With an ever-quickening rate of technological change and new platforms emerging just as fast, it can be tough for businesses to adapt. Rather than reinvent the wheel, legacy businesses should strive to be themselves.

When it comes to digital transformation, legacy businesses are in a uniquely tight spot: they must consider how to provide new, innovative experiences while retaining the character, image and customer relationship that have worked so well thus far. In some cases, rigid brand standards and internal reluctance to change can squander customers’ relationship with even beloved brands. So how does one invest in digital transformation without losing what made them unique and successful? 

Take stock of customers’ needs and how you can meet them.

The first step in adopting a digital strategy is to keep a customer-centric focus. How can digital platforms add value for them on top of your existing IP and products? Which of your customers’ needs are unmet given the channels that are available to you today? In addition to focusing on customer habits and needs, you should keep an eye on competition for inspiration, benchmarks and to see where possibilities lie. Are there any ways you can provide an even better experience than them?

When envisioning the experience that you want to give customers, avoid a common pitfall that befalls some brands: the dubious assumption that digital transformation solely involves a flashy site or app. In fact, digital transformation is a multifaceted process that will require you to restructure the way you do business. So rather than just invest in a new website or app experience, you’ll need a much more integrated approach to how your core message is amplified across several touchpoints, media and other messaging. This also means restructuring your team a bit. One example of changes you might implement includes marrying your marketing and IT teams to ensure a smoother user experience on the web.

Use your stature to your advantage—but don’t be afraid of change.

Old habits die hard, but legacy businesses have one advantage over newer ones: decades of cultural relevance and consumer trust that they can draw upon when asserting themselves in a digital space. Take, for example, one of the most iconic toy brands of all time: LEGO. When children’s attention shifted from physical toys to smartphones and iPads, LEGO wasn’t going to go down without a fight. The big, bad wolf of digital media failed to huff, puff and blow the LEGO-brick house down. Instead, the Danish toymaker chose to follow the wind and invest heavily in apps, videogames and film. The digital transformation effort has proved so successful that it’s today regarded as the “Apple of toys.”

Niels B. Christiansen, LEGO CEO, mentioned in the LEGO Play Well Report 2018 that “today’s children are seamlessly merging what’s real and what’s virtual, reinventing play in ways people of my own generation could never have envisioned.” This inspired the brand to similarly blur the lines between physical and digital experiences. “We at LEGO are embracing that fluidity in play,” added LEGO CMO Julia Goldin, “and we want to have a bigger role in a child’s development” both online and off.

LEGO’s sophistication in digital platforms culminated in Nexo Knights, a toy franchise designed to hold children’s attention across an entire ecosystem of experiences and media including a TV series, a mobile app, retail VR experiences and a web game. The robust campaign introduced children to the world of the toy series—but even with the bells and whistles of a VR game and mobile app, the focus was still on the boxes of brightly colored, plastic bricks that kids could dive their fists into.

Some things simply aren’t replicated digitally, according to Sander van der Vegte, Head of Labs at MediaMonks Labs. “From the feeling of the bricks to the sound of them clicking together,” there are many physical elements to the beloved brick toy that would make it impossible to replace the physical aspect of play. The big question to consider with digital transformation is how digital can augment the experience or thing that people already love about your brand.

See how we pieced together the Nexo Knights launch brick-by-brick.

Don’t cling to legacy business models, but enhance them in a smart way.

Clinging to a legacy business model can be suicide amidst changing consumer habits. Companies that are early in the digital transformation process can prioritize tools, platforms and features that fit within their existing business model rather than try to reinvent the wheel or deny the changing tide of customer needs.

One aspect of the Nexo Knights campaign that shouldn’t be overlooked is that it invites customers to visit and explore LEGO retail stores in a couple of different ways—despite the fact that most toy sales are happening online rather than off. What sounds like a bad idea has proven fruitful for the brand. A keystone of the campaign is the Nexo Knights VR experience, which lets customers literally step into the IP’s world as soon as they walk through the doors of a LEGO store. After they became acquainted with the product, children were able to find power ups at stores that they could scan into the Nexo Knights app, enhancing their digital experience with in-store visits. With both assets, the brand leveraged digital tech to enhance brick-and-mortar retail and to encourage kids to see the products in-person. Who said retail was dead?

Digital transformation can certainly be intimidating—it forces you to take a long, hard look at the way you form relationships with customers and can even cannibalize your product. But adopting a digital strategy doesn’t have to result in an identity crisis. Sometimes the best strategy is to be yourself.

Calling it a “digital diet,” mobile users are making a point to reduce and limit screen time; even Apple and Google are jumping on the bandwagon by integrating features into iOS and Android, that alert users to the amount of time they devote to their apps. While this might seem like bad news in the attention economy, don’t run for the hills just yet.  “With growing user awareness of smartphone addiction and new tools to monitor and limit use,” MediaMonks Co-founder & COO Wesley ter Haar assures developers, “brands will need to switch focus from extending to enriching user engagement.”

In simple terms, don’t try to capture your users’ attention for as long as possible in a single setting. Instead, leverage good design to create a first-class customer experience that will encourage them to keep coming back. “Great UX and design can turn otherwise unremarkable interactions into brand experiences that directly affect customer satisfaction and loyalty,” says ter Haar. One such “unremarkable interaction” is calling for a cab, which Uber has turned into a luxe and frictionless experience that users, it seems, can’t see themselves living without.

Brands hoping to reach that level of customer loyalty and enthusiasm will want to pay special care to how they design digital experiences—which can have a significant impact on the bottom line, too. At a MediaMonks event in Mexico City in February, ter Haar shared industry findings on the business value of good customer experience design: “Companies that use design more effectively enjoy higher revenue growth than those in the same industry that don’t.”

Mobile is the New Wallet

What better place to look for ways to heighten user loyalty through design is there than loyalty apps? Loyalty programs have long prompted customers to make repeat visits or purchases at a store, and today their presence on mobile has made them more akin to marketing platforms. “Mobile is the new wallet,” says ter Haar, “and having the ‘brand at hand’ enables more meaningful data collection for brands and more relevant content to their users.”

Your mobile app should go beyond simply targeting users with sales and promotions (though those certainly help in providing value to them). A truly engaging customer experience is built around small moments that take advantage of the brand’s presence in users’ pockets, enhancing their day-to-day needs and activities.

One great example of this is the Club Premier app, which lets users handle everyday tasks like checking their balance or use the points they’ve saved. But it goes beyond that: through a dynamic design and engaging UX, the app surfaces up personalized content through its Experience Companion feature, which informs users on how they can make the most out of their Club Premier membership. Built around customers’ unique needs and providing convenience when and where it matters most, the app enhances the way customers engage.

See how Club Premier’s app fit within a larger digital transformation strategy.

Catering to Mobile Moments

Delivering a better customer experience through your mobile app begins in identifying its place within a larger ecosystem of interactions with your brand. One area to focus on is optimizing these experiences: a fashion brand might make it easier for users to reserve and purchase items that are high in demand as soon as they release, for example, like the Adidas Confirmed app that we redesigned for a more stable and smooth user experience.

But designing around mobile moments should do more than optimize. Here, it’s the little details that matter, which can be as simple as acknowledging a user on their birthday. One app that shows how a touch of whimsy can build a better experience is ING’s Kudos app. Designed to provide a way for ING employees to compliment and recognize one another’s contributions, the app uses bright colors and badges to gamify workflows and make complimenting more fun. And if you don’t believe us, look at the numbers: over 50% of internal employees shared kudos on the app in the first three months, which is quite good for an internal business tool.

Because gamification features like badges in Kudos encourage a sense of progress, they make as a nice example for how developers can encourage repeat check-ins and actions from users in their mobile design. In addition, they show how apps designed expressly for customer loyalty can extend beyond the obvious offerings of discounts. Insights gained from such apps—like location, time in-store, browsing or purchasing history and more—may then power more personalized content, allowing for a more engaging customer experience. This way, brands can focus less on delivering more quality in the time users spend within an app than focus on the amount of time. This way, the focus isn’t on the amount of time users spend in an app, but the quality of time spent with the brand—the perfect recipe for satiating the digital diet trend.