Xeneta Summit

Three years designing a customer event that argues Xeneta is a technology company.

Role

Brand and design manager

— Event identity

— Stage design

— Keynote design

— Launch films

Context

In-house

With

Events, marketing, executive team

Year

2022 to 2024

Almost all of the Summit’s value is generated inside the room.

Freight still meets in person and forms its judgements by reputation, so the event had to demonstrate the positioning to the customers present and produce enough visible evidence of it for everyone who wasn’t.

Context and challenge

The value was real and invisible from outside

The Xeneta Summit is the company’s flagship customer event. I joined in 2022, the year of the first in-person edition after COVID, and the event’s role changed each year afterwards in step with the move upmarket that drove the rebrand.

Before that the Summit was a smaller gathering, well reviewed by attendees as a place to talk to other freight professionals in a closed setting with few vendors selling at them. The content and the conversations were the value. The branding was simple and the event was underused as a brand-building asset.

The value is generated in conversations and direct access to the analysts, and none of that is visible from outside the room.

My role

Creative direction across three editions

Creative direction across event branding, stage, launch films and keynote design, working with the events team and organisers, and with the CEO, CMO and CPO on keynote content. I directed the production house, AV and stage suppliers, and print.

Section label

Your heading goes here

Your body copy goes here. Write in the same editorial voice as the rest of the case.

Considerations

What every decision had to clear

Signal the category we want to be in. Every design decision had to read as technology company rather than industry conference, because that is the distance the pricing was asking customers to accept.
Launches had to feel like launches. Keynote, film and stage treated with the weight a technology company gives a release, rather than as agenda items.
Budget. Every decision had to hold against a fraction of the production budget the larger names in the category work with.

Keynotes

Built with the executives, not handed to them

Keynotes were designed closer to a product keynote than a corporate deck. Every chart legible from the back of the room, the insight carried by the visual rather than narrated around it, and timing worked out with the person presenting.

Results

Over three years the Summit moved from a functional industry gathering to a flagship event that holds its position against much larger names in the category, on a different basis: a smaller room, better conversations, and production that signals what the company considers its customers to be worth. Customers, partners and colleagues consistently single out the production quality relative to the rest of the industry. For a company selling trust in its data, that is a commercial outcome rather than a cosmetic one.

Next case

Xeneta Brand Transformation

01 →