Event Promotion

MYOB 2009-03-16
Show #102
Release date: 16 Mar 2009

Notes

Mind Your Own Business Podcast listener Linda Imm is planning on starting an events business and has asked for some advice. As ever, Guy Kingston and John Richards duly oblige.

Why are some events better attended than others? Is it cost? Can they be too cheap as well as too expensive?

What about free food, interesting speakers, free gifts? Or is it all about the other people attending?

Also in this podcast Muna Adhamy challenges us on our Podcast #96 – Sales Staff about the proper motivation for excellent sales people. Guy Kingston responds with a case study of a dysfunctional, but widespread, commission system.

And, an old friend of the show, Yan "Kern" Gagné asks for some investment guidance.

It’s My Party – And I’ll Cry If I Want To

Is there anything more embarrassing than turning up at a party and finding that you are the only one there?

Yes, there is – hosting a party and finding that you are the only one there.

Either way, there are few things more excruciating than being one of a handful of people in a huge, empty room, bunched together around a generous buffet that is destined to go to waste, all making pointless conversation until they feel they can leave with a degree of decency.

This sort of experience is almost inevitable in any of business that depends on “events”.

An event has a group psychology of its own that is every bit as complex as that of any organisation or culture or even a civilisation.

No one knows how it works, and one wishes one could predict it, but an expensive, well-advertised, beautifully-catered function might be a miserable failure, while the crowd who should have been there instead converges on some squalid venue, with little in the way of amenities, where everyone has a great time.

Accept it. This sort of thing is going to happen to anyone brave enough to try to make a business out of “events”. There will be failures and any run of successes will be limited, because the fashion that made them a success will change.

Events are a classic buyer’s market. No one is obliged to go. Moreover, there is excessive supply. Any local newspaper will offer a bewildering range of activities, much of it free or subsidised, every weekend. If that is not enough, there are always leaflets and mailings coming through the door, and posters on display, all with one thing in common: they need a crowd more than the crowd needs them.

The same is true of business events. It might be more than possible for someone who had nothing better to do to spend the whole working week just going from one to the next. Indeed, it might be interesting to see if someone could live off free buffets by simply pretending to be a businessman!

Time is the most valuable commodity people have. It is particularly at a premium in the 21st Century. No one has a right to expect a crowd of people to turn up to anything.

If there is a key to getting a crowd, it is this: people will turn up to an event to which they believe everyone else is turning up.

The event organiser should trade on the paranoia most human beings feel at the idea of being the ones left out of something.

Spectacle helps. However, spectacle is usually expensive, and progressively so: spectacle is not spectacular unless it exceeds what has been seen before. The Roman gladiatorial games developed from three pairs in the first recorded display, to dozens, to hundreds, to thousands in veritable pitched battles.

Yet spectacle alone, however expensive, is no guarantee of success. The Opening of the Olympic Games in China was money well spent. The Opening of the Millennium Dome in London was a small fortune down the drain.

Perhaps the best competitive advantage anyone organising an event can have is to tap into the fact that people of all ages, cultures, and creeds have a paradoxically constant desire for something “different”.

Even the Bible mentions this: Saint Luke describes how the people of First Century Athens “spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new”.

Two thousand years later, much the same can be said about most of the people of the contemporary West, especially in the big cities. Although such people today like to think of themselves as modern, the irony is that there is nothing as old as obsession with the new.