Marketing in the metaverse is heating up, and some early adopters are reaping the benefits. Explore the latest virtual worlds that brands are developing to engage consumers, according to coverage in Event Marketer, from Timberland’s TimbsTrails experience to BMW’s Joytopia platform to SK-II’s virtual cineplex.

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In this third year of the pandemic, virtual events remain a valuable resource for marketers to engage with customers and prospects, introduce new products, gather critical feedback and more, all while accommodating for attendees’ varying comfort levels. Read about 12 different programs that successfully conquered Zoom fatigue, according to coverage in Event Marketer, with gamification tactics, attendee curation, extended reality and more.

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Here’s a look at how Sephora transformed its flagship annual House of Beauty experience into a virtual playground with expert-led demos, live Q&As, games and photo ops, according to a case study in Event Marketer.

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Most are familiar with the consumer side of Panasonic’s business, but not necessarily its thriving B2B enterprise in the manufacturing, retail, entertainment and mobility sectors. Like so many others, the company was not immune to the challenges of keeping its business customers engaged during the pandemic.

But the marketing insights it gained are invaluable. Most critically, the brand has shifted from seeking to drive the conversation to letting customers take the wheel. “We had to step back and say, what are the conversations that are happening in the industry that we play in, and how do we fit into those conversations, versus us saying that this is the conversation we want to drive,” says Panasonic’s VP of Marketing, Brian Rowley.

We spoke with Rowley about lessons learned from these tumultuous times and how adopting a more customer-centric approach, engaging in thought leadership and launching a podcast series helped the brand remain relevant to B2B customers and play to its unique strengths.

Chief Marketer: How did Panasonic experience the past year and half, and how did your B2B business adapt?  

Brian Rowley: It’s no surprise that the past year has been more challenging than ever for some companies, and Panasonic was not one that didn’t witness and experience some of those challenges. We’re more focused on meeting the customers where they are. More so than ever, we’ve seen the importance around this customer-centric approach to marketing.

When the pandemic broke, we were at the heels of one of the largest shows we have for our professional video business, which is NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters. We quickly had to pivot there and move our presence from that in-person [event] to virtual. So, how do we do that? We looked at it and said, here are pain points. Here are the things that each of these businesses are experiencing, and how do we add value to that? We shifted a lot from the conversation we want to talk about to what our customers are looking for and what they wanted to hear from us—not our agenda, but their agenda.

CM: What were some of the key learnings?

BR: When customers wanted to have a conversation—and quite honestly, in some cases where they wanted to terminate a relationship with us—that fell more in their hands than we’ve ever seen before. That’s one of the bigger shifts. For us, this was about being where our customers wanted us and having content available to them wherever they were and whenever they wanted to consume it. In the past, we were very focused around, what is our message that we want to talk to the market about? We had to step back and say, what are the conversations that are happening in the industry that we play in, and how do we fit into those conversations, versus us saying that this is the conversation we want to drive.

From a Panasonic perspective, we’ve always been very engaged in soliciting feedback from our customers around product development. I could talk to you about numerous products that we’ve had and pinpoint where a button is on a piece of hardware as a result of feedback from a customer. But this wasn’t just about feedback. This was about understanding what was important and doing the listening in the markets that we were in, and making sure that we designed these experiences based on that listening.

For example, we initially had intentions of opening a customer experience center in our offices in Buffalo Grove, IL, that was meant to have four primary areas of the business: our immersive experience center, food retail services, manufacturing, and we also wanted to cover the public safety sector with the solutions that we offer to the market. We very quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to open that center. So, we ended up doing it from a virtual capacity, but we made it self-guided so that it didn’t require us to be a part of the conversation. We made it so that each section was self-explanatory… to allow customers to do that when they want it. We made sure that the topics of our webinars were important to people in the business. For example, the concept in the quick-serve restaurant market of maintaining social distancing and keeping people coming through their businesses. What does contactless look like? Those types of things.

CM: From a marketing perspective, what are some examples of what worked and what didn’t?

BR: We knew we had to be relevant. We also knew that we had to shift, potentially on a dime, with what we were talking about or how we were approaching it. Panasonic is a hundred-year-old company. So we had to be fearless. We had to be willing to try new things. We did about 200-plus trade shows a year. We ended up doing about 40 virtual events last year. From a marketing side,  we had about a 40 percent attendance rate for those that registered. We’ve heard that a good turnout was 25 to 28 percent. The other thing that we saw was the quality of people. It was a lot more effective than some of the shows in the past that were face-to-face, where people who would walk through the booth didn’t have a lot of interest in speaking. These relationships are ones that you can actually nurture and pull into a real customer.

We went through and revisited materials that we had in every place that we talked to a customer to make sure that it made sense. Sometimes [companies] take a very broad stroke across a conversation or when marketing to specific industries. We’ve found that you really have to focus and not try to be everything to everybody. Know where your strengths are, stay in that space and deliver quality around that and the content that you’re providing.

We also saw the importance of thought leadership. We established a thought leadership program with nine of our key executives that helped educate people on some of the positives we saw and give an opportunity to share some of those stories. And the last thing was we introduced a podcast series called The Big Rethink. We bring in external experts who have conversations with us—myself and two other individuals on the team—and post the conversation. It gives people a chance to hear how others have been successful and are literally changing the way that work is being done.

We’ve launched over 50 episodes, with just shy of 11,000 downloads. We need to expand where we show up and allow people that opportunity, understanding that we’re supporting all different demographics, whether it’s a white paper or a video case study, whether it’s on our website or on social, whether it’s through podcasting.

CM: What skills do B2B marketers need today to be successful in today’s business landscape?

BR: There’s a stronger need for awareness than we’ve ever seen before. The days of being able to just go in and stay focused on the work that you’re responsible for are behind us. As a marketer, it’s about telling a story. But it’s also understanding the sub-stories that are developing underneath the bigger story. The other thing is, more than ever you need to push that comfort zone further. Doing traditional things that we’ve been doing for the past five, 10 years isn’t going to be enough. Podcasting wasn’t a part of the realm of what we do, but we got out there and we tried it and we’ve been successful. Getting yourself more in that space around video, and tackling some of the more challenging areas in regards to thought leadership is another one. Being fearless as a company, but also as a marketer and having that awareness, are two of the most important shifts.

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In actuality, the state’s 1,200 cheesemakers produce more than 600 varieties, from tandoori gouda to apple-cinnamon chèvre to cave-aged cheddar to Colby (invented in the state in 1885). “I saw where we were in consumers’ minds and saw the reality, and our biggest challenge was to close the gap of perception,” Fanning says. Her efforts to do so have led to a 4,000 percent increase in social engagement, earned media coverage valued at $50 million a year, sales growth of Wisconsin specialty cheese outpacing that of the category at large, and among other accolades, having its Cheeselandia brand community named 2020’s Influencer Campaign of the Year by Adweek.

Making Cheese “Crazy and Cool”

Fanning came on board Wisconsin Cheese as Vice President, Marketing Channels; less than three years later, in November 2018, she was named Chief Marketing Officer. Her passion for Wisconsin Cheese—a marketing organization funded by the nonprofit Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin—and for Wisconsin cheeses is apparent as soon as she begins talking about them. The words spill forth in a rush, and invisible exclamation points end most of her sentences. That same passion fuels the organization, but Fanning says it wasn’t readily apparent when she was brought on.

“When I started with the organization, they were very well behaved,” she says with a laugh. Cheese festivals were the primary marketing channel, and to hear Fanning tell it, rather staid affairs: people sedately walking along rows of six-foot-long tables as they taste cheese after cheese. “Nobody can tell one cheese from the next,” she says. “So I said we were never going to do this again. We weren’t meant to blend in; we were meant to stand out.”

And that’s how Wisconsin Cheese became one of the most popular activations at the 2018 SXSW. “I said, Let’s go someplace completely unexpected where we’re the only cheese brand. Let’s go to SXSW!” Fanning recalls. “Brands were going with millions of dollars, and we just went in with thousands of pounds of cheese.”

People waited in line for as long as 20 minutes to enter the Cheese Lounge, where in a setting designed to resemble a barn, they could sample 100 varieties of Wisconsin cheeses from what was dubbed the world’s largest cheese board. The lounge also offered happy-hour sessions with wine-and-cheese pairings and, for SXSW attendees who’d been out late clubbing the night before, a morning Bloody Mary bar. Attendees flooded social media with photos and praise, spreading the word to others who might not have known that Wisconsin produced more than a few types of cheese.

The success of the event spurred Wisconsin Cheese to create an even more impressive cheese board—35 feet long, 70 feet wide and laden with 4,437 pounds of 145 varieties of cheese—in Madison, WI, that summer. As well as gaining a place in the Guinness World Records, this cheese board attracted more than 45,000 people to its unveiling and raised funds for Feeding America’s Great American Milk Drive.

Another byproduct of the SXSW event: The Wisconsin Cheese team “realized we can do this,” Fanning says. “We can think totally outside of the box and be crazy and cool.”

Welcome to Cheeselandia

This can-do, zig-where-others-zag attitude certainly came in handy when COVID-19 put an end to in-person samplings, tastings and other events. The strength of the organization’s Cheeselandia community proved important as well. Launched several years ago, the Cheeselandia website, social channels and tasting events cater to the type of people who post a photo of a packed cheese board on social media with the caption “Self-Care Sunday,” submit to the Cheeselandia Instagram account selfies in which they’re savoring cheese, and devour articles about the minutiae of the cheesemaking process and the lives of those who work in the family-owned businesses that make up 95 percent of Wisconsin’s dairy farms.

“Cheeselandia is about person-to-person conversations, not just relying on advertising and content,” Fanning says. And while Cheeselandia has its share of influencers, they are simply individuals who are especially active. “We don’t pay influencers,” she says with pride. “We just have this great community.”

So when the pandemic made it impossible for Wisconsin Cheese to sponsor member-hosted tasting parties, “our community rose up and said, We miss this. How can we have cheese together?” Fanning recalls. “We came out of the gate early with Zoom events.” Rather than send a crowd’s worth of cheese to a Cheeselandia member who volunteered to host a party, as it had done, Wisconsin Cheese shipped individual cheese samplings to each member who signed up for a virtual party.

And to ensure that these gatherings felt less like a conference call and more like, well, a party, the organization made sure to come up with unexpected activities. A recent Zoom party of cheese-lovers in the Northeast, for instance, included a scavenger hunt: Attendees were broken out into teams and had to find several dozen items in their homes, including a New York Yankees cap and a Green Bay Packers jersey.

Although in-person gatherings are becoming possible again, Fanning expects to continue offering virtual events as well as in-person promotions. After all, whereas maybe only one cheesemaker can take time away from his or her operation to spend a day at a gathering of aficionados in California or Florida, “with virtual events we’ve been able to feature five cheesemakers in one night,” Fanning says. “From that standpoint it’s been really great. We’re able to offer a much richer experience.”

Wisconsin Cheese’s celebrations for American Cheese Month this May are an example of the hybrid offerings the organization might be offering going forward. Some 8,000 stores nationwide will be running promotions for the state’s specialty cheeses, and more than 1,200 restaurants will spotlight special “Wonders of Wisconsin” menu items. The organization is also hosting weekly virtual events such as a game night and a live cooking class hosted by restaurateur and “Top Chef” winner Joe Flamm. People need to register in advance to be entered into a lottery for the chance to attend, and the lucky winners will receive cheese kits in time for the festivities.

An Education on Craft

“It looks like we’re just having a bunch of random fun, and we are having fun,” Fanning says of Wisconsin Cheese’s headline-grabbing promotions, “but there’s nothing random about them!” They’re part of the organization’s years-long strategy to educate consumers regarding the quality, craftsmanship and uniqueness of the state’s cheeses.

“The path from mass to class isn’t a short-term thing,” Fanning says. “We’re very focused on the food fanatic, who loves not just all things cheese but all things food. We’re reaching out to those people who love to entertain, who think their social credibility is enhanced by knowing the stories behind their food.”

Some marketers might feel pressured to come up with ever-bigger, ever-flashier promotions following the success of events such as its activation at this year’s virtual SXSW: three tastings held via Zoom that included personalized cheese boxes sent to each of the 2,021 participants, musical performances, quizzes, interviews with cheesemakers, and the presence of Midwest native, cheese-lover, and “Parks and Recreation: star Nick Offerman. But Fanning isn’t one of them.

“I don’t necessarily worry about coming up with things that are bigger and shinier and more extravagant. It’s more about how do we come up with something that’s truly meaningful. My challenge is keeping it real, not doing the next shiny thing.” And keeping it real, Fanning adds, is “having the clear vision and the focus and making sure we’re telling our story and being true to ourselves.”

And if that means Fanning has to record for Facebook Live a family cookout featuring ways to up your burger game with Wisconsin cheeses in weather that would have rained-out anyone else’s barbecue, so be it. That half-hour video, by the way, received more than 14,000 views.

The post Marketers on Fire: Wisconsin Cheese CMO Suzanne Fanning appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Festival-style Format. The event’s platform mimicked an in-person experience that attendees typically experience at music festivals. Elements and touchpoints included help tents, main stage signage and an activity field as well as digital posters, maps, tickets, wristbands and dedicated spaces to socialize.

Concise Content Delivery. Leveraging lessons learned from the dozens of virtual events it created in the past year, Facebook settled on 15 minute-sessions that included b-roll, sound design, soundtracks and more.

Out-of-the-Box Audio. Facebook enhanced the event’s accessibility by creating audio sessions on the go and allowing speakers to present content in their native languages along with subtitles.

Community Building. The brand incorporated a social good campaign that invited attendees to run, walk or bike for a cause, with miles tallied equaling a donation to support pandemic relief.

For more detail on Facebook’s GMS Summit, read on in Event Marketer.

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So when SXSW announced it would hold an all-digital festival for 2021, Wisconsin Cheese knew it couldn’t disappoint its fans. Not to mention, grocery stores had stopped doing cheese tastings during the pandemic, which meant that a virtual sampling event was the only way to drive trial.

The solution was a highly interactive, Zoom cheese tasting attended live by “Parks and Recreation” star and Midwest native Nick Offerman, complete with celebrity cameos, trivia for prizes, interviews with cheesemakers, musical performances and personalized cheese boxes for the first 2,021 ticketed attendees who registered for one of the three, 30-minute sampling events on March 18.

“As soon it was announced they were doing a virtual SXSW, people began to say things like, ‘Now if only I could get that giant cheese table in my living room,’ or, ‘I’m going to miss the cheese,’” says Wisconsin Cheese CMO Suzanne Fanning. “So we said, let’s throw a giant SXSW party for all the attendees—and show them that we could make this whole virtual thing work.”

The key to getting people to buy cheese? Let them taste it. And that’s just what the brand did, by leaning into personalization and participation for its Cheeselandia community. For more on the brand’s SXSW virtual event, read on in Event Marketer.

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When its 110 gyms across 10 states closed, the company sought to engage its community in different ways through developing new content and experiences. It opened up its app—previously reserved for premium membership—to all members for free for 60 days. It also created content that addressed customers’ mental health needs, such as short virtual meditations. Members can now check the gyms’ capacity ahead of time and make reservations, and for those who aren’t ready to frequent on-site locations there are options to train virtually.

Another area of focus for the brand during the pandemic is social media. Fitness classes were livestreamed on Facebook five days a week and then made accessible through the Blink Fitness app afterwards. It also began working with influencers on TikTok. For more on how the brand continues to engage its community during COVID, read on in AdExchanger.

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Our monthly analysis of the world’s top brands and the marketing moves that are setting them apart.

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Cisco was hardly the only organization that had to transform an in-person conference to a virtual gathering in the past year. But it was perhaps the only one that decided the night before its virtual event to postpone the conference for two weeks in support of Black Lives Matter.

Nonetheless, the tech company considers its Cisco Live 2020 educational and networking event to have been an unqualified success. More than 124,000 people from around the world logged on during the first day alone; by comparison, roughly 28,000 people had attended Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego. What’s more, 53 percent of the 2020 attendees were first-timers, and 84 percent of attendees said they “liked” or “loved” the conference, which won Best Virtual Event in Event Marketer’s 2020 Experience Design & Technology Awards.

Reimagining and Rightsizing

Cisco announced on March 16 that it would take Cisco Live 2020, scheduled for May 31-June 4 in Las Vegas, virtual. As a tech company with a dedicated Technology Experiences Team of engineers and product managers who could help optimize its gamut of tech and apps, Cisco had an edge over many other organizations that were also grappling with making the switch from face-to-face to virtual events. And Cisco had introduced some digital elements—broadcasting keynotes on Facebook Live, using its Spark messaging platform to facilitate conversations among speakers and attendees—into Cisco Live during the previous years.

Even so, the company had less than 11 weeks to convert the five-day, 1,000-session in-person gathering into a virtual conference. Complicating matters: Its staff was working from their homes.

One of Cisco’s first decisions was to compress the event into just two days with 60 live and prerecorded sessions. This rightsizing was designed to help attendees maintain focus and engagement even as they continued to work (most likely from home) and deal with the myriad distractions resulting from life during a pandemic. “We had to prioritize,” Kathy Doyle, Director of global Cisco Live conferences, told Event Marketer. “We had to make everything much shorter and make it something that was easy to consume. The strategy that we took was we’re going to make it two days, focus on content, and then extend that reach after the event.” The post-event reach included loading recordings of the sessions from those two days onto the Cisco Live On-Demand Library as well as adding recordings throughout the summer of another 700 or so of the originally slated sessions.

For the virtual event, Cisco created four content tracks: the IT Leadership Channel, which looked at tech through a business lens; the IT Heroes Channel, with highly technical content including demos; the Innovation Channel, which focused on strategies for applying tech to solve business issues; and the Possibilities Channel, where in addition to sessions with thought leaders, attendees could watch musical performances by the likes of Fall Out Boy and the Chainsmokers. Live hosts on each channel gave the event an immediacy and spontaneity reminiscent of an in-person event.

Concerts were just one element designed to encourage engagement beyond listening to presentations. Others elements included virtual Zumba and yoga classes, trivia games, a TikTok dance contest, live Q&A sessions and the Meet the Engineer program, which enabled attendees to have one-on-one video conferences with Cisco pros via Cisco Webex Teams. In lieu of in-person networking and socializing, the company set up the #CiscoLive Social Lounge where attendees could connect via Instagram and Twitter. To encourage participation as well as social media sharing, Cisco gave away prizes ranging from bobblehead dolls to Apple TVs.

“There was a lot taking place on social media, and it was just buzzing the whole time,” Doyle said. “We created contests and real-time social engagement activities, which made it feel like an interactive in-person event.”

Last-Minute Postponement

The new, virtual Cisco Live 2020 was scheduled for June 2 and 3. In the days prior, the protests against the of Brionna Taylor, George Floyd and other Black Americans had reached a fever pitch. Groups such as Black Lives Matter had organized Blackout Tuesday, a day of social media silence during which Black people were asked not to buy, sell or otherwise partake in business, to take place June 2.

Late in the day on June 1, Cisco decided to postpone Cisco Live for several weeks. “We had a couple of hours to shut everything down,” Doyle said. “We sent out communications to all of our customers and our partners, our analysts, all the internal teams across Cisco. We changed the website, we activated all the social channels, and it just all happened at one time.”

As Cisco chairman/CEO Chuck Robbins said in a video released that evening, “… in light of recent events, the turmoil happening across the United States, and with your feedback, we feel that this is the right thing to do. And that is something we always strive for at Cisco.” The company also announced it would donate $5 million to nonprofit organizations fighting discrimination.

The re-rescheduled Cisco Live was held June 16 and 17. Not only did attendance increase more than fourfold from the previous year, but the conference generated three million session views during the two days and 2.1 million social views; it was even a national trending topic on Twitter. Easily as important, attendees gave the content an average score of 4.5 points out of 5, exceeding expectations.

Key Takeaways

Scheduled for March 30 and 31, Cisco Live 2021 is another all-virtual conference. The company is of course implementing learnings from last year to bolster this year’s event. Among the takeaways you can use when creating your own virtual events:

* Don’t underestimate how long it can take to produce pre-recorded content. Producing a half-hour pre-recorded session will take longer than the half-hour of the actual taping. You need to factor in time for sound and lighting checks, editing, uploading and the like.

* Test any and all technology well in advance. And be sure to have solid contingency plans.

* Lean toward shorter sessions. A 45- or 60-minute session might command attendees’ attention when they’re in an off-site venue, but when they’re in their office or home they might find it difficult to block out distractions for that length of time. Some of the Cisco Live 2021 sessions are as short as 10 minutes.

* Mix pleasure with business. Pentatonix, Bebe Rexha, Keith Urban and the Killers are among the music acts scheduled to perform exclusively for Cisco Live 2021 attendees. And Serena Williams, Billie Jean King and James Cameron are among the non-tech celebrities speaking at sessions. Such star power amps up an entire conference, and many celebrities are more likely to participate in a virtual event than in one they’d have to travel to.

* Incentivize social sharing. Once again Cisco will have the #CiscoLive social media hub, complete with media leaderboards spotlighting attendees who’ve garnered the most social engagements. Cisco and some sponsors are also awarding prizes to attendees who post fun photos (say, of their dog watching a session on the computer), notable quotes and more.

* Keep the momentum going beyond the event. This year’s Cisco Showcase will offer more than 90 live and on-demand product demonstrations as well as Cisco experts available for live chat. Those demos will be available for viewing for a full month after the conference ends.

The post Brands on Fire: Cisco appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The virtual celebration, held on Feb. 18 during the height of the Lunar New Year, featured performances and culinary demonstrations. Hosted by Hennessy global ambassador Henry Golding and gaming personality AtomicMari, the event included a demo of filmmaker and restauranteur Eddie Huang’s favorite Lunar New Year dish (paired with the cognac and cocktails), a performance from rapper Jay Park, a dance routine by the group Kinjaz and event branding from Hennessy X.O.’s limited-release packaging designed by Chinese artist Liu Wei. The charitable component included pledges to donate toward supporting Asian American, Black and Latinx small businesses impacted by the pandemic.

For more details on Hennessy’s virtual celebration for the Lunar New Year, read more in Event Marketer.

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