- Question your own product and markets through your mar-
ket research and analysis:
■What aspects of direct mail, advertising, and public relations
have been most successful? Least successful?
■What event elements are most important for your attendees?
■What event elements attract only light response? Why?
■What target markets generate the least business? Why?
■What new features, unique to the competition, can be added
to rejuvenate interest in your areas of weak participation?
What old features can be eliminated?
■What additional promotional tools can be used to gain a
breakthrough at your next event?Again, the questions you ask of yourself and your marketing
team are open ended and infinite. But ask only those that are
meaningful. Resist the urge to overcomplicate and thus confuse
and forestall your analysts.- Apply the SWOT analysis to all comparisons of competi-
tion. Comparing “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and
threats” will add flesh to the skeleton of your grids and charts and
make more meaningful your responses to the otherwise mechani-
cal profiles they display. Marketers often find that pursuing cer-
tain audiences is an unprofitable exercise, perhaps maintained
only by habit or tradition. “Don’t throw good product after bad
prospects” is an old, but valuable adage in the marketing field. Be-
fore giving up on a market, however, ask another vital question:
“How long will these negative market conditions last?” Remember
that every organization and industry has life cycles, many with
continuous ebbs and flows of strengths and weaknesses.These
fluid conditions will drive the opportunities and threatsyour mar-
keting efforts will encounter in the long term. “SWOT.” Write it
down again.
The day of the snake-oil salesman is over. There are no more
medicines being sold to crowds over the backs of wagons by tran-
sients with no lasting ties to the buying community. Marketing has
become as much a science as it has an art. It blends human un-
derstanding with scientific analysis and high-tech implementa-
tion. It requires marketing practitioners who understand the nu-
ances of these characteristics and are able to integrate them into
an effective game plan that identifies, reaches, and satisfiescon-
190 Chapter 8 Trends in Event Marketing