Design Strategist in Climate Change
Design Strategist in Climate Change
Strategy for Club Premier’s transition into a user-centered company
After Club Premier revitalized their image and changed their business model, from being Aeroméxico’s loyalty program to a coalition program, their commercial partner’s number increased to over a 100 and their member base quickly grew up to 5 million members and also diversified.
With so many new messages to communicate to very different people Club Premier’s marketing campaigns doubled, from 500 campaigns in 2015 to over 900 in 2016, and lost their effectiveness and sense of purpose.
Concerned, Club Premier approached SBB to best design and filter the communication efforts to members, based on needs and wants instead of assumptions, so they could be more effective.
To fully understand Club Premier’s situation and challenge, we performed a market and user research based on design thinking and service design tools. We gathered a lot of qualitative data through interviews (frontstage & backstage), analyzed it carefully and found information about the users’ and partners’ needs and wants. We also found Club Premier’s internal pain points.
The challenge laid beyond communication. Regardless how beautiful, campaigns would only work if their offer resonated with members’ desirability.
In order for Club Premier’s communication to be effective, they had to adopt a user-centered culture where not only the communication design but also the content made sense with member’s needs and wants.
This transition had to be smooth, letting Club Premier test the results and many advantages of user-centered cultures, and progressively collaborate to implement this culture into their service design, value proposition, and overall member experience.
To identify the different type of members we deepened the research and classified the information into diverse member archetypes based on their most particular characteristic: their lifestyle.
To easily share and present their member types, we created Persona Profiles with the variables that would best help the company to understand, empathize, and design for their members.
For each Persona Profile, we developed story-telling’s, diagrams, user journey maps, character illustrations and even branding that would make it easier for Club Premier to remember and adopt them.
After the successful presentation with Club Premier’s CEO, we were assigned to share this Persona Profiles with the whole company at all levels. To effectively accomplish this we designed a half-day creative workshop that pursued four different goals in steps.
For the first part of the workshop, we developed creative confidence in the group through a 30-circles activity and showed the advantages that doing things a different way could have. After, we divided the whole group into 6. They performed interviews through a small questionary and later had to guess which Persona Profile their interviewee resembled the most. We then presented the Persona Profiles, explained how the tool worked and shared the process with them.
For the second part, we divided them into 4 groups that were handled a case where they first had to identify which Persona Profile the case talked about, answer an empathy map to prove it, and define the main challenge of this Persona Profile in relation to the case.
After, the groups brainstormed ideas to solve this challenge and selected the idea that held the most value to both the company and the member. Finally, they presented their idea to others in a storyboard to vote for the best. We ended with a memory game that shared the tool’s application each of them visualized in their area.
At the end of the workshop, 86% of the participants gathered a complete knowledge of the Persona Profile tool, 80% were able to fully empathize with them, and 70% started to visualize an internal use in diverse areas.
30 out of a total 150 participants on day 5/5
The strategy is still in process but Club Premier is already implementing their Persona Profiles in different areas. They’re optimizing the resources assigned, and developing customized digital campaigns. They’re including a desirability analysis and Persona Profile identification to their process in key assignments. They’re selecting commercial partners based on member identified needs.
The team continued working on the implementation of user-centered tools in company’s designated projects, by guided sessions with multidisciplinary teams to resolve a problem assuring business viability, technical feasibility, and member desirability. Once these leaders have adopted user-centered culture they will permeate it to the teams they are leading, and Club Premier’s user-centered culture will continue to grow and develop.
Getting from interviews to a user-centered company strategy was not easy. A lot of time, people, laughter, frustation, and post-its were involved. I would like to publicly recognize all of the support Club Premier and their Partners gave us, as well as the SBB team for all their patience when the Strategic Design Team invaded yet another wall to make it a new board. And of course the Strategic Design team, Adriana Ojeda y Zaira Pérez, from whom I learned more than I could have ever imagined.