Tobias Borris
How a lean, experimentation-based approach helped a global business to de-risk investment by testing critical assumptions early, quickly and at small scale.
Summary
One of the world's largest apparel companies planned to expand its loyalty program with an elite tier. In just 3 weeks, the challenge was to validate the viability of this new tier design. A lean, experimentation-based methodology was implemented to test critical assumptions quickly and at a small scale. The team developed an experimentation plan and conducted various digital tests, including fake door experiments, A-B testing on social media, and a WhatsApp panel. These experiments aimed to understand elite customers' motivations and validate key assumptions about the proposed loyalty tier. The rapid testing approach provided fast, actionable insights that led the company to reassess its product strategy. Experiments revealed that customer preferences differed from initial assumptions, indicating a potential misalignment between the proposed tier and actual customer needs. Based on the results, the team advised against proceeding with the original elite tier concept. Instead, they suggested exploring new digital products, services, and experiences that better align with the discovered customer motivations.
Challenge
To build on its forward momentum one of world’s largest apparel companies set out to expand its loyalty program with an additional status tier. While the company had already started to ideate potential features and service that could be added to the digital platform, I led the argument why the company is well-advised to validate the fundamental design of the planned level before moving ahead. As is to be expected from a company that makes running shoes, the organization was under time pressure and expected rapid results.
Approach
The new elite tier was originally designed to appeal to the company’s most valuable customers: trend-conscious sneaker fans that spend thousands of Dollars per year on the latest collection. As an incentive to keep spending the company would grant them with early access to the most exclusive product releases – helping them to boost social validation from people they adore. While this concept had potential, it also involved a large number of consumer and commercial assumptions.
To test these, the experimentation methodology I led focused on getting fast, measurable, and personal insights, and validating the key assumptions through smart and simple in-market tests. This enables businesses to invest in smaller increments when the confidence in the solution is low and risk is high.
To guide the process, I developed an experimentation plan which laid out the objective, approach and expected outcome of each test.
Whereas commercial modelling provided an estimate on the financial value of the upcoming level, a range of digital experiments investigated how much elite customers are actually motivated by status and exclusivity versus intrinsic motivations such as creative self-expression. This included fake door experiments (to test consumer sign-up and drop-off rates), A-B testing on social media (to test click-through-rate) as well as a WhatsApp panel (to explore customers’ deep-rooted personal motivations).
Through an iterative test design, the newly generated insights were directly integrated and further developed in the subsequent experiments.
Experimentation Mock Ups
Outcome
In only a matter of weeks I was able to accelerate the speed of learning by pinpointing what dimensions are most interesting to the audience, and supporting existing theoretical research with clear behavioral data.
This allowed the company to reassess its product strategy and thereby protected the business from making misguided investments. It also opened up new conversations about how to address these more deeply understood customer needs through new digital products, services and experiences which were explored during a follow-up engagement.
Key Services
​​
-
Consumer Validation, including respondent recruitment, fieldwork, synthesis
-
Commercial Optimization, including business modelling, capability & asset assessment, org readiness assessment
-
Visual Design, including illustration prototyping, user interface prototyping, video prototyping
-
Commercial Modelling, including business case development, organization human & asset resourcing planning