News

1 Mar 2010 Sorting The Men From The Boys

The interesting thing about working in the events industry is that you get an unbiased view of a complete cross section of pretty much all business sectors.

Almost all of the large brands will hold events, meaning one day we could be working with a large high street bank, the next with a government-run education authority and the next a pharmaceutical giant. So we get the inside scoop on how well each of these sectors are doing, an insight which is particularly useful during recession.

We came across an article which researched this, using four very different sectors as examples; business to consumer events, such as would take place in the motoring industry have found behind the scenes consolidation have meant that to the outside world the products can keep the same prestige, however they are a lot more selective as to location of their events.

The finical sector has perhaps come under the most scrutiny for its events programme, this has resulted in the consolidation of events and meetings in the best cases, and cancellation and postponement in the worst. In this industry ROI has become the key.

The Professional sector has feared it would receive the same treatment as the Financial, and therefore budgets have been significantly cut to sort any perception of money being spent ‘inappropriately’. Residential are now one-day meetings, venues are now company HQ’s instead of external locations and the focus is much more education-based.

Finally, Healthcare events have become a lot more regulated, venues must be seen to be appropriate and any meals and activities secondary in value to the educational sessions. Cost saving is not enough of a reason, all meetings must be fully justified and have ‘good supporting reasons’ to be held.

The result of all this has separated the men from the boys, successful events companies have become a lot more savvy with their budgets, a lot more attentive to the event contents and target audiences and most importantly become experts in ROI – judging by this we think from all the negativity of the past year something positive has definitely be achieved.

Send this news item to a friend...