Merkle, dentsu’s customer experience business, continues to scale its experience design capability with the addition of two specialist leadership roles.  

Merkle's experience design capability brings a wide range of human-centered design disciplines together to collaboratively craft products, services and strategies into experiences that create meaningful relationships between people and brands. 

Lincoln Mitchell has joined Merkle in the role of Design Systems lead, and is responsible for building, evolving and maturing Merkle’s design systems accelerators and practices across the business and for its clients. Merkle has created world-class design systems IP through targeted investment in the space to ensure they can deliver exceptional, consistent customer experiences. 

Lincoln joins Merkle after multiple successful design system leadership roles, most recently at Breville and brings almost 30 years of UX experience where he focused on bringing design and technology closer together. 

Mik Stephens has been promoted to the role of Research Ops lead following roles within dentsu across Strategic Design, Service Design and Experience Design. In this new role, Mik is responsible for amplifying the value and impact of the research and insights Merkle delivers for its clients, driving innovation and supporting data led, insights aware and user validated experiences. 

These roles sit within the Experience and Commerce Practice, led by Head of Design Dave Calleja. Linc and Mik both bring specialist expertise to a team with deep capability across experience design, CX research and strategy, visual and interaction design, and design systems. 

“I’m incredibly excited to see Linc and Mik take up these roles, as is the entire Merkle team. Having dedicated specialists in these critical capabilities to support every project means our teams can focus on creating incredible, memorable experiences for our clients, their customers and employees,” Dave said. 

The appointments come as Merkle doubles down on its ambition to lead and expand its market share in the customer experience space, with the announcement earlier this month that Simon Doukas will be joining the company as its inaugural Chief Experience Officer. The CXO role will oversee the Strategy, Design and Commerce teams. 

For further information, contact:

Vanessa Desloires                                          

Communications and Brand Lead                                                   

Merkle Australia                                   

[email protected]