Client: Miele Canada
Project: Virtual Experience Centre by 36Pros
Miele Canada is a premiere supplier of high-end domestic appliances and commercial equipment. Headquartered in Vaughn, Ontario, the company is well-known for quality and customer care.
The Problem
In 2021, the company had plans to exhibit at the annual Interior Design Show in Toronto, but was told by organizers that—due to the Covid pandemic—the event would be going virtual.
That meant the only way to display wares would be to do so online.
Miele Canada responded with plans for a virtual exhibit but wanted to make it as close to real life as possible in order to generate maximum excitement and engagement.
To achieve this, the company turned to 360Pros.
The Solution
After 360Pros had worked its magic, Miele Canada reviewed data captured by Google Analytics and learned that during the trade show approximately 4,400 people visited the virtual exhibit. On average, those visitors spent 36 minutes exploring and interacting with it (the industry benchmark for visits to online exhibits is less than 2 minutes).
For years now, the Interior Design Show has been an important event on Miele Canada’s calendar. The show allows hundreds and even thousands of people interested in interior design to see and touch the products Miele Canada brings for display and discussion at its booth.
In 2021, with the show turning virtual, Miele Canada recognized it would be at a disadvantage by not being able to provide a tactile experience. The company decided that it could compensate for it by endowing the virtual exhibit with an overwhelming visual “wow” factor.
This led Miele Canada to 360Pros, which was tasked with creating a virtual replica of Miele Canada’s brick-and-mortar Ontario showroom where prospective customers come for in-depth consultations, to explore the Miele product range, and to discover which appliance is best suited to their needs based on lifestyle, living space, and other criteria.
The Results Are In…
The work performed by 360Pros delighted Miele Canada above and beyond expectations.
The result was a virtual tour of Miele Canada’s Experience Centre, which permitted online visitors to “walk” through an exceptionally lifelike environment viewable in three dimensions and from all directions.
360Pros added a number of flourishes that included inserting into the virtual showroom a number of sales personnel (actual store employees videoed in front of a green screen) to answer visitor questions and introduce popups containing detailed product information as well as explanatory images and videos.
To augment engagement, 360Pros sought to make the virtual showroom a more entertaining place by hiding surprises round and about. Among the discoverable “Easter eggs” were raffle tickets for special prizes such as Miele coffee machines and bags of premium coffee.
A Blossoming Partnership
The success of the virtual Experience Centre led to other projects with 360Pros.
One is Miele Home. This is a 100-percent virtually rendered Canadian two-storey house furnished with various Miele products to give online visitors a good sense of how those wares would look inside their own homes—a significantly better sense than if they were to rely on their imaginations while standing in a brick-and-mortar showroom. 360Pros configured this immersive experience so that visitors can fill every room of the Miele Home with products from the entire Miele catalogue and can experiment with colour schemes. No VR goggles are required to interact with the Miele Home—just a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.
Response from Miele Canada
“We chose to work with 360Pros because we are very interested in delivering amazing experiences to our new and current customers,” said Miele Canada Head of Digital & Online Marketing Sergei Moiseev-Liberman. “Boris Maganic and his 360Pros team proved to be very efficient project managers and very flexible—never thrown off by surprises or last-minute requests.”
Moiseev-Liberman said he appreciated that his vision was not merely embraced by 360Pros but also enlarged upon: “They did way more than just listen to what I had to say; 360Pros charted a path that made it possible for there to be a symbiotic development of ideas, thinking, and hypotheses so that we could go from concept to truly powerful product. I was impressed by how much value 360Pros brought to the table. 360Pros was perfect for our objectives.”