Embracing the phygital challenges in the event world: the case of Kering eyewear

Archie Smith was an introverted man. Recently promoted to Head of Events at Kering Eyewear, a company launched in 2014 by Kering and a group of managers led by Roberto Vedovotto, his mission was to empower the events division to go beyond its physical limits in the Eyewear industry. In 2022 Kering Eyewear's senior management embarked on a process of change that resulted in the introduction of far-reaching decisions that transformed Kering Eyewear's event strategies and business practices. In that year, three task forces of mid-level executives were appointed to come up with, in the words of Vedovotto, 'big ideas' that would shake Kering Eyewear out of its complacency and get the company moving beyond its traditional and renewed way of approaching and designing event interaction with its major stakeholders. A senior manager recalled that several 'provocateurs' were put on these teams to stimulate and challenge Kering Eyewear's ways of designing corporate events. For most of its history, Kering Eyewear's business strategy relied on recurring physical corporate events to showcase high quality products (frames and sunglasses) internally (to brand management teams of Kering Eyewear) and externally (to buyers of national and international retailers (eg Sunglass Hut), distributors, stores and optical stores). This business model had paid off handsomely and the company enjoyed profitable high double-digit growth from 2015 to 2020. Kering Eyewear's traditional business model came to an abrupt halt during the first few months of 2020, due to the advent of the global Covid-19 pandemic, forcing the company to rapidly introduce fully digital events. Markets were changing due to the accelerated digital transformation in progress and large global competitors were boosting the efficiency of their technological tools and applications and exploiting the resulting economies to undercut Kering Eyewear's results. After two years of forced event design experimentation there was now a need to identify new ways of working and understanding how to redefine the rules of the game within the events industry. The next Corporate Sales Events were approaching, and a decision had to be made: how should the event be designed in the light of the elements that had emerged in the previous years? Should Smith go for a traditional (physical) event format or keep designing a fully virtual event as he had done from 2020 onwards? Are there any new approaches within the industry? Together with the task forces at work, the Head of Events needed to understand who was right within his team: the optimists within the company who continued to see a bright future for digital events (fully virtual) that had allowed Kering Eyewear in the last few years to save 20% of its budget, or the pessimists outside the company who believed that the digital events format was over and that the company should have faced another challenge by introducing new event formats? Sitting in his new office in Milan, Italy, Archie was mulling over these questions as he began charting a future for Kering Eyewear's events business division which he had recently inherited.