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the marketing guru
Peter C. Yesawich Time Poverty
PETER C. YESAWICH is chairman and CEO of Orlando-based Ypartnership, a marketing, advertising and public relations agency known for its strategic thinking and innovation. In April and May, Ypartnership conducted a survey of 516 professional meeting planners for PCMA and American Express which is available at pcma.org.
MPG Peter: Probably the most significant change is the evolution of the Internet and the way the technology is now used to plan meetings.
We saw the conventional supplier sales presentations about their facilities – floor plans, services, amenities – which had been done through direct sales using printed collateral material move online. There was a major transformation in how planners accessed information.
The second change that has impacted the meeting business is something that we call “time poverty.” Time poverty is a generalized sense expressed by roughly 4 in 10 adults in America that they don’t have enough time.
How does that bear on the meetings business? Time poverty has underscored the need to transact things faster, including meetings. What may have been a four-day agenda in the ‘90’s has morphed into a two or three-day program. There are now greater demands on meeting efficiency. It’s been exacerbated by the economy because of the costs associated with the length of meetings.
What’s funny about time poverty is how it’s impacted leisure travel. We have anointed a new form of vacationing we call “speed vacations.” Hurry up and relax!
There is an ironic correlation between these two mega-forces. The more wired we become, the more we feel the sense of time poverty.
Has the social networking phenomenon affected face-to-face meetings? I don’t see this new media having any kind of adverse affect on the desire or the need for people to meet. The greatest negative impact these social sites may have on off-site meetings will be the attention deficit of the attendees during the sessions.
There is a fundamental benefit derived from face-to-face meetings that cannot be supplanted by technology. Most of the degradation in the demand for business travel is not in the meetings category, it’s in the individual business trips where people say, “let’s just do a webinar.”
What is your advice to meeting planners to help them continue to demonstrate their own value to their employer? I think it’s really underscoring the benefits that are derived from the exchange of information during their off-site meetings.
Their focus has to be on the business, not the recreation. Planners understand that but, unfortunately, it has been misinterpreted and some groups are avoiding places like Orlando, Las Vegas and other destinations that appear that they are having too much fun.
A planner needs to be able to demonstrate specific, actionable items from their off-site meetings that can be translated into some competitive advantages for their organization. Things that senior management can look at and say, “you know what, it was really worth the cost of getting those 300 people together for that 3-day period.”
According to your PCMA survey, luxury properties are seeing the most impact from the economy. What is your advice for these people to maintain or grow their market share? That’s a difficult question to answer. My advice is to first acknowledge that there is a “trading-down” phenomenon. You can’t hide from it - the Smith Travel numbers confirm that.
With that acknowledgement, point two is to be innovative in your pricing and promotional strategies to insure that you can capture your fair share. That does not mean that you embark on strategies that try to persuade planners that it’s “okay” to meet at a luxury resort. Those will never work.
Look what Hilton has done. They said, we understand it’s all about value so if you book a meeting at any of their participating hotels with a minimum of 10 room nights, then we’ll give you the meeting for free. What that means is they will give you the meeting space, the room set up, and, I think, a luncheon. All of a sudden it’s all about value. The focus is on the wisdom of booking that particular venue for the meeting instead of the wisdom of booking the meeting.
Look into the future at least five years and what do you think the meeting industry will look like and how will it be different? Association meetings will continue as they have for years with perhaps one significant change – because of time poverty, the duration will shorten. There probably won’t be a lot of growth from the association market because those meeting patterns are pretty well established.
I think that the corporate market is the area of greatest opportunity. I believe that we have another 18 months of soft business, but the corporate market is going to rebound significantly after 2011 and will be principally in the industries where the rate of information change is exponential – telecommunications, medical, pharmaceutical.
The meetings that will grow the most in terms of popularity will be smaller - typically less than 100 delegates - so from the suppliers’ stand point, there is a greater need for more flexible, smaller meeting space as opposed to the 85,000 square foot ballrooms which has been part of the recent building rage.
We are going to see more virtual meetings. The PCMA survey showed a number of planners saying they were rediscovering the value of the virtual meeting technologies.
Will technology have a significant impact on the off-site corporate and association meeting? My feeling is no. The need for face-to-face meetings will continue to be evident. The technology will evolve into a form that is used to host more spontaneous kinds of meetings that require collaboration - not something that would supplant a training session or a sales meeting or an annual convention.
Any closing thoughts? Yes. Keep an eye on these two forces. First, technological innovation and how people are communicating. Second, the growing pressure from time poverty.
Regrettably, we don’t see the promise of the four day work week coming back again - it’s gone the other way. |
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