This time it’s Let’s Talk Trade Shows, written by Joyce McKee. It looks like she’s been blogging since December, and I’m just now hearing about it (shame on me!). Anyway, lots of good trade show items on there. Among her recent entries:

How to Thrive – Not Just Survive – This Economy with Brilliant Marketing (who could resist that headline?), about how to download a special report on the topic that got a rave review from at least one reader so far.

‘Marketing During a Downturn’? Let The Numbers Do The Fighting For You…

and lots of other good nuggets about marketing in today’s most interesting environment. Not only is the info good so far, but she’s a dog lover like me! Another blog to add to my RSS reader.

P.S. New folks are great, but I still miss Rich and his TSMI Trade Show Marketing blog like crazy.

Oh, why not? These floating logos made of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases could make a fairly big impression at an outdoor function, and they say they don’t harm the environment, and planes can fly right through them. I thought these were cute, anyway. Read more about them here.

I just read this post on FC Experts about the disconnect between what organizations say and what they actually do when it comes to being customer-centric (for planners, think attendee-centric). From the post:

Take proposals, for example. I was just with a new client in Europe. This innovative and technically superior corporation had a challenge on their hands. They were driving a value strategy and customer centric messaging throughout their organization but not seeing bottom line results. When we were given sales and marketing collateral such as proposals, white papers, case studies, and a website to review, and conducted multiple interviews, the question we were asking ourselves was, “Where is their customer in this picture?” All this stuff was about the seller…their great achievements and super powerful products and services. We found that 90-plus percent of the content was about them and their solutions.

Sound like your organization? To find out, poster Jeff Thull suggests that you “compare your collateral, your proposals, your web sites with two of your best competitors. Shuffle them up and re-assign them. Is there a difference?” All too often, there really isn’t.

Or at least your brain thinks that’s the case, according to a research study Tom Asacker talks about on A Clear Eye (looks like a story about it was published in Science magazine). So, according to the study, if someone gives you a glass of $10 wine and tells you it’s from a $90 bottle, you actually will think it tastes better. From Tom’s blog:

Neuroscientist Antonio Rangel sums it up for Science this way: “Subjects believe that more expensive wines are likely to taste better. These expectations end up influencing their actual experience.”

I wonder if they also studied the flip side, say if the TED Conference only cost $100 to get in, would people enjoy it less? That’d be interesting to know (I doubt it, not with those presentations!).

But it is a good argument for not underpricing your event. While you’d think a freebie would draw a big crowd, it’s amazing how often people devalue something when it doesn’t cost them anything, even if its actual value is high. Which may be why so many industry suppliers who provide fams, dinners, and other things of pretty high value for free or very low cost to planners find themselves getting stiffed by no-shows who RSVP’d that they’d be there.

This research also bolsters the meeting planning basic of doing everything you can to put on a champagne meeting at beer prices. If it looks like a million bucks, their experience will likely match that perception, not the more measly reality.

Humans really are interesting critters, aren’t we?

That’s WOW as in “what others want,” as well as the usual sense of the word. Lunch ran a little long, so presenters Max Suzenaar and Amanda Marijanovic of Minding Your Business, Inc., had to truncate their session a bit, which was a shame because it was really, really interesting. This is another one I want to talk about in more detail when I have more time (have to run in a few to go to the closing reception), but they showed us how to create a detailed audience profile that includes demographics, psychographics, relationships to industry and organization, and influences and experiences. You can use this profile when defining goals and objectives to make sure what you want to accomplish meshes with your audience’s needs and wants.

Max talked a bit about learning = message plus impressions. We tend to focus on the content (message), but tend to short-change the emotional connection to the material that also has to happen for real learning to occur. You need to bring all this together to get that WOW.

They did a really quick skip through an event marketing timeline and developing an event marketing plan, but suffice to say that it’s vital to match each tactic you use to a specific objective. Like, say, using save-the-date/calls for papers if your objective at that point in your marketing plan to raise awareness of event dates and to generate excitement. They also talked about how important that first impression is, so take care to make your first communications with potential attendees remarkable.

Another key point was to keep your theme consistent throughout all your marketing materials, and to set goals and track your progress through visual records.

About themes: Make sure they’re not just clever catch phrases or things you can hang decor on, but something that really ties back into your goals and objectives.

One thing I loved about this session was that, even though they had to cut a third of their presentation out due to time constraints, they kept in the audience participation part. The best was at the end, where each table had an envelope with the type of attendees you had and the theme of the conference. We had to make up what we’d do to market and then carry the theme through in the conference itself for our attendees and theme. We were kind of doomed, being a three-person table with barnyard animals as attendees and the theme of “partnering for tomorrow” (we decided to do something with greener pastures and bags of oats, but never got to flesh it out).

The winning table, which got $500 donated in their names to the PCMA Foundation (how cool is it that the presenters did that??) had little kids as their attendees. I can’t remember what their theme was, but they did invitations that were interactive video games where kids could register from home on the invitations themselves through handhelds, and an awards banquet with a Mario theme where Mario would bump into the blocks and release the names of the winners instead of mushrooms or whatever.

Figures that this winning table was made up of students, doesn’t it? They were awesome.

What do you think of Meeting Professionals International’s attempt to promote it Professional Education Conference North America on YouTube (see below video)?

I applaud them for trying out a new medium, but wish it wasn’t just a slick ad. It would have been a lot more effective, I think, if they had just interviewed some people about what their opinions of PEC-NA are, or, better yet, if they had put out a call to members to submit their own videos, have people vote on the top five or whatever, and use that for the promotion. Then again, that might be a fairly big risk: I wonder if anyone would submit a video about the conference? I don’t know if people feel that passionate about it (but that’s another story, isn’t it?).

Anyway, if they could have done something a little rawer, less packaged, it would work better, but good for them for giving it a shot.

Update: Here’s the latest

Better, but still awfully slick. Then again, that may just be my bias.

This time, the example under the microscope is Starbucks new holiday ads, but this dissection on Brand Autopsy holds a few lessons for meetings marketers as well. Key quote:

Anytime you can swap out your logo for a competitor’s logo in any piece of marketing collateral and it looks fine, you have a problem.

Unfortunately, that’d be the case with 99.9 percent of the meetings brochures I have seen.

From Chief Marketer: Top Ten: Marketing Ideas to Consider in 2008. Some are no-brainers, like green is red hot, but others are a little less obvious. Like using the gaming trend to market your wares (including, possibly, your meetings somehow?). Since Access All Areas already has given the list a good rundown, I won’t repeat it here, but definitely this is a list worth checking out.

The American Bus Association is doing an interesting promotion touting the industry as being “green”—and saving some penguins in the process (click to ABA’s home page, then on the penguin headline to download the pdf for the full brochure). I don’t know if it would persuade anyone to bus over fly to go to your meeting, but it does make me wonder if there are interesting ways you could tie your meeting promotions into some of the more popular social causes.

Check out this post on We Have Always Done it that Way for one of the best ideas I’ve heard yet on getting the next generation interested in coming to your association’s meeting.