Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Hanifin Loyalty blog.
What was the last conference you attended where you were so riveted by the presenters that you only checked e-mail during the breaks? Or the last one where you returned to your office so inspired that you shared learnings with your colleagues and engaged in personal research to build your understanding of the topics covered?
Just walking into Arsenal Montreal for C2-MTL, held in late May, you knew that a special experience was in store. The event came about as result of a vision from Cirque de Soleil’s President and CEO Daniel Lamarre in 2010 to create an event that would inspire leaders and spark innovation and creativity. "Creativity is everybody’s business" was 2013’s theme.
The format was a smart blend of networking, workshops and keynote talks. While sounding like customary conference formatting, it was how each element of the format was delivered that made the difference. A large Wi-Fi enabled area provided a venue for "always on" networking. A cadre of gourmet lunch trucks transformed meal/snack breaks into a grand crowdsourcing of creative minds.
Keynotes were given by notable business leaders and emerging entrepreneurs, including Blake Mycoskie, Philippe Starck, Neri Oxman, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg and Sir Richard Branson. A content partnership with Fast Company celebrated the "100 Most Creative People in Business."
Workshops were different too. I had the pleasure of facilitating one with Aaron Dauphinee, Canadian knowledge director for Aimia, Inc., on the subject of "Loyalty and Big Data — the good, the bad, and the opportunity."
Our direction was to leave the laptops and PowerPoint behind. Instead we facilitated a "kitchen table" conversation among three separate groups and talked about which brands were using data smartly to improve customer service and build brand loyalty and which stood out as flops.
Attendees become passionate in discussion and each group walked away with new ideas and perspectives on their favorite brands. Our creative Emoji provider, Shawna Newbery, captured highlights of each discussion in a pictograph, with one example seen below.
Being part of C2-MTL was an eye opener. I’ve felt for some time that the traditional conference model is somewhat "broken" and the standard fare I’ve attended this year in loyalty and cards marketing has reinforced that view. It was refreshing to experience a new format and to return home energized for growth.
BrainTrust
Discussion Questions
How would you reinvent retail conferences? What’s holding back more experimental approaches?
Poll
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To date, the best conferences I get to attend are in Europe. Retailers in Europe and not afraid to tell it like it is. If they made a mistake and installed the wrong system, they say so and call out the vendor who misled them. If a retailer did well they share their results with the world and again provide a shout out to the vendor who help them. In the U.S. everyone is so afraid of their competition they do not even offer to speak at a conference. That needs to change and in doing so can help their vendors do the right thing too!
The second question is easy—trade association inertia.
As for the reinvention of retail conferences, they need to focus on the actual store. The best way to do that is by having a good chunk of the events in stores. For a long time, the best part of the NGA show was the store tours, although that’s run it course after so many years in Las Vegas.
It would be engaging to have all levels of retail management go out to local stores to see what exactly is going on with merchandising, operations, etc. Have the experts lead the tours and add color to the store sets and other activities. The host stores will get a lot out of it by hearing critiques of their operations. And there could be so much more with areas like loss prevention, sustainability and even HR and finance. I know the logistics could be a bit challenging, but it would be so worth it.
First of all I would look to a set of new presenters and ban any presenter who pandered to the audience rather than challenge them.
Years ago I heard a much lionized retail presenter assure his mesmerized audience that Walmart could never succeed at retail because, “Nobody will ever buy food and large nonfood items in the same shopping trip.” After the presentation I pointed out to the presenter that that was already happening—in America—with successful retailers like Fred Meyer and Meijer. “I know,” he said. “In a couple of years most of those guys in that room will be out of business, but that’s what they want to hear and I need to worry about evaluations.”
The retail industry sat back and enjoyed years of bloated conventions full of political speakers and funded by what it believed was an unending river of manufacturer money. And—as the party raged on—traditional supermarket share declined each and every year (not that you would have know that from all the glorious speeches about how supermarketing was the most efficient industry in the world). Now, the parties are far more modest and the problems remain.
So, want to have a better conference? Start programming for the challenges of the future rather than the glories of the past. Bring in the Bransons of the world and let the politicos stay home. Associations may be based in Washington and do lots of good, much needed lobbying work, but everyday retail success is more about adapting to a radically changing social and customer culture than it is rehashing current affairs.
Give people tools and they’ll put them to work. Give them superannuated lounge acts and rehashes of CNN or Fox debates and they’ll thank you for a nice time.
What’s holding things up? There’s an establishment that supports itself — especially on the presenter side. Change the players and you might just change the game.
One of the opportunities with retail conferences is to vary the location so that there is the ability to expose attendees to different retail models (whether in the same industry or in different industries).
For many years I was chair of the FMI Consumer Market Research Committee. One of the best things we did was move our committee meetings around the country and part of the meeting involved visiting different local retailers. Invaluable for generating ideas and seeing things from different points of view.
I like the use of conference-within-a-conference techniques. This gives the show organizer the ability to take advantage of scale and yet still offer more meaningful content and interaction for attendees with specific interests and needs. NRF looks to be trying to do this by integrating parts of RAMA and their Mobile Initiative at the Annual and Shop.org. I would like to see them go further and have dedicated tracks, bring more focus on the expo floor (beyond just calling some portion “mobile pavilion”), keynotes that address specific issues for these sub-sets of attendees.
Holding them back: logistics and money. It is a balancing act to keep the core audience coming back while expanding and staying relevant.
Make sure that attendees have some simple take-aways (tips) that they can easily apply to achieve positive results. I like to call these “Monday Morning Take-Aways.”
Exhibition should be added to the list. Instead of brochures and iPad slide shows, exhibitors should be challenged to build pop-up stores and pop-up back-end operations on the exhibition floor to demonstrate their solution in real world and get real world feed back from trade show attendees on their experience and input.
Second option is to build an innovation center and a wall to post virtual sticky notes for questions and solutions and alert attendees when one of their questions were addressed or if a new question was posted.
I personally see no sense whatever in having retired football players, politicians (generally far right, for some odd reason?), and someone reading his/her carefully screened and censored PowerPoints. This has become such a predictable waste of time that I always arrange ahead of time with other attendees to get together and walk stores in the area at some point, often missing the jock du jour and not caring a bit.
I am told consistently by show managements that they need “the big names” to draw a crowd and make their conferences profitable. Shame on them for not putting the work into attracting more truly useful and interesting speakers. “Interesting,” by the way, is NOT synonymous with “incandescent.” I see some perennial speakers who ham it up, pace and growl, while stating the totally obvious. It depresses me no end that these bozos often get high evaluation ratings.
Entertaining, yes, but useless. I’ve spent my life running trade magazines. If I were to pander, or print stuff everyone knows, I would quickly lose my audience. There’s an analogy here….
Here in the US, we have “Industry Trade Organizations” that are primarily Washington, D.C. lobbyists. That’s the first obstacle to innovative approaches. Any progress that has been made in those trade events has been done primarily by the exhibitors, sponsors and other participants.
The more innovative events I have attended and been a part of continue to be the private industry media/publisher events. I think a more global audience always adds value to for the attendees. Keeping US events narrowly focused upon US-exclusive issues limits the global appeal. I think these events need to recruit more diverse attendees from around the world.
This is very much a topic of interest to industry insiders, but cheers to you Bill for stimulating the discussion.
In general, the speakers at our association events are predictable, bland and overpaid. Rarely does a keynote speaker deliver even a particle of wisdom that the audience can put to practical use. This was true even at the latest two NRF Expos, where the stars were the inspirational Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton. (To be fair, NRF is without the doubt the best of the large industry association events in the U.S.)
Some of the worst speakers I’ve encountered over the years were retiring Washington politicians who assumed attendees hewed heavily to the right and told them exactly what they figured would result in the greatest book sales or PAC donations. Such laziness and disrespect for the audience should be a retroactively unelectable offense.
Running a close second in my hall of shame are the so-called motivational speakers who make no visible effort to relate their messages to the business concerns of the folks in the seats. That, to me, is just stealing.
Making conferences better is about more than picking better speakers, however. I think the breakthrough will come from programs that are more participatory—workshops are good for this, but also pavilions on the show floor where attendees can walk through and experience practice innovations.
“Speed-dating” type vendor-client-meetings remain a popular and effective format at medium-sized events. Store tours are great too, but may be awkward to coordinate for more than a few dozen individuals. Where in-person store visits are impractical, pop-up stores on the exhibit floor are a nice idea.
Finally, there is an opportunity to design and host a variety of team simulation exercises patterned after the “Store Wars” or MarkStrat simulations.
In general when it comes to industry conferences: do is better than show; show is better than tell; tell is better than sell.
A big AMEN to Brother Warren Thayer!!!!!!!!
Could not agree more!
Here are some approaches that I like:
User generated conferences like Bar Camps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp
Or unconferences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference
These have been around for awhile and are amazing. They have their own cultures and are why we have moved so fast here in the valley. They have evolved and have processes (like the law of two feet) that enforce participation vs. being a spectator. Here is more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-space_technology
My feelings on what’s holding us back is we don’t have a clearly defined joint/big problem to solve (like we did during the supply chain era). That could be a problem of leadership or creativity.
As a motivational speaker, I have to chime in. While I’m about to write about this subject on my blog next week, I took NRF’s Big Show to task several years ago about what they could do better.
I would suggest the days of high vendor outlay for space in a highly crowded and competitive market are waning. Associations need to find new ways to engage customers of all types. There’s not much reason to come to a large trade show as products are online much sooner than most events.
The magic happens with the right speaker who energizes and gives hope to the audience. Who understands what their challenges are, and yes, challenges them to do better.
I learned long ago, it’s not about me, it’s about what the audience takes away. When you present with creativity you get raving fans.
However, many people who are presenters these days are merely reciting features of their products without passion, interest or relevance to the audience.
I was followed by a guy a couple years ago at a large industry event. He was out of touch and within 10 minutes, 90% of the audience was on their smartphone.
Just because you can get someone to “speak” doesn’t mean you should. Find a great keynote speaker who understands retail and never takes the chance to speak for granted. We can do amazing things.