To broaden and deepen the relationship with Philips customers by developing an enterprise wide customer marketing platform
Customers are looking for things that improve their lives but also the lives of causes they care about
A programme and a campaign that let customers set the agenda for Philips' social causes and drive My Philips registrations
Innovation process
Business discovery
Audience insights
Category review
Ideation
Rapid prototyping
Audience testing
Proof of Concept
Campaign design
CRM
planning
Philips was in silos with different products running their own customer marketing initiatives. Ogilvy had sold the need to create a unifying approach and a global masterbrand loyalty platform.
The brief had been kicking around in Ogilvy, the agency I was working at the time - but now we needed to give an update to our clients on where we proposed to take the programme.
At the time of coming into this project I was the Ogilvy Customer Lab lead, the agency’s customer-centric experience strategy and design arm.
The Customer Lab was about bringing your audience into the process, either physically or virtually, to find insights, co-create ideas, and developing and testing experiences through rapid, iterative prototyping.
I was tasked to help put shape to our response to the Philips execs. There was no further direction as to what exactly our exec update should look like, so I had the perfect opportunity to put my thoughts forward on how we could best tackle the brief by leveraging the ways of working of the Ogilvy Customer Lab.
“I put my thoughts forward on how we could best tackle the brief in the Ogilvy Customer Lab.”
I proposed to our Global Philips Business Director that we shouldn’t just aim to supply strategic thinking but we should bring it to life by creating a customer validated Proof of Concept experience concept. In other words, a tangible manifestation of the strategy.
Working with the Philips Global Business Director and our Head of Strategy, we developed a three-week sprint process with a week-by-week plan with regular client check-points. The end game was to get to a concrete proposition and an experience prototype that we could test with real customers as part of the process in the final week. A Proof of Concept, in other words.
We proposed putting together a multi-disciplinary sprint team that was made up of UX, design, customer experience and brand strategy. This was going to be a dedicated team that was going to be 100% committed, from beginning to end.
My role was to act as the Sprint Lead responsible for keeping up the momentum and driving the strategic response.
“Our goal was to get to a customer validated Proof of Concept in just three weeks.”
In our dedicated Sprint room at Ogilvy
With our Philips clients bought into the way of working and Scope of Works signed off, we cleared the decks and locked ourselves in a dedicated room.
Our belief was that it was no longer enough to just offer transactional and rational benefits to customers. Our aim was to design one cohesive customer proposition and experience that brought the useful and the emotional together.
After defining the parameters of the more rational and functional benefits that My Philips product registration could offer customers, we then started to explore how we could bring a more emotive engagement element into the experience. We knew from research and data that causes mattered to our audience.
We explored how we could align with Philips’ social cause of improving the lives of 3 billion people. Here the Phillips Foundation and its existing work became a proof point and a vehicle we could leverage.
‘Better Me’ (the functional and service-led proposition) ‘Better World’ (the social cause), became our two-fold value proposition and working title.
“85% of consumers think brands should play a larger role in society.”
An early illustration of the Better Me Better World customer experience
Having agreed on a proposition with our Philips client by the end of week 2 of our sprint, the focus of our third week was to bring it to life through an experience concept which we rapidly prototyped.
We arranged a session in the Ogilvy Customer Lab and tested our thinking with Philips customers. Armed with further feedback from our customer testing, we sharpened up our proposition and experience concept.
The end result from our intensive three-week sprint wasn’t a 100-page strategy but two compelling films: a manifesto of the Better Me Better World proposition and an accompanying film that brought the customer experience to life.
“The end result from our intensive three-week sprint wasn’t a 100-page strategy but two compelling films.”
Our videos along with a handful of set up slides found its way to the desk of Philips CEO Frans van Houten, who immediately loved the concept. Not only that, but he wanted to personally launch the programme at the upcoming Social Good Summit in New York organised by the United Nations and Mashable.
Ogilvy soon got a message back with a request to plan and prepare the whole programme and campaign ready for launch. Our three-week sprint had unlocked a significant opportunity for the agency that was to keep over a dozen people busy over the next four month period.
The first step in making it happen was to carry out further audience testing in key markets. I observed a series of focus groups across the pond in US and in Berlin, Germany. These were facilitated by a research partner.
The results were taken into a two-day client workshop in Amsterdam, where the Ogilvy team worked through the details with a broad Philips stakeholder team.
The experience proposition, including the name Better Me Better World we had coined as part of our three-week Customer Lab sprint, finally saw the day of light as the CEO Frans Van Houten stood in the podium in New York.
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