“Here’s how Target’s design lab in Minneapolis has created six billion-dollar brands, and has more on the way” – Fast Company

Challenge

How might we design a system for our customers to experience new owned brands consistently throughout the Target ecosystem? And can this system work efficiently for content creators?

Define

There are 2 users to consider in this problem. The first is the customer and their need to experience a brand consistently and to have barriers to shopping removed. The second user in this problem are the content creators. They were tasked with creating content for all the marketing channels with speed and efficiency.

Ideate

To understand the full scope of how customers would experience the new brands, I I audited the entire digital ecosystem designed the various customer journeys. With that complete, I had to reconcile the journey map with the planned media buy so I could understand where we would be driving traffic and how the landing experiences need to inspire confidence. and reconciled that with the planned media.

Analyzing the complexity of the map, I worked to simplify the system so it could be repeatable for other launches. Each launch was comprised of 3 phases: Announcement, Pre-Launch and Launch.

Prototype

I designed the system to build on itself at each phase. So we would plan for the whole experience, but only release the parts that corresponded to the phase. Once I had the system approach

Once the system was establish, I designed wireframes for each experience in every phase to direct the content team on what to capture to tell the appropriate stories.

Test

There was no time or budget to conduct formal user testing. The main testing I was conducting was with content creators ensuring that I had captured all of the channels and linking destinations that the customer would encounter so they could plan their stories.

Solution

Created a new way of developing content that made the digital experience consistent and on-brand for customers, as well as designing for efficiency in how we develop the content.

Results

1. Inspired confidence in our content teams by creating a repeatable system for them to present a complete omni-channel experience for our most impactful business objectives, which had never been done before.

2. Connected the dots between creators in traditional media and digital media and created processes to ensure the stories created consistent experiences for customers no matter where they landed in our ecosystem.

3. Drove efficiency in how we develop content by re-using assets in different channels.