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A design thinking workshop that
put the customer at heart
Cisco needed to find a way to get the people at their Cisco Live! Event to engage and share more of their content on social media. But how do you craft memorable and shareable experiences for 8000+ brilliant minds, some of whom aren’t even fans of engaging on social media?
Design Thinking | Workshop | How Might We | Buyer Persona | Ideation | Journey Mapping
Digital Experiences

A collaborative design thinking workshop with BlueMelon and Cisco identified the challenges Cisco were facing, as well as the opportunities.
We put people and their needs at the core of our thinking, uncovering unique buyer personas and yielding a deep understanding of who Cisco would be talking to and, what they wanted to hear.

1 day, 8 brains, 44 fun-size chocolates and 179 post-its getting to know Cisco, their world-class event and beloved fan-base.
By initiating the workshop with the question ‘What do we love?’ BlueMelon uncovered deeply insightful chunks of knowledge about the Cisco brand, their values, broader team and culture and most importantly, their ‘rabid fan base’. Our exploration was rewarded with a rich understanding of what matters to Cisco’s die-hard fans which would later help make up a central pillar in the social campaign strategy.
Design Thinking

In design thinking, BlueMelon will always ‘frame the problem’ in order to conjure truly human-centred creative solutions for the client. For Cisco, this was put to them as a question ‘What do we wish?’. The teams’ wishlist highlighted past hurdles they wanted to clear, and many of the challenges that they historically faced with their social media strategy. In design thinking, by framing the problem, it often organically leads to solution-focused thinking. During workshops, this is a crucial step for BlueMelon, whereby a ‘How might we?’ statement is framed. For Cisco, the exercise turned their challenge into an opportunity, and it became clear to BlueMelon what Cisco needed to get out of a social media experience at their event.
How might BlueMelon help ‘electrify’
one million people to love Cisco?
Now that the end-goal was in sight, we had to get to know Cisco’s target audience. With the guidance of the Cisco team and their vast consumer knowledge, we shaped three very different buyer personas, with their individual pain points and goals defining the very different social media experience that each would have at Cisco Live! 2020.

With a clear goal and a defined target audience, we facilitated an ideation session, a creative brainstorm that revealed unique angles that had the potential to gain the attention of Cisco’s various personas. These collective ideas were then grouped into buckets of recurring themes and topics for further exploration. The ideas were fleshed out and cultivated into specific event touchpoints, customized to engage each persona, and plugged into the user’s unique journey, created with an experience mapping session.
Focusing first on what matters to people, we crafted a user journey for each persona. From the pre-event when they opened a targeted EDM or web browser, through the event itself (in person or virtually) and continuing on to engaging post-event content. The experience map presented an opportunity for event longevity; re-imagining a three-day conference into multiple micro-content campaigns that would stay relevant and engaging until 2021.


BlueMelon Design team delivered an incredible design thinking workshop, facilitating insightful discussion and sparking conversions about customer engagement and strategic interaction long after the conclusion of the session. The team are incredible to work with, bringing a powerful energy to the table and really displaying just how well they grasped our brand identity! Check them out!
Jelena Bodulic
Social Media and Content Lead | Cisco
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