Prophet is a place where creative passion and commitment merge with strategic smarts and intellect. Our clients – across industries – are true partners in our joint pursuits to differentiate brands and reach and attract customers in innovative ways. Digital, strategy, design, verbal, insights, analytics all work together to develop brands that win in the market.

Learn More About the Work Featured in Prophet’s Design Reel

Poly: Creating a Marketing Campaign to Celebrate a Historic Day

Prophet created the 50th-anniversary marketing campaign to celebrate Poly and Plantronics’ role in the 1969 Moon Landing. The team ultimately won two Transform Awards for its out-of-this-world work. Read more.

L’Escape: Creating a Parisian Escape in the Heart of Seoul

Prophet reimagined Shinsegae Chosun Hotel Group’s brand strategy to successfully revamp its luxury hotel, L’Escape. Praised for its creative differentiation and sophisticated attention to detail, Prophet’s design work earned two gold Transform Awards. Later on, L’Escape was awarded an iF design award for its website design – based on Prophet’s brand concepts and designs. Read more.

Keurig Green Mountain: Energizing an Iconic Brand Portfolio

Keurig Green Mountain needed a partner to successfully merge its newly merged businesses and accelerate growth. Prophet supported its large-scale transformation – setting the strategic foundation for its marketing organization and clarifying its brand architecture. Read more.

Fora: From Co-Working to Pro-Working

Prophet helped Brockton Capital fill a unique gap in the market for a new type of co-working space – developing a unique and elevated brand experience for sophisticated professionals. FORA became the fastest-growing player in the co-working space, expanding its locations in London and beyond. Read more.

The Wharton Center at MSU: Defining Brand Purpose for a Performing Arts Center

Prophet revitalized Michigan State University’s performing arts center by developing a brand purpose that resonated with the community. The new brand expresses the boldness, courage and diversity of the 300,000 young people that use the space each year. This work received a gold award for key art and a bronze award for print collateral at the 2019 International Design Awards. Read more.

“Our clients – across industries – are true partners in our joint pursuits to differentiate brands and reach and attract customers in innovative ways.”

Nam Nghi: Defining the Brand Story & Experience for a Vietnamese Luxury Resort

Prophet developed a compelling visual identity and signature customer experience that differentiated the brand, attracted new customers and sparked interest across the luxury tourism industry. Read more.

USWNT OOSA: Creating a Brand that Pushes for Progress On and Off the Field

Prophet partnered with U.S. Women’s National Team players to create a brand and digital experience that captured the essence of the team—both as world-class athletes and as passionate activists. The pro-bono work won two Transform Awards for creative development and audio branding. Read more.

Formula-E: Reframing a Racing Championship for an Electrifying Future

Formula E was having a hard time finding its place in the racing world and beyond, so they partnered with Prophet to reframe the series, create a relevant position, and craft a visual identity. This work was recognized with two Transform Europe awards, two Transform APAC awards and was acknowledged within the Creative Review Annual as one of the best brand identities. Read more.

Colmo: Designing a Simply Extraordinary Brand of Smart Home Appliances

We developed a brand positioning, verbal identity and visual identity for a new premium home appliance brand COLMO. The big idea captured the philosophy of highly crafted products that are effortlessly simple in delivering an extraordinary user experience. Read more.

Regal: Evolving an Entertainment Icon

We revamped Regal Cinema’s brand identity and digital experience to reflect a modern, ever-evolving theater experience. Our teams also helped strategically think through how the new brand could be activated across touchpoints from the theater façade to concessions and the digital experience. Read more.

Do you need a strategy and design partner to push your brand forward into its next evolution? Reach out today.

It wasn’t that long ago that when companies talked about the customer journey, it sounded as simple as a walk in the park. The customer journey, once linear, has been replaced by a complex matrix of touchpoints with the customer at the center. Consumers’ ability to access your brand in so many avenues and on so many devices has highlighted just how indirect and fractured these multiple journeys can be. To talk about the challenges of creating breakthrough customer experiences, we brought together three distinctly different perspectives: Harry West, a senior partner in Prophet’s customer experience practice, Chan Suh, Prophet’s chief digital officer and Andres Nicholls, a partner in our design practice.

Mapping customer pathways

“We used to draw a line on a board to represent the path to purchase,” says West. “Now, it’s multiple lines, and we talk about journeys in the plural. The path to purchase is increasingly intermittent.”

Imagine someone considering opening a new type of account at his bank. He may begin to gather information while physically at the bank, from an ATM or teller. He may then learn more from his desktop at work or his laptop at home, perhaps emailing the bank for more details. His wife, who handles most of the banking responsibilities, may complete the account registration process using a tablet or mobile phone.

What that means, West adds, is “that while most companies have a preconceived hierarchy of touchpoints, they don’t apply anymore. In each instance, it is the customer who decides how to move forward, not the bank.”

That means every possible access point has to be perfect, says Nicholls. “A touchpoint the company might have regarded as less important may turn out to be the critical deciding factor.” But banking on a mobile phone is very different than banking from a 17-inch laptop, and unifying these experiences is difficult. USAA, which has long functioned without branches, is a great example, says West. “Not only was it the first bank to offer a depositing feature via smartphone, it’s been a pioneer in using text messaging, alerting its military members to everything from low balances to potential fraud. It confronted digital challenges a decade before most of its competition.” The consumer-determined hierarchy is a tough lesson for some companies.

What it means for companies

In some ways, we can blame this ever-escalating cycle of innovation on Amazon, says Nicholls. It consistently tops customer service surveys, outshines its varied competition and raises expectations. “If people can buy a mountain bike that is perfectly sized for them in just one click, why can’t their bank, doctor or airline offer the same level of service?”

And if disappointed, consumers now have access to technology that will amplify how they feel about the customer experience — the good, but especially, the bad. “They’ll talk you down in customer comments, in blogs or on their social media accounts. And word-of-mouth can be the most influential driver of purchase,” says West. Two-thirds of all consumers say they read customer reviews, for example, and 90 percent say they act on them.

That means companies must work to deliver experiences that meet customer expectations, focusing resources to deliver experiences that will be memorable, and drive overall perception. “Companies need to understand, in a very intimate way, how customers react to their brands at each touchpoint,” West says. “That includes those you can control—your website, for example. But you also need to understand how people react to your brand in places you don’t have much control—in stores, at dealers, on blogs and in product forums.”

“Two thirds of all consumers say they read customer reviews, and 90 percent say they act on them, either positively or negatively.”

Next, companies need to measure the importance of each touchpoint and get a sense of which will have the biggest impact on the customer experience. Once the ideal experience — the signature touchpoint — has been achieved, everything needs to be brought in alignment with it. “We also recommend parallel measures that will track that experience over time,” he says.

But that’s not the end. Customer expectations are constantly being ratcheted up from same-day delivery, to free shipping, to BOGO. With innovative companies like Uber, Mint.com and WunWun, a company that delivers anything at any time. Suh says, “Customers expect experiences to get better all the time. Once they’ve shopped at stores where product passion is the key ingredient—whether they’re buying lipsticks at the MAC counter or a stand-up paddleboard at REI—they’re going to want that level of expertise and enthusiasm with more transactions.”

Finally, Suh adds, “Don’t forget that the most important interaction your customer has with your company isn’t always through a marketing or distribution channel. Sometimes it’s with the product itself. We have to put as much effort into the user experience as we do the marketing experience—that way, every time they use the product, they’ll be reassured that yes, they made the right purchase.”

What are the barriers?

For companies to keep up with this ever-traveling consumer who expects more and more, they need to be aligned and involve each division, department and market. Completely breaking down silos isn’t realistic, “but companies can build effective tunnels and bridges to connect them,” Nicholls says. Project teams need to accept that in this new universe, the launch trajectory is upended: “In the old way of thinking, once a marketing project was published, it was done. In the digital world, once it’s out there, it has just begun. And you have to help it, give it momentum and keep it alive.”

Not all organizations are equally suited to uncovering that kind of cooperation. But it’s a skill that can be learned. “At Prophet, we have PlayStudio, where we remove clients from their daily routines and combine inspiration with business tools,” Suh says. It doesn’t just lead to great ideas (such as the Hanes tagless t-shirt, the first innovation in t-shirts in 50 years and a customer experience touchdown). “It fosters customer-focused collaboration across departments with very different backgrounds. And the human interactions are what to lead to innovation,” says Nicholls.

After years of leadership in its home market, and being called the “Korean Walmart,” Emart is pushing hard to become recognized as a world-class retailer in its own right. And it’s using strategy-led design to get there. Strategy-led design is the seamless integration of the brand and business strategy with design. This approach is rooted in a deep understanding of the customer, which is built into every facet of design, whether visuals like logos and signage or the experience itself.

Emart’s direction is in keeping with the leadership tradition that has marked the company as South Korea’s first discount retailer since its launch in 1993. Moves like its fresh market grocery, occupying the entire first floor of its typically three-level hypermarkets and being first to adopt an “everyday low prices” policy helped cement its position. Today, it operates 130 stores in Korea that produce £6bn annually in turnover.

In recent years, Emart has faced soft sales in a very difficult market environment. The consumer base is very homogenous and any significant point of competitive differentiation is immediately copied.

The challenge became clear – to achieve world-class retailer status, Emart would need to undergo a major transformation. It needed to more effectively engage customers through an experience unlike any other in the market. To enable this strategic transformation, Emart realized it would need a complete rethink of its hypermarket brand and experience, and to develop stand-alone retail formats to drive growth. It appointed Prophet to chart the way, using our strategy-led design approach as the basis for the process.

“To achieve world-class retailer status, Emart would need to undergo a major transformation.”

Building up an understanding of Emart customers was particularly challenging because Korean consumers all tend to have similar demographics, attitudes and shopping behaviors. Moreover, 80% were already shopping at Emart. That made typical segmentation studies about “who” was shopping there less germane than “why” they were.

It took a novel and innovative approach to identify segments based on trip types and their corresponding needs, the economics of different shopping occasions and how retail formats and shopping occasions intersect. Over a six-month period, we delved into why Korean customers shopped at both Emart and its competitors across 10 major product categories.

Eight occasions were identified – such as “everyday needs”, “quick mission” and “social outing” – and prioritized against brand and business credibility, along with execution capability. This selection became the filter for understanding the customer needs that had to be built into the brand.

Understanding customer behavior was one thing. Finding ways to link and drive their shopping occasions to an Emart versus a Lotte Mart or Tesco’s Home Plus – all major players in Korea – posed another challenge. Despite the popularity of its fresh groceries, the lack of cohesiveness in the rest of the store was a detriment to delivering the kind of clear brand story and consistent customer experience that can translate into brand loyalty and greater sales.

Emart’s hypermarket stores are typical of Korean retailing. From one section to the next, the style, feel and look are dramatically different. This promotes customer confusion. Shoppers are awash in a variety of point-of-sale communications. It all results in unclear messaging and an inconsistent experience.

Retail executives walk their stores with an eye on merchandising and signage. They don’t typically put themselves in the customer’s shoes to understand what they are feeling – excitement at exploring the store or dread at wasting time trying to fight the crowds to find five specific items.

We were able to put Emart’s leadership (and our own team) into its shoppers’ shoes by utilizing a technique we call Experience Attribute Mapping (EXAM). This allows us to map the customer experience in minute detail, from the customer’s perspective. From there, we apply elements of what the brand strategy should be at various key interaction points. How this greater understanding of Emart’s customers and the shopping experience will play out in a repositioned brand is still a work in progress. But Prophet was able to provide a taste of the possibilities through the development of three new store formats all designed and opened in 100 days.

The challenge was to transform an underperforming Emart store, which had been a Walmart, with formats that previously hadn’t existed in Korea: a warehouse/club-style store (minus membership requirements), a lifestyle-oriented electronics store and a pet store.

The 17,000-square-metre ground floor was given over to Emart Traders – characterized by mass merchandising, value pricing and bulk purchases of everything from fresh food to office supplies. Featuring a clean, simple and well-organized flow, it emphasizes deals, through bright and inviting signage, along with a merchandising presentation of open cases on shipping pallets.

Matrix, the electronics division, departs from the single-manufacturer stores that typify Korean electronics retailing. It emphasizes interactivity, with demonstration areas that hadn’t previously been employed in the market. It also focused on customer needs, with “watch” “listen” and “play” sections, which shoppers gravitate to according to the type of product they want. It also has a more urban feel – reinforced with graffiti on concrete surfaces.

The pet department, Molly’s (named after one of the Emart chairman’s dogs), shares the first floor with Matrix and is a huge draw to people who normally shop for pets through vets or online. The bright and lively environment features color cues to denote different departments – from the Beauty Studio’s (grooming) bright topaz blue to the blue and white of Molly’s Café where owners (known as pet parents) and dogs can enjoy a meal together.