Discover why customers selected your brand or other alternatives that get the job done.

People buy products and services to fulfil a need. It might be as simple as something to pass the time while waiting in line, or to pack a healthy school lunch for their child, or a new premium watch, to reflect success.

But whatever that need is, it’s what your customers care about at the time they consider it. And it’s how they’ll engage with you on an emotional, as well as a functional level. It’s this emotional engagement that big data alone cannot deliver. 

Ask them directly, and most people don’t really know what they want. That’s why standard Q&A interviews don’t work. But empathy interviewing is more like a conversation. With a skilled interviewer, it unfolds naturally, encouraging people to speak from the heart, revealing what’s really important to them and why they behave in a certain way. 

Like a trusted therapist, the insights we glean from these carefully targeted conversations can teach you much more about where your customers are coming from and how they experience your brand. 



                


Empathy Map Tool

Observe users in their natural environment

When we pair empathy interviewing with behavioral observations and the “job to be done” interviews, we gain a deeper sense of who your customers are and which product/brand they hire to get the job done. This will help  designing and delivering smart solutions for them.

Seeing your customers in a natural setting reveals not only which products they use, but also their feelings about those products. It also gives you instant snapshots of their interactions with your touch points, exposing any irritations or frustrations they may experience.

Gaining insight into how your customers feel about you is key to developing better ways to reach them. It can help you to build a meaningful conversation with your audience, so you’ll stand out from your competitors. And if it’s handled right, that conversation will lead to greater brand loyalty and generate lasting revenues. 



 

How well do you know your business? 

Our brand audit takes an in-depth look at how your stakeholders (customers, suppliers and staff) see your brand. We'll give your products, services, staff, capabilities, markets and competitors a full evaluation. And we’ll leave no stone left unturned. 

We'll then use our insight to hone your brand, target your strengths, maximize your impact – and give you an extremely powerful tool to help you on your brand-building journey.

Internal brand audit metrics

We’ll take an in-depth look at the internal factors that affect your brand. 

•  Brand foundations: company vision and mission, brand values and personality. 
•  Brand strategy: brand essence and positioning ,company value proposition, differentiators, target groups and customer experience. 
•  Category and brand portfolio: the category, the competition, the P&S portfolio, the distribution.
• Branding and marketing: corporate identity, marketing practices, external communication, brand management tools.
• HR and brand engagement: brand language, internal communication, training and recruitment, appraisals.

External brand audit metrics

We’ll investigate your customers and opinion influencers and we’ll look at the following metrics:

• General attitude towards the sector 
• TOM brands 
• Awareness and familiarity index 
• Image and perception 
• Perceived brand personality 
• Value proposition understanding 
• Customer satisfaction 
• Customers’ unmet needs 
• Branding and communication impact
• Customer experience at every touchpoint

 

Cultural values and preferences impact the way stakeholders respond to an organization. 

We’ll look in depth at the values and behaviors that contribute to your business’s unique social and psychological environment. Then we’ll define the cultures and subcultures within your organization. We’ll use these insights to help you:

• Standardize behavior
• Align business processes with desired outcomes
• Define your global vision and strategy.

Culture Climate Map



Our approach relies on three steps: 

1. Our climate survey identifies the hard facts and cultural patterns within your organization

2. One-to-one interviews identify subcultures, uncovering the business’s real leaders and influencers as well as cultural differences between departments

3. Group discussions identify other, less predictable factors affecting your organization. 



 

We all know that people “hire” products to get jobs done. Office workers hire word-processing software to create documents. Surgeons hire scalpels to dissect soft tissue. But few companies keep this in mind while searching for ideas for breakthrough offerings. Instead, they rely on inquiry methods that don’t generate the most promising ideas or exhaustive sets of possibilities.

Gathering job- to- be -done & unlocking insights for innovation is gaining a deep understanding of what a customer is trying to achieve. “The Why” they are buying a certain product/service, their higher purpose and the obstacles they face points to fertile grounds for new solution. The Problem is that customers are notoriously bad at imagining solutions to their problems. Traditional market research can focus heavily on the superficial questions whereas JTBD allows to gather and understand hidden pieces behind customer’s behaviors.

The jobs-to-be-done framework look for opportunities to create value. When companies understand that customers hire products, services, software, and ideas to get jobs done, they can use the jobs-to-be-done template to dissect those jobs to discover the innovation opportunities that are the key to growth. 



How we do it? 

Following one to one interviews with customers and non- customers, we go through the following steps:

• Segmentation according to lifestyle & drivers with different JTBD
• Identification of substitutes
• Sense making and correlations
• Identification of areas of opportunities

A lack of clarity in a business’s strategy is like asking each sailor to row the ship according to his understanding of the destination.

Acquiring new customers is well known to cost more than serving existing ones. However a 3rd category often underplayed consists of the consumers that used to be customers and defected due to bad service, disappointments or simply their needs have changed. There are ways to win them back if we invest time understanding “what went wrong” and providing the adequate solutions.

On another hand, It is rather rare for a team of top executive to agree on a common formulation of “what our customers really need” and even so when asked “which business are we really in?”
Defining our “Where to play” and “How to Win” is critical to any successful strategy. Where to Play includes which geography, products, customers and channels used to get our offering to market.



 
How we do it?
 
-PEST Analysis to factor in “contextual changes” in the environment
-In-depth Interviews with a sample of existing customers to identify their issues with your organization and what are their emerging aspirations
-Co-creative workshop to ideate possible solutions that meet customer’s needs and are feasible for your organization to deliver.
-Prototyping of solutions to mitigate risks and ensure market success.
 
Your data can point to large information on these customers (previous purchases, location, preferences…) that were once hardcore fans and promoters and turned to become detractors. Sometimes showing them that you care is all it takes!


 

Our brand strategy defines what you stand for. It’s the promise you make. And the personality you convey. 

Your brand strategy should be driven by the entire company, from the ground upwards, and it should be supported and lived by the people who contribute to it. We’ll help you encourage your people to share it, to believe in it, and to deliver it consistently, at all levels, and at all times.

Brand Foundations

You can't know where you're going until you know who and what you are. For new organizations, it's crucial to set brand foundations first – they’re the base from which all your brand elements will be created. 

Your brand foundations are made up of four main elements: your brand story, your brand vision, your brand mission and your brand values.

 

Brand Positioning

We’ll create a successful positioning for your brand by determining your brand essence and promise. We'll then help you identify the market territory your brand can own and structure its delivery across all touch points with your customers.

 

  Brand Wheel



 

Are you looking for innovative ways of doing business to replace outdated ones?

In a challenging economy filled with shark competition and volatile customers behavior, no business can afford to stick to “business as usual”.

Revisiting the way you create value and how you monetize that value is critical to “stay in the game”. The Business innovation process covers a mix of rigorous business analysis, customer research and ideation workshops to explore new possibilities to create profitable growth.

We will conduct an in-depth exploration of the nine essential building blocks of your business model and evaluate alternatives that matches current organizational capabilities and its winning aspiration ending by identifying the impact of the model on your business and your customers.

 

These blocks cover the four main areas of business: customers, offers, infrastructure and financial viability. Together, they form a blueprint we can implement throughout your structures, processes and systems.

 

There are many elements to a successful brand. How you structure them is essential. 

If your business is home to a number of brands, effective management of your portfolio is essential. An effective brand architecture process defines how your brand and sub-brands relate to each other. So you can maximize your return on investment and provide clarity for your customers. 

Brand Architecture Spectrum

Client issues 

There are five key issues for clients that drive the need for brand architecture:

•  Corporate mergers 
•  Brand rationalizations 
•  Brand extensions
•  Changing competitive landscape
•  New marketing approach.

Key deliverables

We’ll help you create a system to organize all your brand names and hierarchies. 

This will illustrate the best way to associate your corporate brand with individual lines of business or across your product portfolio. 

Then we’ll help you develop a disciplined approach to brand guidelines so your people will buy into it, and you can manage your brand consistently.



 

Why Companies Fail? How to think differently about the future?

Scenario Planning is a new approach that is logical, structured and yet creative that aims at exploring different ways the future might realistically develop.

It is the Art of thinking the Unthinkable and aspire to answer the following questions: How might our current strategy of product and service development be wrong? Is our product development pipeline too narrowly-focused? Is our target customer / market profile off-track? Would we be better off collaborating with our competitors in basic R&D - and competing in areas that matter more to consumers?

The Process consists in 10 steps starting by framing the challenge, to identifying the driving forces and the critical uncertainties to generating scenarios and their challenges.



How we do it? 

• PEST Analysis to factor in “contextual changes” in the environment
• In-depth Interviews with experts and a sample of customers to identify their emerging aspirations
• Co-creative scenario planning workshop to ideate possible scenarios and estimate their Challenges & the Organization Response.
• Validating the solutions to mitigate risks and ensure market success.
• Monitoring Scenarios over time

 

In a me-too product economy , often it is the Customer experience that differentiate your offering and brand value proposition.

Customer experience is the way we describe the relationship  a customer has with a business. It is the sum of all interactions and thoughts across all the organization touch points.

 

Balancing customer experience and business value

Understanding your customer journey and then reducing unnecessary frictions and irritations will improve satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.


Customer Journey Map




How we do it?
Our approach is structured around four phases, each with an activity to verify the chosen direction.


 


 

Service design is an interface that connects organizations and clients in a new way.

We combine different methods and tools to improve your existing services so they're more useful, useable and desirable for your clients and more efficient for your organization. 

  Double Diamond Approach



Our key principles of service design are:

1. User-centered: we focus on the experience of your customers – always
2. Co-creative: we include all stakeholders in the process
3. Sequencing: we see service design as a sequence of inter-related actions
4. Evidencing: we measure the effectiveness of the designs we develop
5. Holistic: we consider the entire environment, not just its individual parts

 

If you want happy customers, you need happy employees.

Companies vie for customer loyalty through personalized offerings, rewards programs, and one-to-one marketing initiatives – all in the name of boosting their brand. And that’s as it should be. After all, customer loyalty drives business profitability.

But in doing so, many organisations overlook a critical business fundamental. If you want happy customers, you need happy employees – and that comes from giving your employees an exceptional experience too. 


 

All too often there’s a misalignment between the experience companies create for their customers and what their employees experience in their everyday work life. Who sees this misalignment better than anyone else? Employees.

Employees are best placed to tell and sell your brand story and values. Good internal communication following a clearly detailed structure can help you to reach them with your vision, and keep them engaged. 




 

Do you need to reshape your organization to fit your business strategy?​

Organizational design is a step-by-step approach to identify issues with work flow, procedures, structures and systems. Our process assesses the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and designs a new, improved structure. The focus is on improving both the technical and peoplesides of your business simultaneously.

For most companies, this leads to a more effective organization, significantly improved results and more committed employees. Our holistic approach touches on all aspects of your company’s organization, including:

• Employee satisfaction
• Internal engagement 
• Sales and productivity
• Customer satisfaction

Becoming a design-centric company can be a long journey. But it’s a necessary one if you want innovation to thrive within your organization .

 Mckinsey 7s' Model

Improving internal processes 

Organizational design is a continuous process that can provide long-term growth throughout your organization. We’ll review your processes as they develop, and use our own KREA® model to make sure all functions within your organization are operating consistently with your brand strategy.