Growing the right way: why Elemental Concept is launching in Australia with Causal CX

We believe we can help businesses grow, the right way.

We’ve been helping businesses to grow for years – as Elemental Concept for the past decade, and in other guises before that – and we’ve built the opportunity to do this for businesses all over the world.

And now, it’s time we took this even further afield – we’re launching in Australia. 

The Australian consulting market is large, and it’s still dominated by firms that will happily consult on absolutely anything. That breadth used to be an asset, but increasingly, it’s the constraint. Because 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. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s been our approach for years.

Why we believe Elemental Concept can make a difference in the Customer Experience market

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 – 37% of brands went backwards against 5% that got better. Most of these organisations already have CX teams, CX budgets and CX dashboards; we’re not looking at a capability problem here. What they’re missing is a clear view of what actually drives customer choice, which means 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 that underpins Causal CX, our approach to customer experience built from years of practice by Purple Shirt in New Zealand, and now being introduced internationally.

It’s built on Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done  (JTBD) methodology rather than satisfaction scores, NPS scores and journey maps, because Jobs methodology asks a more useful question: what progress this customer is 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 Australian brands right now. It’s also the exact thing Chris Green, our Head of Strategy and Innovation, over in Australia already, has been helping clients with for over a decade – which puts him in about as good a position as anyone to lead this.

Your CX programme is probably making the wrong things better.

Not because it’s badly run. Because it started in the wrong place.

What the Purple Shirt acquisition brings to the table in Australia

The incredible team at Purple Shirt, the New Zealand strategy and human-centred design consultancy we acquired in 2025, are the reason we can make this argument credibly at all. Purple Shirt’s strength has always been human-centred design and a deep, practical grounding in Jobs to Be Done and Customer Experience; ours has been technology, data and AI delivery at scale. Combined, these skills are a differentiated offer, and the year since the acquisition has mostly been spent working out what we’re genuinely good at when we operate as one business, rather than as two client lists bolted together.

Why we’re excited about bringing a fresh approach to CX to Australia

Elemental Concept has never formally operated in Australia (unless you count two of our senior team who live there). Most firms enter a market on the back of an existing relationship – that could be a big-name client to reference, or a brand that already means something locally. Yes, we’ve done some work to support our trusted network in Australia, but ultimately, we don’t have a huge legacy client base, an existing reputation or an inherited way of doing things to protect.

We think this is actually an advantage rather than a gap to apologise for.

It means we get to decide – deliberately, not by accident – what we lead with. For Australia, that’s Causal CX, with Chris Green and Gaven Henry on the ground, and backing them up from New Zealand are Blake Lough and Steve Alexander.

Meet the team on the ground in Australia and New Zealand

What it means for clients

For prospective clients, we’re going to be honest: we’re not arriving with a bigger team or a longer service list than the firms already established in the 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 the existing pain points to make it easier for customers to interact with their products and services. But making it easier won’t necessarily drive customer choice and deliver growth.

We start with the decision – 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.

We believe this is exactly the right direction for our growth in new markets, and we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t believe the argument holds. So if you or anybody you know, in Australia or anywhere else in the world, is struggling to work out what’s actually driving their customers’ choices – let us know