When Vacon Drives need to be launched into the highly competitive UK variable speed drives market from Finland – the strategy was originally to take a hotel room in Leicester and invite a database of prosepctive clients to meet the company and their products.

I was referred to Vacon’s MD and Vaasa Control having extensive B2B credentials and pointed out their strategy was not only expensive but would have very limited success and therefore represented poor ROI.

Asked to create an alternative company launch strategy, I devised the V-Event – a Vacon company launch event but on the internet – the world’s first virtual company launch event – the V-Event (Vacon Event).

The V-Event took place over 7 days instead of 1 day – was accessble via the internet so no travel required – was reaccessible as many times over the week as requuired – accessible 24×7 to suit the customer – other in the company could visit the V-Event and forward-on to colleagues.

The V-Event was essentially an online multimedia virtual launch event website – so was modular and cost efficiently created so on completion we simply change the front and back end of the V-event to become the Vacon UK’s website.

Instead of a dozen calculated attendees to the hotel event – the V-Event attracted hundreds of attendees and was a complete launch and sales success for Vacon UK. Moreover, with such an innovative technology-led marketing approach from a technologies engineering company, the V-Event raised the Vacon brand in the UK so fast, they were attracting major tenders and sales leads within the first 3 months of launch, then traditionally 3 years for new company start-ups.

My very first website project, the V-Event also won the ‘Macromedia Wedbsite of the Month’ award (August 1999) and was the world’s first virtual company launch event.