Event Planning and Customer Insights

For years, my friends and family have compared me to Martha Stewart (pre-jail time, of course). They’ve always said I’m the decorator, the creative one, and the event planner. While I am studying Marketing and can’t wait to begin a career in this field, I feel that someday when I retire, a good side job would be event planning. Whether that involves professional, sporting, or charity events or more personal events like birthdays and weddings, I hope to someday be able to use my creative ideas to plan beautiful, memorable events.

Before I could take on this endeavor, however, I think it would be exceptionally beneficial to have a better grasp on the customer insights and behaviors related to events. Therefore, I hope to use the research project for my Customer Insights class to my advantage by leveraging the different resources made available to me through UT, to research the differences in customer behavior regarding specific types of events. I hold particular interest in events surrounding charities and professional organizations because I may be able to leverage this information into my actual career someday if I am a project manager or get into event marketing professionally.

Within event marketing, I hope to take a closer look not only at how to organize events in such a way that will maximize the ROI, but also at how different tactics appeal to different types of event attendees.  I want to take a closer look at trends in events, customer perceptions of events, and how to evaluate the success of events in the eyes of customers.  I hope to use some of the following questions to form a basic foundation for my research:

•        What have been some recent trends in event planning?
•        What are some trends that have remained stable over the years?
•        How does professional event planning compare to sporting events? Charity events? Birthdays? Weddings? Socials?
•    What are some best practices for event marketing? What are these practices founded upon?
•        What are customers saying after “successful” events versus “unsuccessful events?
•      Does a more expensive event guarantee better approval from the attendees?           

As aforementioned, I hold particular interest in this area of study because I hope to someday be involved in event planning throughout retirement. However, I feel that understanding this topic will be extremely beneficial in the community service work I do as well. I hope through this research I will be able to find ways to understand customer behavior in regards to their participation in charity events.  It will be especially interesting to see why consumers are willing to pay thousands of dollars to charities in return for a plate at an event, and yet not willing to pay $20 to attend a marketing luncheon downtown. If I can figure out what motivates people to do this, I may be able to increase the number attendees my company’s marketing luncheons.

Another reason I hope to look into this topic comes from my perspectives as a customer, not a marketer. While throwing an event can be stressful and overwhelming, attending one can be fun and exciting – if it’s been put together well. However, I have on occasion found myself at an event thinking, “wow this is so tacky,” or “why won’t the keynote shut up already?” I’ve left these events tired, grumpy, and not at all impressed by the company/person throwing the event. It will be interesting to reflect on my own negative (and positive) experiences regarding events when compiling my research. Using these reflections may possibly lead me to discern ways to have made those events better.

Overall, by gathering these customer perceptions and insights, I will be able to someday create a valuable customer experience through event planning. Ultimately, by creating a valuable experience, the company, charity, or person I am planning the event for will be thoroughly happy with the results of my event, but even more importantly, their guests will be happy as well.  Happy guests means more donations for charities, more sales for companies, and more invites to other social gatherings from friends.

As the first step to this research, I have found a very interesting paper called: “Events Beyond 2000: Setting the Agenda.” While the paper is very long and I have not yet read the entire thing, it is broken down into several topics that I feel will be extremely beneficial to this project. The most important of these sections include the keynotes, event evaluations, event marketing, and the case studies related to this topic. While the main focus of this paper is about sporting events like the Summer Olympics in 2000, the insights the authors have documented seem relevant to many fields of event planning.  The link to this article is: http://linkbc.ca/torc/downs1/Events2000.pdf#page=192

By and large, I feel that this research paper will be very beneficial for future projects I someday hope to take on. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the “Events Beyond 2000” article and begin diving into other articles related to this topic.