Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes when creating a brand’s custom-slide template? More than you’d think. In this post, we shed light on how we helped a multi-national corporation (MNC) upgrade their presentation by consolidating and accentuating the essence of their brand. After operating for nearly a full century, Panasonic made a strategic decision of moving beyond their initial offerings. Problem is, their existing brand image was still deeply entrenched in the minds of their loyal customers.The challenge here was to re-position their company offerings in the minds of their consumers.

Keep in mind, the templates would be used by departments manned by over 254,000+ employees. Hence, the presentation system and library had to be malleable enough to convey a uniformed message whilst still be tailored towards the context of the presentation.

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Introducing Panasonic Corporation

Image Source: Business2Community

When you think of the Panasonic, what is the first impression that comes to mind? If your first impression is a multi-national electrical appliance company, you aren’t alone.

As a Japanese household brand, Panasonic built their reputation through distributing electrical appliances. Through a series of successful expansions, they grew to become the global brand they are today.

Over the years, however, they have evolved beyond household electronics towards providing solutions that impact lives and the environment. Today, they even produce organic produce for household consumption.

Their motto “A Better Life, A Better World” sums up their aim to provide a better living for their customers through revolutionizing their living spaces. Spaces such as their homes, communities, businesses, journeys, and automobiles through building smart cities and intelligent machines. In order to create a presentation that is both customisable while delivering the brand essence, we focused on developing a solid presentation strategy.

More About Presentation Strategy

To clarify, presentation strategy is more than just pretty images and fancy copy. Instead, the support visual’s function is to serve as a potent vehicle in selling a message.

Its end goal is to prompt the audience towards desired business outcomes ( e.g. strategic partnership). This involves the careful consideration of a brand’s identity and business objectives while incorporating effective visual storytelling techniques. Generally, it is common to disregard these three elements and jump straight into designing.

While this might sound more efficient in theory, it actually makes your presentation less persuasive and more unlikely to fulfill your objective.

• In the following paragraphs, we will be revealing the behind-the-scenes steps we took to enhance their story through our four-step methodology:

1. Business & gap analysis
2. Structuring a story that sticks and captivates
3. Designing visuals that accentuate the story
4. Production of templates and guidelines

Background Analysis

Business Goals

Starting with the business objectives as the primary consideration, we uncovered that these slide decks were primarily meant to be used by the sales departments across different product and solution verticals. The objective of these presentations is to convince potential partners to collaborate with Panasonic towards achieving their vision of a sustainable world.

The objective of these presentations is to convince potential partners to collaborate with Panasonic towards achieving their vision of a sustainable world.

Company Background

The Panasonic team mentioned that they would like to tap on the reputation of Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic. Known to be the “god of management” in Japan, his deep management philosophies helped Panasonic grow and tide through difficult financial times.

While he is no longer alive, his name serves as a key asset in lending credibility to Panasonic as a brand. Through this, partners can trust that working with the company would bring about a good cause for the world.

Competitor Analysis

Next we analyzed Panasonic’s competitors such as Philips and Siemens. This gave us an in-depth perspective of the wider industry while defining what made Panasonic’s brand special.

Their rich history and their innovation efforts that is aligned to their founder’s philosophy on sustainability. Therefore, projects like smart cities development are unique to them.

The Storyboarding Process

Panasonic strived for a single deck that can be used across various verticals. Hence, they needed a story framework that allow them to edit the content without losing the essence of the overall story.

Based on this requirement, we created the following story structure:

It involved a roundabout loop. Starting off with a broad landscape overview, it covers three main points and goes back to the beginning with a call to action.

Let us break it down in more detail: The introduction describes a landscape overview of how technology has changed the world drastically. Yet despite the change, Panasonic will continue to strive to live by the timeless philosophy laid down by its founder to continue enhancing the quality of lives throughout the world.

• It goes on to describe how Panasonic has moved beyond consumer electronics. Instead below are the three areas where Panasonic strives to make a positive change:

1. Lives of people
2. The Industry
3. The World

Within each area, there is a case study/evidence to illustrate the respective points. To end off, the slides presents a call to action that YOU can be part of it. This is the prompt for potential partners to come on board and join Panasonic on their world-changing mission. With that, Panasonic reinforces its new mission: to create “A better life, A better world”.

Designing The Presentation

With the storyboarding process completed, we proceeded to conduct a visual brand analysis. This comprises of studying current brand assets and defining the brand personality. As the presentation deck is a part of the company’s brand collateral, the style had to be conveyed consistent across all mediums. Through this exercise, we created three different themes for the Panasonic team to choose from.

This comprises of studying current brand assets and defining the brand personality. As the presentation deck is a part of the company’s brand collateral, the style had to be conveyed consistent across all mediums. Through this exercise, we created three different themes for the Panasonic team to choose from.

Creating An Instructional Brief

The size of the Panasonic team is huge, servicing diverse vertical and geographical locations. Therefore, we created an instructional deck enabling the staff to understand how they could tailor specific areas of the deck. This framework enabled them to tailor the slides according to their situation, without affect the overall story flow.

This framework enabled them to tailor the slides according to their situation, without affect the overall story flow.

To Recap What Happened

[fancy_box id=5][content_upgrade id=938]Bonus Download: 7 Things You Must Do For Visually Persuasive Presentations[/content_upgrade][/fancy_box] So there you have it – Here are the steps we took when helping Panasonic upgrade their presentation slides while consolidating and accentuating their brand essence.

So there you have it – Here are the steps we took when helping Panasonic upgrade their presentation while consolidating and accentuating their brand essence.

To recap, here were the steps we took:

1. Analyzing the business background
2. Structuring a story that flows and captivates
3. Designing visuals that accentuate the story
4. Production of templates and guidelines

Ultimately, this project has enabled Panasonic to highlight the impact of their legacy and invite potential partners to their mission of “A better life, A better world”.