A year into the Elemental Concept Group
In 2025, Purple Shirt joined the Elemental Concept Group. It's been a year of finding out what we're genuinely good at when we operate as one business rather than two client lists bolted together. Purple Shirt's strength has always been human centred design and a deep, practical grounding in Jobs to Be Done and customer experience. Elemental Concept's strength has been technology, data and AI delivery at scale. Combined, we think that's a differentiated offer, and Australia is where we're choosing to prove it.
Why customer experience, and why now
Customer experience is where the gap between effort and outcome is currently most visible, and where we're choosing to make our case first. Forrester's latest CX index found that across Australia, Singapore and India, CX quality declined at more than seven times the rate it improved last year. Thirty seven percent of brands went backwards against five percent that got better. Most of these organisations already have CX teams, CX budgets and CX dashboards. This isn't a capability problem. What they're missing is a clear view of what actually drives customer choice, so the effort goes into polishing journeys and touchpoints that were never the real reason someone chose to stay, switch or leave in the first place.
That's the point of view underpinning Causal CX, the approach Purple Shirt has built over years of practice in New Zealand and are now introducing internationally. It's built on Clayton Christensen's Jobs to Be Done methodology rather than satisfaction scores, NPS scores and journey maps, because Jobs methodology asks a more useful question: what progress is this customer actually trying to make that causes them to choose one solution over another. Get that right and you know which parts of the experience are worth investing in. Get it wrong and you can improve everything and still be losing ground, which is exactly what's happening to a lot of brands right now.
It's also the exact problem Chris Green, the Elemental Concept Group's Head of Strategy and Innovation, has been helping Australian clients with for over a decade. That experience puts him in about as good a position as anyone to lead this work on the ground.
The Australian consulting market needs a different starting point
The Australian consulting market is large and still dominated by firms happy to consult on absolutely anything. That breadth used to be an asset. Increasingly, it's the constraint. Clients don't need a firm that can theoretically do everything. They need one that's genuinely excellent at the handful of things that actually move their business forward, and honest enough to say when something won't. That's been Purple Shirt's approach for years, and it's the approach the wider group is now bringing to Australia.
The Elemental Concept Group has never formally operated in Australia, aside from two senior team members already based there. Most firms enter a new market on the back of an existing relationship, a big name client to reference, or a brand that already means something locally. We have a small number of highly valued Australian clients including Future Women, Duke of Edinburgh Australia, Mott McDonald and Transport for New South Wales, but we don't have a large legacy client base, an existing reputation or an inherited way of doing things to protect.
We see that as an advantage rather than a gap to apologise for. It means we get to decide, deliberately rather than by accident, what we lead with. For Australia, that's Causal CX, with Chris Green and Gaven Henry on the ground, backed from New Zealand by Blake Lough (CXO) and Steve Alexander (CEO - APAC).
What this means for clients
We're not arriving with a bigger team or a longer service list than the firms already established in the Australian market. The big four can out resource us on any given day of the week. We're arriving with a different starting question. Most CX programmes focus on removing existing pain points to make it easier for customers to interact with a product or service. Making it easier won't necessarily drive customer choice or deliver growth.
We start with the decision itself. What is this actually costing you, and is it worth solving before you spend another dollar improving it. If your CX investment isn't moving the numbers that matter, that's not a delivery problem. That's the conversation we exist to have.
This is the right direction for Purple Shirt's growth as part of the Elemental Concept Group, and we wouldn't be making the case if we didn't believe it holds. So if you, or anyone you know, in Australia or anywhere else, is struggling to work out what's actually driving their customers' choices, let us know.
