Canon is well and truly focused on the experience economy with the brand utilising Vivid to ensure it's accessible to consumers.
Canon was a sponsor of the event, and also created an activation that set out to solve a problem faced by the many attendees of Australia's most photographed event.
Head of product and customer marketing, consumer imaging for Canon Australia, Simon Russell, told AdNews the brand established Canon HQ at Vivid because it made perfect sense for the brand to be involved, due to the fact everyone at Vivid is holding a camera of some description.
“There's so many great things to shoot at Vivid, but so many people leave disappointed, so Canon can play that role of helping people,” he says. “It's so much more than the product; everyone has a camera, but it's the experience that you have with that, so we asked: 'How do we help people take a better photo and have a better experience?' That's key to us.”
By the time the light show wrapped, Canon was expecting to have 125,000 people pass through its Vivid HQ, with some partaking in the free experiences and advice given at the venue. Many also participated in the paid light walks and even helicopter tours offered as part of Canon's Vivid experience.
The brand has been setting itself up to be more customer and experience-focused over the past few years, with Canon establishing the Canon Collective, which is the name given to the raft of mostly free events which allow people of all levels of photographic skill to get involved with the brand.
General manager of consumer experiences at Canon Australia, Steve Loughran told AdNews that what Canon is doing with its Collective is something that isn't being done by any other camera brand locally, or even globally.
“If somebody wants to learn more about photography, if their hobby is photography, if their passion is photography and they want to take it somewhere, there’s only one brand that can allow you to do that, and that's this brand,” he said.
Russell explained that Canon is increasingly doing events and experiential activity because it gets the brand in front of consumers and it allows Canon to have conversations with people to find out what they really want from the brand. This is particularly vital for Canon because consumers previously engaged with the brand mainly through retail stores that sold all the camera brands.
“Rather than doing market testing or relying on our agencies to support us through those type of programs, we're here having real conversations and we can help people solve there imaging problems,” he said.
When it comes to measuring the success of these events, Russell explains that engagement is top of the list.
“Engagement is one of the key ones – it's a very difficult thing to measure – again through the conversations our people are having and the feedback that we're getting [we can see we're getting positive engagement]. We also undertook a substantial amount of research to understand if we are delivering the right experiences,” he said.
Russell also explained that anecdotal feedback from Canon's retailers in Sydney indicates that stores are selling to people who have visited Canon's Vivid HQ.
“A lot of people have walked in with the Canon 80D, which is the hero product for the event, so they have just bought it and they have come back to visit us here. With such a considered purchase like a camera, we know the path to purchase is quite elongated, an event like this helps consumers go away and make those decisions knowing full well what the product can do,” he said.
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