At the end of 2021, architecture firm Warren and Mahoney was commissioned to redesign Vodafone’s physical store space and optimise it for customer experience.
This included designing both new stores and renovating existing ones. To support this work, Warren and Mahoney commissioned Perceptive to complete a research study to explore how and why customers use the telco retail space, and what opportunities exist to express, support, and build a telco brand in a retail environment.
The catch: Because this work was related to Vodafone’s rebrand to One NZ, strict non-discloser agreements meant that Warren and Mahoney was unable to disclose anything about the new One NZ brand.
“Redesigning a store space is more than a logo and colour palette change,” says Justin Crook, Brand Design Lead at Warren and Mahoney. “We really wanted to understand how this physical space could inform people’s impression of the brand and how we could elevate the physical space to be a core brand asset.”
Warren and Mahoney is a multidisciplinary design practice offering architectural, interior, graphic, urban and environmentally sustainable design services. With over 70 years in practice, it is the only third-generation architectural practice in New Zealand and the firm has designed many buildings regarded as the benchmark of New Zealand Modernism. Today they have teams in Auckland, Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch, Queenstown, Dunedin, Sydney and Melbourne.
Our projects start with a clear definition of the end user’s needs that, through our processes, will inform the fundamental principles of a design strategy.— Gareth Huston, Principal Specialist, Warren and Mahoney.
Vodafone/One NZ’s strict non-disclosure agreement meant that very few people knew the full story.
“While everyone on the project knew the work was for Vodafone, only some people knew it was for a rebrand,” say Ange Dunn, Senior Business Director at Perceptive. “Meanwhile, no one outside of Vodafone knew anything about the nature of the new brand or the direction it would take.”
From both design and research perspectives, this made communicating the objectives and goals of the project incredibly tricky.
We really wanted to understand how this physical space could inform people’s impression of the brand and how we could elevate the physical space to be a core brand asset.
—Justin Crook, Brand Design Lead, Warren and Mahoney.
Because Warren and Mahoney was unable to give Perceptive any information related to the nature of the rebrand, they compiled a comprehensive list of objectives to guide Perceptive’s research.
These objectives were grouped into four distinct categories:
1. Understand the experience of the telco retail environment.
2. How to build brand associations of authentically Aotearoa, sustainable and community through the retail environment.
3. How telcos can better support SMEs.
4. Quantify the current customer experience (SME and Personal).
“Retail store design fundamentally requires designers to understand what customers’ needs are and reflect those needs in our design. For us, that meant we had to explore and dig down deep to understand what telco customers needed before picking up a pen,” says Gareth.
Our core challenge was to uncover what the role of the physical space is in post-Covid times. Why would people come in versus just do all their engagement online?
—Justin Crook, Brand Design Lead at Warren and Mahoney.
Due to the explorative nature of the objectives, Perceptive ran two qualitative studies to better probe the objectives and questions posed by Warren and Mahoney.
“The insights Vodafone provided us at the beginning of the project were very number heavy. There was no emotion to it; no data on what their customers where feeling. And emotion is so fundamental to what we do,” says Gareth.
Perceptive ran six online focus groups with personal telco customers from across a representative sample of New Zealanders. These focus groups included customers who considered themselves technically confident and those who did not, along with a mix of Vodafone customers and non-customers. As part of the study, focus group members were asked to complete a pre-task to encourage them to think about great experiences they have had with tech brands, and what facilitated these experiences.
In this phase, Perceptive interviewed eight SME telco customers (i.e. business owners and/or decision makers). To get a healthy mix of SME telco customers, interviewees were recruited according to a mix of business size, type, current telco provider, age, gender, industry, location, and level of technology knowledge.
To verify the key insights from the two qualitative studies against a larger sample size, Perceptive ran a quantitative survey via the Perceptive Omnibus, Perceptive’s in-house panel. The survey included questions on telco store experiences, which covered topics such as expected wait time, staff behaviour, how to make queuing more enjoyable, and personalised experiences. The responses were weighted by age, gender, and region to provide a national representative sample of New Zealand.
The Vodafone/One NZ rebrand project arrived at Warren and Mahoney in November 2021 and was to be concluded conceptually in late January 2022 Because of this tight time frame, Perceptive provided preliminary insights mid-way through each qualitative study. This included debriefs after every couple of focus groups or interviews as well as interim top-line reporting.
“The idea was to feed real-time insights to Warren and Mahoney so they could input it straight into their designs,” says Ange Dunn, Senior Business Director at Perceptive.
A major part of the challenge was the rebrand included more than Vodafone/One NZ’s stores. It also included 2000-plus partnership dealers, such as dairies and Harvey Normans. All of these retail spaces needed their Vodafone areas re-designed and optimised for experience.
“It was a massive project,” says Gareth. “Every element of Vodafone red had to go, and we needed to have reliable information very quickly to work with.”
Vodafone’s rebrand to One NZ meant there were many, many stakeholders paying very close attention to the project. As a result, Warren and Mahoney had to engage with a range of specialists during the project and lobby for their experience-first design, rather than a transactional space. In these sessions, Perceptive’s research provided invaluable evidence to back up Warren and Mahoney’s design decisions.
“Historically, Vodafone’s retail spaces focused on transactional interactions between the brand and the customers. We knew it could be more than that. We wanted to create spaces that built relationships,” Gareth explains.
Against more conventional retail models, ‘leave your phone at the door’ became our provocation. The new retail strategy is designed to focus on welcoming, hosting, inspiring and engaging with community and businesses to create brand resonance.
—Justin Crook, Brand Design Lead, Associate at Warren and Mahoney.
Despite the research being for Vodafone/ One NZ, the learnings extend across the telco industry and into many other retail service environments. As a result, Warren and Mahoney gained valuable insights for not only for the Vodafone rebrand project, but insights for how they can continue to design these spaces in the future, particularly in the wake of the behavioural change caused by the pandemic.
“It gave us a really nice holistic overview, from what the pain points are in the physical spaces to clues on how we might design the spaces going forward,” says Justin.
Incorporating Perceptive’s insights, Warren and Mahoney developed a bespoke, modular display system that could fit the different needs and spaces of retailers and dealers.
“You can ramp up or down certain elements depending on where you are,” Justin explains. “This was very much a core part of the brief—that the design and strategy for the space could work for both central city and smaller regional spaces.”
In November 2022, Vodafone/One NZ opened their first new concept prototype store in Rotorua.
"It landed really well with everyone in the business. They were all excited about it," says Gareth Huston, Principal Specialist at Warren and Mahoney.
When Warren and Mahoney typically begin a retail design project, insights are often part of the initial conversation to help them understand the brief and scope of the project. However, often these insights are number driven, with very little emotional insight. The success of Perceptive’s qualitative approach on this project has paved the way for others like it.
“This approach is definitely something we’d be recommending to future clients coming to us with a similar typography,” says Justin. “It gives us a lot of creative leavers to pull during the design process.”
In its first three months and coinciding with a recession, One NZ’s new physical experience has resulted in an uplift of 30 per cent in sales and 12 per cent in foot traffic. Nationally, One NZ has also seen a 9 per cent increase in monthly acquisitions and 9 per cent in people-to-people interactions.
For Warren and Mahoney, their design of One NZ’s retail space saw their team awarded three Silver Pins at the 2023 Design Institute of New Zealand (DINZ) Best Design Awards in the Retail Environments, Spatial Design Communication, and Value of Design categories.
By late 2023, the new store design had been rolled out to numerous locations across New Zealand. To assess the success of the new stores, Warren and Mahoney and Perceptive ran a second round of research to understand the new store experience for both consumers and OneNZ staff.
For this study, Perceptive conducted in-store intercepts at One NZ’s Slyvia Park, Cuba Street and New Plymouth stores. This strategy meant Perceptive could survey customers about their experiences of the new store design, layout and navigation while it was still fresh in the customers’ minds.
“What’s been great to see is almost 90% of customers rated their in-store experience as excellent or good,” says Ange Dunn from Perceptive. “It really validates how insights can empower and inform design.”
Visitors also reported finding the stores easy to navigate and to find areas/products. On top of this, staff interactions were also largely positive.
A staff survey was used to gauge how staff experienced the store and allowed them to share their thoughts on what was working well. Staff were also invited to identify areas for improvement that could further enhance their working environment.
“The employee response to the new store design was very positive, particularly around the appealing design, which encourages customers to browse and showcases products more effectively,” said Ange.
Feedback from both surveys has not only gone into further refinements of Warren and Mahoney’s store design, but is also being used to help One NZ enhance various elements within its stores.
“It’s been great to get feedback directly from our customers and staff on what their views are on our newly designed stores,” says Pooja Patel, Retail Store Environment Lead at One NZ. “A key focus was on functionality of the design to know what’s working well, what’s not, and what to improve on. We’ve reviewed all the feedback captured and made changes in our design 2.0.”
Looking forward, Warren and Mahoney hope to expand this second round of research to explore how SME customers are using and experiencing the dedicated SME facilities at the New Plymouth store.
With numerous lessons learned on the value of insights, post-occupancy research, and the effectiveness of customer feedback, the success of this project is testament to the power of insights and design working together to create truly consumer-centric experiences. With this new approach unlocked and the evidence of its impact clear, we look forward to seeing what new experience-first designs Warren and Mahoney develop and how One NZ will continue to evolve its brand’s physical presence into the future.
Book in a free consult with one of our research experts.