Losing credibility through pricing

Be sure to keep an eye on long term consequences as you try to navigate the current economy. The worst possible result?  Devaluing your event by overly aggressive price cutting.  This can hurt you on either the sponsorship or attendee side.

Wherever possible, go for value-add rather than a drop in price.  Your customers are looking for ROI, not just a low price.  Make sure they can articulate how their organization can benefit from their attending, far beyond the cost to attend.

Some discounting can be done without long-term consequences.  Hotel and travel deals to attend your event. Grandfathering last-year’s prices. Bring a colleague to get a reduction on both tickets.

Seth Rosenblatt’s blog on marketing and management at Autonomy gave a great example on his most recent post: Selling value and not price.

Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor and presidential candidate, was selling a leadership seminar that he was speaking at, along with other luminaries such as Colin Powell, Steve Forbes, Zig Ziglar, and even Michael Phelps (presumably without the pipe).  Sounds interesting and valuable, right?  Rudy told me that I could attend this session – which could change my whole life – for only $19!  Wait, not $19 per person, but $19 for my whole office!  Incredible – how could I pass up on such a deal?  Well, you’re now probably thinking the same thing I did, which is how valuable can Rudy really think it is if my whole office can attend for less than $1 per person?

As Seth points out, offers like these hurt your credibility…not just in the longterm, but immediately.  How useful could it be for this price?  Sounds like a waste of my $19. If this were a business-to-business event I’d expect attendance to plummet.

Though this consumer event, held only to build a mailing list (they don’t make money on the event itself), may defy that expectation.

 

The Paperless Event: Eliminate the show guide

A key element of a green strategy is to simply avoid using resources, and to that end I propose using technology to create a 100% paperless event.
Onsite, attendees still need considerable information about their options to fully experience the event. What if the entire contents of a show guide were downloaded to the attendee’s smart phone? Not only could they scroll to the choices for the next session or find a map of the show floor with a couple of clicks, but you could also push out reminders of key program events, like a midday keynote, or a notification of a schedule change.  For me, this is a great example of the technology actually providing a better user experience than the paper does.  The attendee doesn’t have to carry around the heavy show guide, and can find the information they’re looking for much faster on their device.
What about advertising? Lets re-think that experience in the new medium.  Exhibitors can sponsor the home page with a banner ad.  They can sponsor a pushed message.  Best: they can pay for promotion of their event activities (conference speakers, give-aways, parties, press conferences…) in context within the program guide.  Like a well-placed Google ad.
The trade-off?  No branding advertising. No reference tool to put on the shelf post-event.  Show directors would want to create a show directory online to replicate the post-event ability to look up exhibitors.  Again, an ongoing online directory of exhibitors would provide both attendees and exhibitors more value than the show guide being replaced.
All we need to do is rethink the experience we want to create in the context of currently available media: rather than substitute exact functionality.
Now:  who does this?  I’m working on it.  Accenture did exactly this smart phone application for CTIA.  But I don’t think it is on the market.  Vaultus is in a similar situation, but working on how to make it broadly available.  And I read that A2Z has this type of technology…still checking into it.

 

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.