Overview

I was engaged through The Commons Campus to design and facilitate a series of innovation workshops for Jetstar, with senior stakeholders from both Jetstar and Qantas Loyalty in the room. The focus: applying gamification principles to drive customer base growth, deepen loyalty, and improve the overall customer experience.

In the highly competitive low-cost airline sector, the difference between a loyalty program that works and one that doesn’t often comes down to how well the experience is designed. These workshops were built to generate ideas worth building.

The Challenge

Loyalty programs in the airline industry are notoriously complex, full of coupon mechanics and points systems that, for many customers, create friction rather than affinity. The challenge was to move a senior stakeholder group past existing mental models and generate fresh thinking about what loyalty could genuinely mean for Jetstar’s customers.

”Hearing complicated stories about coupon deals and points turn me off.”

– Customer insight informing the workshop brief

Getting a cross-functional group of senior stakeholders to think differently, and generate outputs that could survive the room and inform real product development, required careful design of the process itself.

My Role

I was responsible for end-to-end design and facilitation of the workshop series: planning all sessions, designing the activities and materials, managing the energy and focus of the group in the room, and ensuring the outputs were structured and useful enough to inform future work.

What I Designed and Delivered

Each session was built around Jetstar’s four primary customer segments, ensuring that ideas generated were grounded in real customer contexts rather than abstract concepts. I designed the workshop arc to move stakeholders through a structured journey: from building customer empathy to surfacing strategic principles, to generating and shaping concrete concepts.

The team produced:

• Customer empathy maps for all four primary customer segments
• Design principles to guide future loyalty initiatives
• How Might We questions and structured brainstorming outputs
• 16 new product and service concepts ready for further development

Result

Sixteen concepts across four customer segments, generated by a senior cross-functional group, in a structured format that could be handed directly to a product team. The sessions produced the kind of outputs that often take months to develop through conventional strategy processes.

More importantly, the process gave stakeholders from both Jetstar and Qantas Loyalty a shared language and a set of principles to evaluate loyalty initiatives against going forward, which is often more valuable than any individual concept.