Challenge: I am part of the Marketing team in my organisation. As part of my role I am tasked with looking  after a portfolio of groups of customers. This means I need to make sure that I retain their spend  with our organization and intervene if it declines.  The challenge that I am faced with is that one of my largest groups of customers (3000) have  been declining their spend with my organization over the past 2 years. I need to come up with  an initiative that I can roll out at scale to increase their spend. The scope of the initiative is not  limited but I need to return a positive ROI on any budget applied to the initiative.

Selection: I chose the Learning Launch tool with was described in depth in week 4 of the Design Thinking  for innovation course from the University of Virginia. A Learning Launch allows you to test a  hypothesis or idea with customers in a live environment at a small scale. This means that if you  fail to reach the goal that you are intending, you will not have wasted a lot of time and money in  the process. The Design Thinking for Innovation course highlighted how IBM carried this  approach out successfully when thinking about their trade show presence.

I chose a learning launch because I need to increase customer spend in a certain part of my  customer base and I need the role out at scale to be successful and gain positive ROI.  However, I have some ideas which are based of past customer research, but I am not sure  which idea is the right one to role out at scale. A learning launch allows me to test ideas at a  smaller scale to ﬁnd out what works so that I can then scale it and get the results.

Application: I used the learning launch tool to test the idea of providing a prize for customers increasing  spend with my company. The top 5 customers to increase their spend with us in a month, won a  trip overseas. This was calculated as a percentage of the same month last year so that the  largest customers didn’t automatically win.

The goals of the Learning Launch were: to see if a prize can be used to incentivize increased  customer activity, and to see at least 30% of customers communicated to increasing their  activity over the same month last year.

From a customer base of 3000 customers, I chose 100 to use as my Learning Launch test  group. I used our call center call the customers and introduce the competition. I also followed up  with an email describing the prize and competition details, this gave more validity to the phone  call that the customers received.

The outcome of the Learning launch was that only 10% of customers increased their activity  which does not cover the investment that I made to provide the prize. This meant that I learnt  that a prize is not the way to achieve the business outcome that I was looking for. More ideas  need to be tested before I roll out an incentive at scale.

Insight: The insight I gained from using the tool was that I may have been be more successful with the  concepts that I was testing if they were based on suggestions from customers, rather than ideas  generated from business research. I think that if I get in front of customers and ﬁnd out what

they are trying to overcome then an incentive to solve those issues might have more cut  through.

More broadly, the outcome of using a Learning launch allowed me to “fail small” and learn from  the approach I took. This has given me a very positive outcome when it comes to applying  Design Thinking and I will not hesitate to use design thinking in future.

Approach: Next time a session with customers to understand the current motivations for them is necessary  before generating ideas to test with the Learning Launch.

With greater understanding of customer motivations, next time I will be able to use the Learning  Launch to test an option that customers will be more interested in. meaning I will be able to  make sure I have the right approach to the challenge before I roll it out at scale.

