is difficult. Why should they believe you?
“How might we compete when the assumptions about where and how value is created have changed?”
What makes it worse is that even though employees can see–everyone can see–that the company needs to make radical changes, internal strategy teams focus on gradual tweaks and long-term transformation, to minimize disruption. While employees can see the company needs to travel vast distances to catch up, their employers are only taking baby steps.
Relatively few organizations have truly asked themselves, “What would we look like if we’d been designed in the last 20 years?” and then set a rapid roadmap, three years at the most, for working backward to create those capabilities and the culture to support them.
Challenges of an Incremental Approach to Digital Transformation
And the unrecognized truth is that taking an incremental approach to digital transformation comes at a tremendous cost. The widely reported “retail apocalypse” is an obvious example. Over the last 25 years, nearly all retailers worked hard, but slowly, to launch to e-commerce websites and mobile apps. They tried to balance conflicts between physical and virtual stores, creating expensive loyalty programs that gathered customer data.
But their incremental approach was often too little, too late. In the U.S., for example, grocers didn’t fully anticipate the speed with which Amazon and Walmart would enter their markets with advanced digital capabilities for serving shoppers. Dozens of chains, including Toys R Us and Payless Shoes, were forced into bankruptcy by online competitors. Mainstream and luxury department stores, from JC Penney in the US to Harvey Nichols in the UK, are teetering. Across Europe, high streets have been similarly decimated, with House of Fraser the latest to struggle. And in Asia, online retail continues to sizzle, led by Alibaba’s Taobao and Tmall, as well as JD.com.
That’s just one industry. Look at what Airbnb is doing to hotels and Uber and Lyft to taxi operators, or the way Grab is shaking up food delivery in Asia. These digital companies are succeeding because they know we live in an experience-first world. Customer wants are rapidly evolving, requiring dramatically new levels of organizational flexibility, agility and adaptability.
And that responsiveness is about technology, yes. But it’s very much about humans. Data can tell us what people have done in the past and what they need, but it can’t create new products and services. Digital technology can’t see trends, nor help you decide how to shift a business as markets evolve. It can’t drive culture, those values and beliefs that make people want to come to work for you every day.
Transforming an Organization’s Body, Mind and Soul
At Prophet, we’ve started thinking about digital transformation as rewiring the Body, Mind and Soul of the enterprise.
Body: Reinvent the Operating Model
A company is trained and equipped to achieve its vision if it can do three seemingly simple things:
Create an organization with the right roles, empowered to make those processes fleet and effective
Shape a governance structure that makes it supremely easy to do the right things, versus being designed purely to block the wrong things
Modern operating models frequently depart from traditional approaches, organizing communities of practice instead of departments and using multi-disciplinary teams to understand customer needs and design new products, services and experiences.
For instance, a large financial services firm determined that its key strategic goal was to dominate the industry in customer experience and differentiate itself through service. But it was bogged down by business units so siloed that its best customers, those who purchased the broadest range of products, got the worst experience. Working with our team, the leaders agreed on a digital transformation vision. Two years after launching its new operating model, it has moved from being the customer-experience laggard to an industry leader, according to several analysts.
Mind: Energize the Talent
The relentless pace of innovation means that many companies struggle with a mismatch of skills and capabilities. This can even happen to digital companies: We recently worked with a global tech behemoth that couldn’t find a market for its newest products. It wanted to deliver innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products targeted at healthcare, but its talent wasn’t up to it. Product managers had never developed SaaS products before. Project managers weren’t trained in agile software development.
Addressing challenges within the Mind of your organization means pinpointing these mismatches, and either building skills through training or recruiting new talent.
Soul: Create More Meaning
The corporate soul, like the individual one, is as important as it is subtle. We approach Soul starting with the very DNA of firm: by identifying the purpose of an organization. We then begin defining the supporting values that make the firm a place that people love to work. Our recent research on purpose, based on 350 business leaders, confirms that this purpose must be evident to employees (and consumers) every single day.
And it must address big questions: What role do we play in the community? How well do we manage our impact on the environment? Is our workforce diverse? Are we adapting to technological change? Are we providing the retraining and opportunities that employees need to adjust to an increasingly automated world? Those with a well-defined purpose, like Starbucks, Patagonia and LEGO, inspire the way their people think and work toward the kinds of transformation that ensure values for customers and meaning in the work itself.
Balancing all three is challenging. But healthy human-centered enterprises recognize that mind, body and soul are connected. Organizational health–and the ability to step boldly into future transformation–comes from synchronicity between the three.
How Gatorade Fueled Its Business Growth with Customer Insights
To regain relevance, this brand learned the power of unbiased listening, increasing annual sales by 15%.
While the key to unprecedented business growth is sometimes hidden, you can find it if you know where to look: consumer data.
Gatorade Finds the Key to Unlocking Business Growth
Once a leader of the $6BN sports hydration category, in 2006 Gatorade faced a double-digit volume decline. The brand needed a growth strategy that would allow them to reignite consumers’ relationship with the brand, reach new consumers and ultimately drive revenue.
To accomplish this, Gatorade partnered with Prophet on an extensive consumer research project to understand where the opportunities for growth existed. This research uncovered two extremely valuable insights:
1. Gatorade’s Brand Positioning was Losing Relevance
The brand transitioned its marketplace position away from its former status as a “science of hydration” brand toward a lifestyle brand. While this shift was intentional, it turned off key audience groups like competitive athletes and teen athletes – who no longer perceived the brand to offer significant performance benefits beyond thirst quench. Direct competitors like Powerade and Powerade Zero, and other low calories “lifestyle waters,” such as Vitamin Water and SoBe life water were encroaching the market share and relevance within targeted segments of consumers.
2. A Glaring Gap in the Market Existed
The former insight led to the realization that no brand satisfied the whole spectrum of athletes’ nutritional needs. Athletes sought a product that provided benefits from hydration to energy to recovery – and Gatorade presented highly stretchable brand equity into the adjacent sports nutrition category, pre-, during, post-acute sports events and surrounding more foundational athletic occasions.
Building a New Growth Strategy for Gatorade
These insights lead to the development of a two-pronged strategy to drive growth. The approach included:
Prong 1: Reclaim Hydration Leadership
The master brand, Gatorade, needed to be re-positioned back to its foundation in hydration. To reclaim its leadership of the hydration space, it needed to move beyond “thirst-quenching” to “performance hydration.” As part of its bid to reclaim leadership in hydration among competitive athletes, Gatorade launched G-Series – Prime, Perform and Recover. This transformed the brand from a generic all-athletic-occasion drink that came in different flavors to a packaged solution covering specific athletic occasions with tailored nutrition ingredients, thus opening the doors to the sports fuel market.
Prong 2: Elevate the Brand from Hydration to Sports Fuel
Anchored on the occasion-specific benefits desired by athletes, the brand was poised to elevate itself beyond the $6BN sports hydration category and into the $72BN sports fuel space; moving from “science and soul of hydration” to “fuel to help athletes win from within”. This was actualized through creating a lineup of products targeting both the hydration and nutrition needs surrounding intensive athletic occasions, across the moments before, during, and after these occasions.
We developed a brand portfolio and architecture to align with other target athlete segments; with clear value propositions for each sub-brand. This led to the launch of G Series Pro – an intense sports fuel targeting endurance athletes. In 2010, it also launched G Series Fit, targeting low-calorie consumption occasions for passionate exercisers.
The Impact of Gatorade’s New Growth Strategy
Due to this strategy, the double-digit declines the brand had been experiencing were reversed to 15 percent growth in just one year. Since its inception, Gatorade has seen over $2 billion dollars in franchise revenue increases and is now the fastest-growing brand in the PepsiCo portfolio (and its only double-digit growth brand for over five years).
Breakthrough Insights Hold the Key to Breakthrough Growth
Identifying consumer insights that have breakthrough growth potential like this example with Gatorade is a tough but rewarding task. To uncover such insights, analysts need to keep a few things in mind:
The market doesn’t lie, and analysts should be bold. When we first introduced the idea for T-mobile’s Uncarrier strategy; it was met with some apprehension, just as when we first talked about nutrition to Gatorade. A bold strategy anchored in solid customer insights is just what an organization needs to ignite its next wave of growth and success. It takes guts to point out (and stick to) a category pain point, but it’s these pain points that lead to breakthrough growth.
Analysts need to understand what’s most important to the business by getting into the minds of the executive team – what keeps them up at night? How do they form their hypotheses? How can we make this data meaningful to them? Fishing outside of this context is futile and irrelevant.
Be an anonymous, unbiased power listener who is tuned into the trends of the market. The challenge nowadays is too much data that still requires human processing and integration.
