Outdoor sports, such as surfing, mountaineering and skiing, are historically exclusive. For years, those sports and their communities were dominated by a white athletic male culture and were far from diverse. This homogeneous environment was, and sometimes still is, reflected within the outdoor industry. Thus, for years, outdoor brands, including Patagonia, represented this one-sided image of outdoor sports throughout their products, marketing, and workplace. This image has excluded various people and has caused minorities to experience barriers to participating in outdoor sports. Over the last few years, Patagonia has been contributing to inclusion and diversity in outdoor sports. As such, Patagonia strives to represent different minorities within outdoor sports. In this way, Patagonia attempts to convey that these people are also part of the outdoors.

Additionally, the brand provides minority communities financial support to participate in outdoor sports and to realize their community projects. Yet, the brand lacks internal diversity and understanding of minorities and their outdoor concerns and interests. In the endeavour for outdoor sports inclusion, Patagonia seeks new ways to understand these people better to support them to engage in outdoor sports. Therefore, this graduation project explores further possibilities for Patagonia to support minorities to enjoy outdoor sports.

Based on insights from literature, interviews with multiple people within the outdoor industry and an analysis of Patagonia, a list of key takeaways is formulated. According to these takeaways, the outdoor sports culture is slowly becoming more diverse, yet outdoor brands internally lack the expertise to represent and appeal to this diverse audience. Besides, outdoor brands need to portray outdoor sports in a way that appeals to people outside the traditional demographic. Lastly, this research dominantly shows that to understand marginalized individuals and to help them engage in outdoor sports, Patagonia needs to collaborate with minority outdoor communities. These communities understand marginalized individuals and know how to get them engaged.

A project vision called "Outdoor Stories" was established based on the key takeaways and Holt's Cultural Brand model (Beverland, 2018). This vision encourages everyone to create outdoor stories together with Patagonia. The underlying thought of this vision is to look for project directions to connect Patagonia with minorities. Thus, creating a solution for collaborative support enabling minorities to participate in outdoor sports. This vision to connect Patagonia with minorities is turned into Designing Outdoor Inclusion, the co-creation tool designed for this graduation project.

Designing Outdoor Inclusion is to be used as a tool for a co-creation session between Patagonia, marginalized young adults and minority community leaders. The tool consists of obstacle and context cards. With the help of these cards, participants brainstorm solutions in groups to solve exclusivity issues in outdoor sports.

Additionally, participants explore applying these solutions within different contexts on which Patagonia has influence. The use of the tool ultimately leads to concepts to enable marginalized young adults to participate in outdoor sports. In cooperation with minorities, Patagonia can then turn these concepts into products, services, and campaigns. Furthermore, the tool enables Patagonia to acquire more knowledge about minorities and provides Patagonia with a means to connect with minorities in a new way.

As the B2B environment of the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry is changing more rapidly than ever, Exact needs to constantly adapt to these changes and accommodate to the increasingly complex needs and wishes of their customers. Designing a good customer experience is vital in ensuring a sustainable competitive advantage for Exact. In order for Exact to try to adapt to this change in environment, a shift towards customer centric initiatives showed over the past years within its organisation. Among these initiatives is the creation of a Customer Journey Management (CJM) team, about half a year ago, within the Customer Success department of Exact. Their aim is to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn, by optimising the customer experience of Exact solutions. This project was initiated by the CJM team which asked: “How can Exact bring Customer Journey Management to the next level of maturity?” As CJM is slowly getting up and running, many quick wins can still be achieved in the Post-Sales process they are currently responsible for. It is debatable, however, whether this is the right approach for the long term, whether they have the right influence to make the desired impact and whether the metrics they are being held accountable for are fitting for its ultimate goal: the optimisation of Exacts end-to-end customer journey. In order to reach this goal, close collaboration between different departments is necessary, by empowering them to positively contribute to their part of the customer journey in an integrated way. This can only be achieved through a shared deep understanding of the customer and their journey and if the value of customer journey management is proven for all stakeholders involved. Ultimately, electing a board member responsible for Exacts customer experience in the form of a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) would be advised. The challenges that the CJM team face, identified in analysis, all seem to point towards the conclusion that user-centered design thinking is not embedded (enough) into the veins of the company. This does not mean that it’s employees do not have the customer at heart though, but it seems that often the customer is not understood well enough and thus mistakes are more easily made. In practise this approach seems harm the customer experience, hurting revenues in the long run. As long as the customer experience is not understood deeply enough by employees, Customer Journey Management does not have the means to impact the customer journey end-to-end, as recommended by literature to bring CJM to the next level. Therefore it was chosen to design a system that enables Exact employees to gain a deeper understanding of their customers. The solution was found in the design of a Game Development Guide. It enables the CJM team (and other employees) to simulate the customers experience through playing games. It is a step-by-step guide for its development and provides the process and tools necessary to design, play and evaluate the games based on different customer experiences. Once the game is ready to be played it can stimulate participatory learning by having employees temporarily step into the customers shoes. This creates deeper (richer) understanding of the customer’s perspective, including his/her (tacit and latent) needs, emotions and contextual factors. The resulting deep customer insights can then be used throughout the innovation process to validate assumptions and prioritize solutions, which results in improved Customer Journey Management. This way Exact will be able to better understand their customers, enabling them to design user-centered solutions that truly benefit their customers experiences. This will ensure that Exact will stay on top, giving them a sustainable competitive advantage over their competitors in the long run.

SINNER - the primary stakeholder in this thesis - is known as a sports eyewear company that focuses on winter sports. With the ambition to gain more brand awareness throughout the Netherlands and eventually worldwide, multiple aspects of the brand have to be made clearer in order to create a stronger brand. Brands need to innovate in order to maintain their position in the market. When a brand gets tired, it might require revitalization, also known as repositioning (Beverland, 2018). The conducted internal analysis is the basis for defining the brand, the external analysis has created input to understand the segment where SINNER can position itself and realize its competitive advantage. The literature review has been used to define how to strengthened a brand. Based on these analyses the positioning and proposition were set up. Additionally, a purpose, mission and vision were determined and used in the brand DNA of SINNER. To communicate all of these elements, the design principles were set up. These design principles are applied in the brand book, which explains what the brand is about, how the brand communicates and how this communication looks when visualized. The brand book is the ultimate deliverable and shows how the new brand strategy enables internal alignment and consistency. The outcomes for this thesis are: An analysis, providing an understanding of what the brand SINNER is about A new design strategy, describing the new brand identity A brand book that presents the new brand identity Brand touchpoints that visualize the translation from brand book to design In the end several recommendations are done, to apply the results in order to give the SINNER brand a new and reinforced appearance.

This thesis represents the result of a graduation project for the Master Strategic Product Design at the Delft University of Technology carried out in collaboration with citizenM. citizenM is a Netherlands based hotel chain and offers an affordable luxury lifestyle in the big cities of the world. The aim of citizenM is to become the leading transformational hotel inspiring a new generation. To achieve this ambition, citizenM needs to innovate the customer experience.  

Nowadays, we live in a world that gets more and more connected through customer innovations. Customers are transforming their behaviour from just consuming services and goods into being part of an experience. Customers prefer to feel that they belong to a company instead of being simply treated as customers. To become more customer-centric citizenM wanted to create a board of customers.  

The customer need and the citizenM ambition led to the project aim to find out if implementing a customer board for repeat customers will create a next level of engagement and a sense of belonging to the citizenM brand. The intended result is fulfilling the customer need, a sense of belonging, by a next level of engagement. The challenge that followed was to design a unique platform, a customer board, where customers can give their opinions and advice, and to demonstrate how customer feedback is shaping company decisions. 

The process consists of three phases; research, conceptualization and validation. The research phase included a literature review regarding customer co-creation, attitudinal loyalty and customer engagement. Next, an analysis of the competitors, customers, company and future trends was conducted. The research insights were the basis for the conceptualization. The presented solution, offering a sense of belonging to the guests by a next level of engagement, is called the citizen board. The citizen board is a digital co-creation platform integrated in the citizenM app called citizenship and will be an extension of the digital passport concept. 

The final design proposition, a visualisation of the app user flows, illustrates an innovative process for citizenM guests to interact with citizenM. The citizen board is focussing on creating micro moments and a feedback loop for repeat customers who are interested and willing to share their suggestions. Besides creating a next level of engagement and a sense of belonging, the customer board is also there for customers to create enjoyment & fun, a social community and a feeling of being valuable and recognized. With a personalised experience citizenM is willing to invest in becoming an even more customer-centric organization. citizenM will differentiate themselves from their competitors and with the help of the citizen board citizenM will maintain a steady loyal customer base.

During the validation phase the citizen board proposition was presented to twenty five citizenM guests and hotel ambassadors. The qualitative research method resulted in a validation moment of the design criteria. The thesis is concluded with recommendations for further developing the citizen board proposition.

During the 1980s the ‘experiential view’ of a consumers buying process was proposed in literature. Since then, the experience a consumer has when interacting with a brand (Brand Experience) has been a frequently discussed topic in research and practise. Different disciplines propose measurement scales to capture this brand experience (BE). However literature does not agree on one generally accepted method. The marketing practise extensively utilises simple evaluative surveys such as the NetPromotorScore (NPS) and CustomerSatisfaction (CSat) to evaluate the BE of a consumer. As the world is becoming more and more digital oriented, consumers leave digital behavioural traces. This brings new measurement possibilities. Accordingly, this thesis proposes a data- driven method for measuring BE. The method is manifested through the design of a digital tool. This resulted in the MerkMonitor, a digital dashboard which analyses the experiences consumers have when interacting with a brand. Originating back to psychology, literature identifies that this brand experience consists of Sensorial, Affective, Cognitive and Behavioural responses. Literature shows a call for new types of measurement to capture these dimensions. The design process proposes a set of variables (measurements) to give insight in the four dimensions. Each dimension is made up of three attributes, which can be measured either with observant variables or surveying variables. Measurements are mostly done at digital touch points, such as social media, the website of the brand or through surveys via for example e-mails. As different attributes are valuable for different clients of GP, a selection toolkit is made. When a selection of fitting variables is decided upon, they form the metrics of the dashboard together. The thesis proposes a dashboard containing ten variables as starting point. When the dashboard is implemented and used right, both GP and the client will be able to analyse the BE and anticipate on this analysis. The launch of the dashboard will make GP able to monitor BE through real-time measurement. This contributes to GP being an expert in BE. Finally, the Merk Monitor was evaluated through six sessions with Strategists, Technology experts and clients. Also a MVP was developed and a prototype was explored to ensure feasibility. This led to recommendations for futher developping and implementations of the product.

Out of Office Workations is a Dutch startup that focuses on organizing and planning unique group experiences outside the usual work environment, called workations. This service provides a right balance between work and leisure inspired by the nomad lifestyle which combines their ability to work remotely dominated by an attractive location offering a variety of leisure activities. While Out of Office Workations primary target is the digital nomad community, this master thesis focuses on identifying different areas of opportunity for a goal-oriented retreat in new potential market segments since their ambition is to become Europe’s customer-centric, innovative and sustainable retreat solution. To achieve this ambition, Out of Office Workations must discover how to fit their offer to new market segments to create a long term sustainable growth with their workation service by stimulating a work-time-balance setting. First, to gain a holistic understanding of what is a workation and what are the factors associated with this service highly exploratory research, website content analysis, semi-structured interviews with workation providers helped clarified the context, the target audience, and the different value propositions behind the offer of workations. Next, interviews with potential clients are executed to find new market segments for Out of Office. I identified three customer profiles in these interviews, two being addressed by the competitors and one remains relatively uncharted: the consulting segment. I have chosen this customer profile as this new market segment is not being forwarded by the competitors representing a valuable opportunity for Out of Office to scale their workation to a new unexplored direction. To properly fit the workation offer to the consulting segment, ten interviews with consultants from a variety of consulting firms were scheduled to understand this customer profile. Once gaining a more detailed and structured view of the consultants’ professional and personal life, the design solution “Out of Office Professional Services” is created to meet their needs, aspirations and frustrations. The presented solution is intentionally transformed as a quotation form to integrate it into the Out of Office website. This quotation form enables consultants to know what value proposition is suitable for their needs and facilitates the construction of their own workation. Once having the answers from the quotation form, Out of Office can create a personal and tailored-made experience for them. These four value propositions have been validated with the CoFounder of Out of Office Workations, however, to verify fully the effect of them Out of Office should test them in real-life projects with the stipulated target market.

This master thesis report is the culmination of six months of collaboration between TU Delft and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The aim of the project is to investigate ways by which KLM can change the perception of passengers during a disruption event such as flight delays, cancellations, and missed connections. In order to accomplish this, the Double Diamond approach was used along with the addition of an envisioning phase based on the inside-out process of meaning innovation pioneered by Roberto Verganti (Verganti, 2016). KLM is one of the world's oldest airlines that still operate with their original name. Their ambition is to become Europe’s most customer-centric, innovative and efficient network carrier by offering memorable experiences by leveraging new market opportunities and technological developments to deliver superior customer service. KLM has done extensive research and examined and identified certain gaps in their customer journey experience to focus on and improve. One of the key gaps identified is disruption handling. KLM projects almost 4.5 million passengers to be affected by disruptions in 2019 (KLM, 2019). During a disruption, passengers experience increased stress and seek guidance and quick resolutions to their problems. A disruption is a sudden event and that passengers do not have control over it. Thus the only way they will feel some sense of control is if they have information about it, information that is transparent and information that will help them take their next steps. In fact, one of the core customer needs gathered from research is the receiving of proactive information in the event of a disruption. Regardless of the cause of the disruption, passengers are usually quick to blame the airlines for the negative situation. Therefore, effective communication might help in reducing that perception and might generate a positive sentiment about the airline. According to KLM’s own disruption communication mandate, passengers should receive information that is consistent, relevant, contextual, personalized and transparent at the right time. However, that is sometimes not the case. KLM uses a number of communication channels to provide information. However, most often, all these pieces of information are not consistent, relevant, personalized or on time. In addition, as per the KLM compass and their new emphasis on customer intimacy, KLM wants to show passengers that they care about them, that passengers feel recognized, comfortable and touched. However, these particular aspects of customer intimacy do not translate to the information that the passenger is being sent. Therefore, the tone of voice, the nature of the information ( helpful, not helpful, feed-forward ) also makes a big difference in how passengers perceive KLM as a brand. In order to make all information more coherent and consistent across all channels and touchpoints, there was a need to evolve a communication structuring, design, and dissemination framework which effectively and consistently delivers the most relevant informational content as expected and desired by passengers under conditions of flight disruption and otherwise. Thus, The Asix structure for information content was created to unify all the information content. The Asix structure provides guidelines as to how the information should be structured along with giving guidelines about the tone of voice of the message as well. In essence, messages designed on the basis of the Asix structure make the passengers feel more recognized, acknowledged and seem to be more sincere and heartfelt which positively influences their perception about KLM and their situation as well, thereby increasing their trust in KLM and their belief that KLM truly cares for them. This is a good positive step towards positively changing the perception of the passengers during a disruption.