Panasonic's corporate image among young people was characterized by high stability and trustworthiness, but relatively low scores in the categories of forward-thinking, innovation, and challenge.

In the future society, companies will increasingly be required to be more innovative and creative in their ideas and realization. For Panasonic's sustainable growth, it was necessary to raise those images to attract promising students and young professionals.

Hackathons and idea-thons seemed to be effective PR methods for acquiring an advanced image, but they were also seen by competitors. We thought we should offer something that is more meaningful for students to participate in and what only Panasonic could do. Therefore, we decided to provide a full-fledged venue as Panasonic activation for students to present their ideas for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which Panasonic is sponsoring globally. Not just as an idea competition, but to demonstrate our commitment to working together to realize the ideas of the students.

The target audience is promising students and young professionals from around the world. They are particularly interested in social issues. Therefor we called for "ideas that extend sports with technology and going beyond barriers." We believed that realizing ideas beyond various barriers would have a strong affinity with the spirit of sports and would strongly attract the interest of our target audience. However, that is not enough to show Panasonic’s innovative spirit. Panasonic also showed its commitment to brushing up the presentation together with the students, and demonstrated the uniqueness of this presentation by inviting IOC and IPC executives for the final presentation.

In addition, to be more sympathetic to the youth, we did nor rank the final 4 groups. Whereas we were careful to have them engage in positive discussions rather than criticism or judging, which would be reflected in the tone of the news coverage.

Starting in 2019, qualifiers were held in four Olympic and Paralympic Games host cities, including Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, and Los Angeles. Unfortunately, in 2020, the competition was postponed for one year by COVID-19.

Even on the day of the final presentation, August 23, 2021, it was difficult to hold full face-to-face participation.

We therefore decided not to simply hold the event online, but maintain the real venue, but preparing a metaverse venue of the same shape and invite journalists to attend. The location information of the avatars of participating journalists were linked to the venue, and participants in the real venue also appeared in the metaverse space as avatars. This digital-twin event reinforced the "advanced" impression we wanted to convey.

The event was then broadcasted live on Twitter, YouTube, and Weibo.

The video recordings of this project were utilized even after the final presentation.

1. The most important result is that one of the students' ideas is still being discussed with the IOC, IPC, and Panasonic to see if it can be realized in the future.

2. The presentation was broadcast globally on various platforms, especially on Weibo, where it was viewed 10,280 times.

3. The presentation received 151 media mentions, including oversea.

4. In a post-survey among the students, those who were aware of the project showed a greater lift in their image of Panasonic as "progressive" (+5.0%), "innovative" (+10.0%), and "challenging" (+5.0%) than those who were not aware of the project.

5. In a survey that showed the event's Web page to a more narrowly targeted main target group* of 18- to 34-year-olds and a group of non-targets, an average of 19.5% said "I am more inclined to consider employment," and an average of 21% said "I would like to be involved in some business with such companies in the future. The results were higher for the main target group, indicating that the approach and message were appropriate in terms of content.

*Definition of main target group

1: People who believe that the Olympic and Paralympic Games mean more than just a sporting event.

2: People who prefer to create something new from scratch rather than improve existing methods.