Gaining the loyalty of digital natives

Boosting Gen Z engagement for Levi’s digital Loyalty Program

Catering to the
digital natives

Shopping online offers consumers endless new choices, making it much harder for retail brands to build long-term relationships with them. For this reason, established retail brands face a particular challenge with Gen Z, who are digital natives that have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones.

To retain Gen Z customers, Levi Strauss & Co sought new features for its online platform and company loyalty program. The company wanted to move ahead quickly to test and iterate upon multiple potential features, but the pandemic threatened to make that much more difficult. With in-person research not feasible, the company would need to rewrite the playbook on digital validation.

Validating new loyalty features with new consumers

The experimentation funnel that we provided for Levi Strauss enabled it to get timely data and feedback from Gen Z consumers on several iterations of loyalty features. As part of that evidence-based process, we helped the company establish the right succession of metrics and review processes to support rapid iterative development of those features.

With tight deadlines and the pandemic restricting in-person research, we leveraged digital tools to gather insights from Gen Z interviewees and give them the chance to test out new features. At each stage of this iterative feature development process, we helped set and adapt appropriate performance expectations, based on insights and experiences from other ventures.

Getting the attention of
Gen Z consumers

This validation process confirmed which online features could help the company retain the attention of its Gen Z customers, including by learning more about what products and looks they like. It also identified an online service that should motivate Gen Z to engage more with the Levi Strauss brand and ultimately drive up average order value. More generally, the Levi’s team got a clear insight of which digital features their users valued the most, those that needed a little work, and the ones that shouldn’t make the final cut.

Ready to start
a conversation?

VIRTUAL SUMMIT

Autonomous
Innovation

JUNE 5 & 6