Reinventing Virtual Events

CHAPTER 26Customer‐Led Retention/Expansion

The test of a first‐rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Al Ries is the godfather of Fortune 500 branding, and we've found some lessons in throwing our events that are worth sharing here that coincide with his thinking. How you design every last detail of your event dictates the power of your marketing, and it all starts with the brand. Design thinking is a process of creative problem‐solving from the customer's lens. Design thinking has a human‐centered core. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes. You put the human at the center and do proper user interface/user experience (UI/UX) research.

Will you build your community in Dark Social on a lesser‐used business‐to‐business (B2B) platform like Discord, which initially gained traction with gaming? How can you meet your customers in the gardens where they spend most of their time learning, sharing, or blowing off steam?

Julia's keen eye for design led her to craft our brand devoid of color, debranded, desaturated, and in stark black and white. We even released our YouTube video highlight reel channels in this desaturated mode, which stood out and caught wildfire visually in ...