What attendees want

HCEA (Healthcare Convention and Exhibitors Association) presented the findings of their 2009 study of what medical event attendees want from events at the Annual Meeting in June.  “How Physicians Would Design the Exhibit Hall of the Future.”

We get used to repeating what we did last year, but step back and re-think your program based on what the healthcare providerssay they want from your event.  (Most of these comments apply to any industry.)  Make the attendees happy and the exhibitors will keep coming back.

• Events serve a very important function
  • Opportunity to see everything related to their speciality under one roof
  • Hospitals and small practices need events more than ever, as they have less exposure to pharmaceutical reps in their normal practice than previously
• Organize the event by therapeutic area
  • Mixing all exhibitors up is confusing and difficult to navigate
• Navigation: Large signage, information desks, representatives
• Schedule: Extend hours and start early.  Drs are used to it!
• Multiple lounges and refreshment areas.  Wifi
• Exhibitors:
  • Put product experts in the booth: Clinical peers, not just sales reps
  • Educational approach
  • Interactive demos or virtual simulations
• See exhibit hall as
  • Providing a break from the dark lecture halls
  • Social time–interacting with peers while interacting with exhibitors
• Schedule meet the expert round tables

 

Interesting Attendee Focus Group Results

A great feature of the HCEA Marketing Summit was the opening keynote of a moderated panel of four healthcare event attendees: doctors and nurses. With lots of questions from the audience, it was essentially a focus group of attendees, queried by exhibitors and event producers.  The learnings go beyond the healthcare event industry.

Here’s what they said to event producers:

• Make it easy to move around the event and find what we need: organize the booths, give us more signs with larger print
• Most interested in new products and start-ups
• Want more demonstrations and theaters, but of technology, not pharma
• Like breaks/lunch in exhibit hall
• Spend only 2 hours in exhibit hall (but these were more senior than typical attendees)
• None have ever been to an event with agenda-building software (!) but it sounds great
• They do all carry smart phones
• They meet with colleagues ahead of time to create shopping lists
• Would love to see a year-round virtual event to complement in-person experience and use as reference
• Get an exhibitor to sponsor a map of the city with local restaurants
• They NEED the face-to-face, especially as they no longer see reps in their offices

Here’s what they said to exhibitors:

• Give us your materials electronically. We don’t want to carry brochures home.
• Give us slide sets we can cut-and-paste from…so we can actually use your materials
• Give us podcasts from the posters and other new technologies we may not get to see in our short time there
• They NEED the face-to-face, especially as they no longer see reps in their offices

The emphasis on technology was a clear, though seemingly unintended, theme.

This is a huge shift, by the way, for the medical profession. When I worked at Krames, a healthcare publisher, 10 years ago, we were publishing patient education literature on CD that nurses told us they couldn’t use as they didn’t have access to a computer at work yet.

Now the practitioners are ahead of us, asking us to catch up in giving them information electronically.  I’m happy to oblige!

 

Medical Events Adapt to New PhRMA Code

I attended the excellent HCEA (Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Association) Summit in Boston yesterday. Attendance was at record levels, with attendees from all across the country flying in to learn more about the new PhRMA and AdvaMed codes.

Essentially the new rules (voluntary, but widely adopted), prohibit vendor reps giving gifts to healthcare professionals.  No more pens, mugs, or lunches.  While, according to the discussion at the event, these rules were not intended to apply to indirect gifts (a lanyard or conference bag with the pharma logo given by the association event), many vendor compliance groups are erring on the side of a very broad interpretation of the rules.

But it was very clear at the meeting that interpretation is everything.  There will be very different interpretations over the next year as this plays out, with direct competitors taking a different position on what they will or will not sponsor, or hand out from a booth.

Attendees were vocal about their concerns:

• How will exhibitors incent attendees to visit their booths?
• How will associations fund their events with a decline in traditional sponsorships?

Ten years from now we’ll all look back at this as a transition year to a golden age of medical promotion.  Freed from the traditional approach and forced to get really creative, the industry will get really creative:

Exhibitors will create really innovative and interesting product demonstrations; electronic white papers and presentations the Drs can re-use in patient education and training; interactive games and demonstrations that are fun and teach new skills; hand-outs that include patient education materials and models.

And the events will come up with innovative features that fit the new standards: demonstration areas on the show floor that highlight new technology; unbranded memory sticks attendees can use to download electronic materials from each booth of interest to them; lightning talks (5-minute vendor pitches) in a conference room; virtual events online to complement the physical event and retain reference information.

All event professionals should be keeping an eye on medical over the next year as they create new best practices that will influence the entire event industry.

[Check out the related article in Pharma Voice, January issue, and NY Times.