What was your journey until taking on this role in the company?
I studied architecture in Venice and then moved to Milan and worked in some architecture studios. Following this experience I worked in design management within a well-known agency. Then I began my entrepreneurial journey by opening my own and acquiring Barovier&Toso as a client. Subsequently I decided to leave the agency and some clients, including Barovier&Toso, asked me to manage the brand independently and autonomously. Throughout my career I have followed more than one hundred high-end companies such as Agape, Flexform, Desalto, Marazzi. I became involved with Barovier&Toso because it is a unique company and therefore I chose to follow the entire communication & marketing department of the oldest glass factory in the world as a single-firm consultant, above all for its values. Until 2019, Barovier&Toso had never had an internal marketing division which now exists and is based in Milan, this allows us not to lose our roots and have a more international and contemporary vision.
What do you think about social media in the lighting industry?
I believe in the enormous potential of digital, but the rapid aging of content scares me in the sense that the effort to produce quality content is enormous while its use has a very short duration. So we try to focus on the durability of Barovier&Toso's communication so that the marketing is more durable over the years. In the world of lighting there are 4/5 top players who drive the communication of the entire segment, most brands aim for product-focused marketing. Barovier&Toso, on the other hand, focuses everything on brand identity. In conclusion, lighting is growing on the social side but is not yet at the level of fashion and design. Investments are certainly arriving and this year at Euroluce it was seen that the entire sector had an edge.
Which social network is more suitable for your reality and which is less?
Instagram is certainly the most suitable one where we find greater involvement and we are trying to land on TikTok for the entire video part also because we have a very large Chinese audience. We use Pinterest very little and LinkedIn, being a professional platform, represents filtered communication for us and we use it above all for institutional communications such as events, product launches, etc... YouTube is certainly a valid social network for Barovier&Toso even if it is essentially a repository platform. Facebook is probably the platform least in line with the company's business model. Russia has always been a strong market of ours so on a social level we have been considering opening VKontakte for years but we have not yet landed on this platform.
The data shows that having a low number of followers damages the brand image, what do you think?
I agree but it always depends on where the users come from because many brands buy followers just for the pleasure of expanding vanity metrics. The problem with this situation is that the brand then loses further value given that today everyone has the opportunity to verify whether the fan base is real or not. The Barovier&Toso community is made up of valuable users obtained slowly over time, we have launched various operations that aim to increase the fan base through the engagement of our contents and which we are clearly going to promote through ad campaigns.
Why are you only present on WeChat and not on other Chinese social networks?
We had an agency that followed us on WeChat but we didn't get along well so now we are followed by a Chinese professional who was based in Shanghai and who has now moved to Bangkok. The strategy on this social network is essentially a reflection of Instagram, we have now also opened Weibo and we are considering opening Little Red Book. Barovier&Toso's next digital step will certainly be to expand Eastern social networks even if WeChat has so far performed less than Weibo where views and interactions are clearly superior.
What are the future corporate communication projects?
We have a new, very interesting storytelling project that we have decided to call Barovier&Toso Handmade, which will have a different language than those we have created so far and we want to continue to focus on this technique because we have seen that it is rewarding. We would like to work with artificial intelligence by describing the brand in an innovative, fun, witty and light-hearted way. Being able to transmit tradition through innovation is certainly something that interests us because we could involve more and more people in different experiences of the territory and our installations.