Challenge     I am a member of my organization’s Sustainable Finance team which handles loans for projects  such as energy efficiency, renewable energy, and climate resilience. I am responsible for the  organization and implementation of our team’s marketing and communications initiatives. With  COVID-19 pandemic restrictions being raised around the world, face-to-face corporate selling  events came to a pause. The challenge is to transition the implementation of marketing activities  online while ensuring an engaging and effective event program design that would generate  sales leads.       Selection    Platforms for online meetings and webinars are widely available. These have basic features that  can facilitate forums such as screen-sharing, break-out rooms, and chat boxes for questions or  comments from the participants. Our team has used other design thinking tools to review the  usual program of face-to-face corporate selling events, tweak it to suit a webinar format, and to  conduct a dry run. We are ready to use the learning launch tool to test how effective the revised  design of our marketing event is.       Application    Our first launch is a large-scale webinar with an expected attendance of 250 to 300 middle and  senior management officers from various companies. The topic was a general sustainability  concept—Natural Disaster and Business Resilience; the three sessions for which are aimed to  encourage participants to employ sustainable engineering interventions for their properties in  order to become climate-resilient and at the same time, have the bank help fund these projects.  For this launch, we were able to reach the target number of attendance with a 20% fall-out rate  from the number of total registrations. There was active participation from the audience during  the open forum. However, the webinar failed to create client leads.    The team once again reviewed the program design and decided to go with a topic that allows for  a direct presentation and discussion of the team’s financing options and services. We also  opted to conduct the online event with a smaller, more targeted audience. With these changes,  our team did a second launch of the webinar which focused on giving the participants a step-by- step guide on shifting to solar energy as well as an introduction to the bank’s Sustainable  Finance program. The audience consisted of not only finance officers, but also engineers and  technical teams of corporations. As with the first launch, there was a good audience turn-out  and an engaging open forum. But this time, the team was able to receive a good number of loan  inquiries from the participants who attended the webinar.

Insight    Using the learning launch tool allowed the team test our assumptions on attendee turn-out,  audience participation, and lead-generation. While we were able to reach the number of  expected participants and had good participant-panelist interaction for both launches, the team  was not able generate leads as expected. It was only with the revisions made to the program  design that we achieved this. The learning launch tool allowed the team to see how customers

would respond to our online marketing initiatives. It made the team recognize what the project’s  strengths and weakness are as well as what part of it needs to be improved.    By refining the webinar based on the launch results, it can now be scalable in terms of the  number of times it can be conducted in a year for various product-focused topics. Even with the  eventual transition back to face-to-face marketing activities, the forum model we have  established is seen to remain effective and sustainable.       Approach    For any marketing initiative, it seems that learning launch is the appropriate tool to be used. This  is because the success of product marketing and communications is primarily based on  customer behavior. And while we may have historical data on customer response to our  products and services, we ultimately assume anticipated customer behavior therefore we have  to test these assumptions in order to know what works and what does not.

