MullenLowe Group Japan Establishes Experience Design Offering for APAC Brands

MullenLowe Group Japan has established a new experience design capability, bringing internationally renowned talent to support its efforts in delivering experience-led digital transformation solutions for brands in Japan and across Asia Pacific.

The new offering sits within MullenLowe Group’s digital transformation brand, MullenLowe Profero, and will focus on bringing an experience-first approach to building products and services, that are faster to market, easier to iterate and designed to collect insights and data from the concept stage.

The new offering is led by Zélia Sakhi, previously Head of Creative & Design at Mobiento in Stockholm, which became Deloitte Digital’s center of excellence for design and innovation in North-West Europe.

Commenting on the unique approach behind the offering, Sakhi said: “Brands in Japan and across Asia Pacific are consciously avoiding big ‘mega-projects’, and are instead targeting a portfolio of change projects, bound by a common experience strategy. We have therefore developed a much leaner, data-enabled approach to the experience process, that is tailored to the nuances and contexts within these cultures. 

MullenLowe Profero has already been a forerunner in developing novel approaches to digital transformation solutions. Sakhi joins Kaoru Fujita, UX Director, who has played a central role in defining an innovative Evolutionary Design model with MullenLowe Profero Sydney, based on collaboration between the Data Science and Analytics team in Tokyo and UX teams in Sydney.

“Data science and analytics allows us to identify the underlying behavioral segments among customers, and based on this we are able to create UX briefs for the team in Sydney to devise the next phase of improvements to a customer platform,” explained Fujita.

“Japanese clients are very much focused on outcomes. They need quick, tangible wins, that can be logically articulated, and backed up with hard data. Post-it notes and PowerPoint deliverables will not cut it for most businesses outside of the startup world,” she continued.

This type of hybridization of approaches and cultures is central to MullenLowe Group’s strategy in Asia Pacific, and underpins the regional structure of Centres of Excellence hyperbundling to deliver transformative work for international brands.

“We need to bring adaptive tools and methods to meet the diverse challenges that clients face,” commented Vincent Digonnet, CEO, MullenLowe Group APAC.

“This new capability gives our clients access to world class talent, but just as important is our passion for collaborating with other specialisms across MullenLowe Group, through our hyperbundled structure, and our agility in adapting to various client contexts,” he continued.