Last week at The Gathering brand-marketing event in Banff, Canada, several speakers shared brand-marketing tips that could benefit meeting planners. These five takeaways are useful for those looking to not only expand their company’s brand but their event brand as well.
- Amplify what is right, not what is wrong. John Moore, author of The Passion Conversation, opened up the conference with a speech about how he overcame stuttering. He encouraged brand marketers to amplify the positive instead of the negative to get ahead in the marketing world.
- Be authentic. Eric Petersen, senior vice president of global brand at Lululemon, said that the Lululemon brand grew from a small community of neighbors who liked to do yoga into a $2 billion company because they stayed true to their beliefs, and as a result, built their client trust.
- Brands can help solve the world problems. Afdhel Aziz, creative director for from Absolut Vodka’s Absolut Labs, spoke about how millennials demand more from their brands, and as a result, Absolut started a campaign to offer live video streams to its customers who couldn’t get tickets to a Bob Moses concert in Brooklyn, N.Y.
- Target a specific audience. Brian Walker, chief strategy officer for SAP Hybris, a company that delivers customer data management, said that meeting planners need to use social media to reach like audiences or audiences interested in their conference topic. “The message to meeting planners would be to recognize how to reach attendees in the forums they’re already in and the mediums they’re using and the touch points their attendees are engaging in, which is primarily mobile today, and look at today’s digital marketing platforms as an opportunity to further engage,” he said.
- Question everything. The conference closed with keynote speaker Brian Solis, a digital analyst and anthropologist, who encouraged attendees to never stop daydreaming because that’s the only way things evolve in this world. “What the world needs now are change agents, and that starts by questioning everything,” he said.
