Brand Strategy
Breaking down barriers between online to offline experiences
Consumer Marketing -
Energy, Lubricants
Spring - Fall, 2023
Project Overview
In my role as Lead UX Design Strategist & Product Manager at ExxonMobil, I applied design thinking and product management principles to 1) establish product OKRS 2) establish product market fit and 3) ideate and prioritize new features on a product roadmap. I worked closely with engineering, UX and marketing teams to ensure that user needs and business objectives aligned seamlessly.
Problem Statement
A consumer-facing marketing and brand strategy team was looking for new ways to break into the consumer car culture. The exisiting marketing strategy for their flagship product - Mobil 1 - seemingly focused exclusively on one cohort of the market, yet our team's research found significant overlap between consumers of Mobil 1 and driving enthusiasts. The problem became a question - how do we open up new channels and ways of speaking to the growing cohort of driving enthusiasts?
My contributions
As Lead UX Strategist on the team, I helped the team parse through data and personas to discover pain points and areas of opportunity. Once we were clear on the problem statement, we began brainstorming features and user stories. After leading a design thinking workshop with the team, we walked away with a new product strategy that bridged the gap between Mobil 1 consumers and driving enthusiasts - and, especially, solving pain points along the way. We devised a new brand strategy that focused on new messaging around lifestyle and freedom, and especially emphasized an online-to-offline, or end-to-end, brand and experience design similar to the concept of Red Bull and Red Bull Racing. We created a promo video to launch this new strategy. The final, tangible product to the user was a membership program that entitled them to certain rewards and perks related to driving and motor oil. The product roadmap that I devised had features that we rolled out and continue to roll out iteratively, as more data arrives.
Impact
We created a new landing page with Salesforce Marketing capabilities to speak directly to these consumers that would live separately from the legacy website and its look, feel and messaging - creating a new 'home' for driving enthusiasts who we were not previously speaking to. In other words, we opened up capabilities to speak to an entirely new segement of the market for our product and branding strategy. This new website served as a fulcrum to link online and offline experiences, such as exclusive access to events and products. This also created a residual lift to other consumer marketing strategies and goals, such as shopper-based design, racing partnerships, OEM partners (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and dealerships.
