30 Chapter 2 Event Promotion, Advertising, and Public Relations
Event Promotion: Trends and Challenges
Regardless of the nature of your event, its success will largely de-
pend on promotion. Promotion is vital in creating awareness of
the event, a desire to participate, and a feeling by the potential
participant that the investment of time and money validates the
benefits the event offers.
As the economy and our society are transformed, we can iden-
tify many new challenges to our promotional strategies. Among
them are:Greater Competition
In 1996, there were 4,100 trade shows held annually in the United
States, according to the Convention Industry Council (CIC). Four
years later, the number of trade shows had increased to 4,600.
Many of these were the result of spin-offs, duplicating national
events with comparable regional events to attract more local and
regional participants. National meetings are therefore becoming
more “regional” in nature, accommodating the strictures of time,
location, and economics faced by attendees.
The CIC study revealed that, 25 years ago, meetings attempting
to attract a national attendance drew 36 percent of attendees from
a radius of 200 miles or less. Today, the growing regionalization of
these events is illustrated by the fact that more than 50 percent of
attendees are drawn from this distance.
This trend is manifested by many sponsoring organizations
and corporations that have “taken the show to the customer,”
rather than compete for long-distance attendees and the greater ex-
penses attendant to both the sponsoring organization and the event
guests and delegates.
This increasing abundance of meetings challenges your skills
in advertising, direct mail, public relations, telemarketing, and
electronic marketing to position your product as not only favor-
able, but also indispensable in the face of increasing alternatives
for your potential attendees.Costs of Travel and Accommodations
As we enter a new era of corporate mergers and turnovers in the
hospitality and travel industry, we are seeing the costs of travel to
certain locations increase.
For example, the clear trend is toward more hospitality prop-