Aēsop

Creating a future customer experience vision and channel strategy to drive profitable growth and get ahead of customers’ emerging needs.

Customer persona development
Long-term CX journey
Omnichannel retail strategy

  • Aēsop, a leading skincare brand from Australia, decided to embark on a long-term channel ecosystem transformation to ensure it could continue to deliver outstanding customer experiences while driving profitable growth. In order to achieve its ambitious sales goals, it needed to built a more balanced global retail footprint, introducing new store formats/channels, refining product assortment and upgrading its network.

    A big part of this future-vision retail strategy included making improvements to the current customer experience and come up with new, exciting ideas for physical locations and digital channels.

  • I was brought in by Bain & Company, as part of a larger team, to join the CX workstream and co-lead the creation of a future vision for Aēsop’s customer experience. My first step was to join Bain’s internal research team and translate learnings from numerous ethnographies, store visits, social listening and interviews into detailed future-shopper consumer personas, representing key market segments, and a current-state journey map (from awareness to post-sale).

    I was responsible for designing our co-creation sessions with Aēsop leaders, setting up agendas, developing ideation artifacts, such as “empathy mind-maps”, and defining creative exercises. We facilitated collaborative sessions with cross-functional teams to align on key strategic directions and create ideas to bring the new CX vision to life based on opportunity territories we uncovered.

    Our recommended future ideas and strategy (on a 6 to 10-year roll-out time horizon) were mapped against an illustrated customer journey, encompassing both physical and digital touchpoints, along with an implementation roadmap. Each idea detailed short and long-term executions based on rich opportunity territories aligned with the company brand ethos and future goals.

  • Aēsop has been rolling out the channel strategy according to plan, opening up new store formats/channels (e.g., mono-brand at Airports, in-room toiletries/ hotel amenities partnerships such as with Waldorf Astoria) and changing existing retail footprint. It has incorporated new experiences into the CX journey around personalization (e.g., online video consultation), community, sustainability and thought leadership.

The images below illustrate some of the project deliverables. Certain details have been disguised to protect client confidentiality.

Customer personas and current-state journey

01

After conducting extensive research that included social listening, mobile ethnographies, store visits and interviews, we mapped out customers’ experiences with Aēsop and how it compared to their overall expectations from a beauty brand across the path to purchase in a current-state CX journey.

This exercise helped us uncover pain-points, understand what’s working/what’s not and identify opportunities for innovation.

We also developed detailed consumer personas based on Aēsop’s key segments to foster empathy among the organization and ensure new solutions had their needs and expectations at heart. They became a critical ideation tool to help us create, filter and prioritize ideas.

Collaborative worksessions

02

Our co-creation process included 2 cross-functional workshops with ~20 Aēsop leaders and used rich ideation artifacts and tools to help us arrive at experience ideas that were creative, customer-centric and aligned to strategic decisions.

We ideated new experience concepts based on a set of 4 opportunity spaces — built by triangulating consumer insights, market trends and Aēsop’s strategic ambitions. We first explored higher-level territories (e.g. Community) to then narrow it down to more robust, market-sized opportunity spaces.

Ideas were grounded in 3 design guiding principles to ensure consistency and alignment with our goals, and also ideated across different time horizons as, ultimately, we aimed to create a long-term experience vision.

Future-state CX journey

03

We presented our future-state experience vision for Aēsop as a detailed CX journey map, organizing ideas as “signature” or as supporting elements. Ideas represented both incremental improvements to existing executions as well as new, differentiating concepts. Relevance to personas and channels was also indicated.

Each idea was detailed to include recommended executions to be implemented both short and long-term and across different CX journey stages (Anticipation, Interaction and Follow up).