How hard can it be?

Admit that you once thought than an event is something like a happening at the local supermarket. Or a summer party for employees. Or balloons for all of the children. How hard can it be? And if you did, you’re far from being alone. Or to be more precise, there was a time when you were far from alone. Nowadays more and more people are aware that events are about experiences, meaning, content and meetings. About a constantly expanding marketing channel with unique opportunities to shift perceptions and build loyalty. And of course, for some of us that might mean having a band playing in the entrance or balloons for all. But for most of us, it’s about much more than that.

Try, feel, experience, taste.

So what do you do? How do you succeed in capturing your target group, internally or externally, both literally and mentally. And how do you succeed in getting them not just to hear, but to listen?
A quick answer: Find the target group’s passion and put the spotlight on their experience. It’s the difference between test-driving a BMW Z4 Roadster and watching an advert about it. The difference between taking part and standing passively on the sidelines.

A slightly longer answer: check this website. In it we offer the basics, the shortcuts and some of the pitfalls in the art of using one of the most rapidly expanding marketing channels around. View this book as a quick guide to meeting communication and experience-based marketing – what we refer to as events.

Meeting communication.

Events and sponsorship are becoming an increasingly large piece of the pie that is baked every year by marketing investments in Sweden. The report produced every year by the Institute for Advertising and Media Statistics (IRM) shows that sponsorship and events together accounted for 13.2% of the media pie in 2009. This makes the discipline the biggest piece of the pie, including the daily press. It’s also the only piece that is growing. So it’s worth taking seriously.
It’s actually not really a surprise. The nature of events – seeing, taking, feeling and experiencing – make them a unique tool in building up relations with target groups that are increasingly tough to capture and pin down. But meeting communication places tough demands. It requires knowledge to imbue an event with meaning. Meeting strategies, to advance positions, to explain a change or to build loyalty. Meeting communication is about giving messages the same meaning.
Providing information from those who know to those who need to know. The meeting is the ultimate opportunity to create a balance. And only when a company has achieved this balance can it focus on its business.Event