Brands often face complex decisions, and they need reliable and tangible information to guide their next steps. Immersion Excursions allow teams to explore new environments, interact with experts and consumers, and gain valuable insights that guide decision-making. Blending a range of learning opportunities helps brand teams explore new possibilities and make decisions based on experience.
Deep knowledge is a powerful building block in decision making.
An immersion excursion is an event-based learning journey that takes a team out into the field to explore a specific subject or topic. It serves as a core building block in decision-making processes by providing experiential learning opportunities. In an immersion excursion, we create a journey for a brand team that will help them answer questions and gain insights to inform their future actions.
For example, a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) company wanted to understand sustainable packaging options, so we developed a two-day immersion excursion focusing on sustainable packaging trends and best practices. The excursion included site visits hosted by producers and users with unique perspectives on sustainable packaging, expert interviews, and a Consumer Connects session featuring interactions with consumers who prioritize sustainable packaging options.
An immersion excursion is an event-based learning journey that takes a team out into the field to explore a specific subject or topic. It serves as a core building block in decision-making processes by providing experiential learning opportunities.”
Designing Immersion Excursions to help brand teams make critical decisions.
An immersion excursion typically consists of multiple components designed to provide a comprehensive and well-rounded learning experience, including:
- Site visits: Teams visit different locations or organizations related to the subject of interest to gain firsthand insights. To help our clients learn more about sustainable packaging, site visits included touring recycling facilities, meeting engineers, and exploring businesses implementing sustainable packaging practices.
- Hands-on learning experiences: Our clients were able to examine and analyze various products and packaging examples to broaden their perspective and generate potential use cases.
- Expert interviews: We also scheduled time for teams to engage in Q&A sessions with industry leaders who specialize in sustainable packaging and businesses. These interviews provided deeper insights into industry trends, innovations, and best practices.
- Consumer immersion: Immersive sessions with consumers who actively seek sustainable packaging options gave team members time to interact with consumers to better understand their preferences, decision-making criteria, and the implications for their business.
Immersion excursions provide essential input to help teams create stronger plans.
The real power of immersion excursions lies in their ability to drive action with teams. During the excursion, teams engaged in notetaking, facilitated discussions, and open dialogues, ensuring that their questions were answered. The experiences shared during the excursion fostered a sense of understanding and commitment among team members and gave them a new toolkit filled with information to work with as they developed their plans.
After the immersion excursion, we hosted the teams for an extended facilitated debriefing session. We guided a discussion to reflect on their learnings and hosted workshops to identify key opportunities and implications for specific use cases. Our approach included tools to help the teams create action plans for their team, and guidance on how to ensure stakeholders throughout the organization would be able to understand objectives and how to implement them. By helping the team synthesize the knowledge they built during the Immersion Excursion, teams were able to align their strategies, plan next steps, and leverage the acquired knowledge to move their business forward. To learn more, read the companion case study now.
Immersion excursions can help your team accelerate activation planning. Contact us to learn more.
