New Look

Launch of “Talkable Fashion”

Background
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‍As part of the transition to a global fashion retailer, New Look invested significant time and effort in evolving its brand. Now was the time to launch this new brand story. In evaluating how to best move forward with this launch, a number of key requirements were taken into consideration:
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- The brand story needed to be translated into specific behaviours at the front line that customers would see, hear and appreciate.
- The launch needed to engage the entire organization in the brand – both stores and head office.
- The brand needed to be tangible. It needed live and breathe on a daily basis throughout the company.

For this brand launch to make a real difference to the way customers experienced the business, it was critical to engage every member of staff in bringing the brand to life. Therefore, rather than follow the traditional approach of a one-off marketing “event”, New Look selected Energize Learning to cascade this major new initiative across the business. Their pragmatic approach, willingness to listen and extensive track record within the retail sector being significant drivers of this decision.

What Energize Learning did:
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The approach adopted followed three distinct phases:

Creating a memorable, engaging two hour brand workshop – This was designed in a way that built excitement, buy-in and commitment to do something new. As part of this workshop, teams were introduced to simple, powerful and proven techniques for engaging customers in conversation. The focus was on simplicity – developing a small number of clear, powerful messages that could easily be disseminated to a large audience who had varying degrees of skill and experience. One of the key outputs of the workshop were actions and commitments from the audience as to how they would make the brand live and breathe in their teams.
Coaching “Brand Champions” to deliver the workshop – Energize also ran a “Coach the Coach” programme for 150 senior managers – equipping them with the skills and confidence to cascade this workshop to all 10,000 people within the company. These sessions took participants through a powerful coaching process that imparted new and effective ways of engaging audiences with passion, belief and commitment.
Support the Champions in making the behaviours stick – Two months after the initial launch, Energize developed and ran a “Brand Energizer" workshop for the "Brand Champions" to provide them with practical tools and techniques for re-energising the store management community, coaching their teams and keeping the momentum going on a day to day basis.

The Results
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‍The benefits of this programme have been many and varied. They include:
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- Rapid cascading of the brand across the business with great success and impact
- It proved to be a catalyst for on-going development of a critical community of senior management within the business.
- Head office and stores share a common language and a greater appreciation of each others perspective
- Stores teams are “Talking the Talk” and “Walking the Walk” on the shop floor.
- Core brand behaviours have become a way of life in stores
- Increased morale and motivation across the business – they believed it was going to be different this time and it was!

Case Study: New Look

Launch of “Talkable Fashion”