Conferences and Conventions

A Research Perspective

Judith Mair

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136329197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Conferences and conventions are one of the fastest growing areas of the events industry. This is a substantially important sector yet research into many dimensions is in its infancy. This timely book, uniquely presents a 'state of the art' synthesis of the research on both demand and supply sides of the industry as well as insights into how current and future trends are affecting conferences and conventions.

This volume provides a critical review of the players involved in conferences and conventions; destination image and impacts; and current and future trends. The players in the industry include attendees/delegates, professional conference organisers, and association meeting planners. On the destination side, conference venues and facilities, along with convention and visitor bureaux are examined, as well as how destination image can be developed and improved. Further, this section considers the economic, social and environmental impacts of conferences and conventions. The final section considers some of the major trends that are likely to impact on the industry, including climate change, new technologies and risk and crisis management. To reflect the sector's international nature case studies and examples from different geographical regions are included throughout.

By identifying gaps in our knowledge, and presenting a collection of themes to guide future research, this book not only adds to our current knowledge, but will underpin the advancement of knowledge in the future. This book is essential reading for all those interested in Events.

1 Introduction

 

 

 

Conferences and conventions are big business worldwide. Although definitions vary, and accurate statistics are hard to come by, it is fair to say that conferences and conventions make a substantial and growing contribution to the economies of many countries worldwide. However, despite this clear economic importance, research into conferences and conventions has not progressed as quickly or as far as might have been expected. Indeed, although studies have proliferated in both industry and the academic world, many of these are descriptive, or based on single case studies, which limits their applicability to the wider conference and convention sector. Our understanding of the complexities of conferences and conventions remains somewhat limited, and the body of knowledge associated with these events leaves much room for improvement.

Of course, there have been some excellent and illuminating studies of various aspects of the conference and convention sector over the years, and we have made great strides in the development of a coherent body of literature since conferences and conventions appeared as an academic research topic around 30 years ago. Our understanding of certain aspects of conferences and conventions – for example, the attendee decision-making process, the meeting planners' site selection process, and the economic impacts of conferences and conventions – is detailed and increasing. Nonetheless, there are still many areas where our knowledge is relatively scant – examples include a deeper understanding of the benefits for delegates of attending conferences, and the so-called ‘beyond tourism’ benefits for destinations hosting conferences and events. In addition, the world is in a constant state of flux, with changes to society, the global climate, technology and geo-politics. There are a number of recent trends that are bound to have an impact on the sector, but as yet remain relatively unexplored. The conference and convention sector, as with other sectors of industry, must keep pace with these changes in order to maintain its competitiveness.

With this in mind, this book sets out to illustrate the extent of our current knowledge of the conference and convention sector, and highlight those areas where our understanding is less than optimal. Indeed, in many cases the book underlines areas and poses questions with which the conference and convention sector has not yet come to grips.

The book is divided into three main sections. Part I will examine the key players in the conference and convention sector. After an introduction to the various definitions and terminology used around the world (Chapter 2), the book will move on to consider the demand and supply side of conferences and conventions. Chapter 3 focuses on the attendees and their profiles, decision making, and the benefits they seek from attending conferences and conventions. It also covers the issue of whether we are able to understand and predict some of the characteristics of future attendance decisions. Such information would be invaluable to those charged with marketing and promoting conferences and conventions. Chapter 4 covers part of the supply side of the sector – meeting planners and professional conference organisers. This chapter discusses the different ways in which conferences can be purchased and site selection decisions are made.

Part II moves on to examine research in the context of the conference and convention destination. Chapter 5 considers the range of destination stakeholders that may be involved in organising conferences and conventions (including destination management and marketing organisations, and convention and visitor bureaux), and also examines the bidding process. The chapter concludes with an overview of the existing convention destination image literature, and highlights several issues with the way that this topic has been researched in the past, as well as suggesting some directions for future research. Chapter 6 details the impacts of conferences and conventions on a destination – positive and negative, short term and long term. As the chapter points out, while we have a reasonable knowledge of the economic impacts of conferences and conventions, our knowledge of the socio-cultural and environmental impacts is not as detailed. In particular, we have very little understanding of the extent of these impacts, a point elaborated on in the section highlighting the need to identify the ‘beyond tourism’ benefits of conferences and conventions – the flow-on effects on local business, knowledge transfer and improved competitiveness that can result for a host destination.

Part III considers a wide range of global trends and changes that are already having an impact on conferences and conventions worldwide, and are bound to continue to do so. Chapter 7 considers pressing issues of a global nature, concentrating on climate change and crisis management, both areas of significant importance, yet areas with a concerning lack of research in the conference and convention context. Chapter 8 moves on to changes in the workplace, society and business, and draws attention to particular issues of interest to the conference and convention sector, including more women in the workplace and increasing numbers of female delegates; a new generation (Gen Y) as employees and delegates; increasing interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR); and rising levels of globalisation. Chapter 9 considers the rapidly evolving pace of technological change, particularly in the areas of social media, event mobile applications, and virtual and hybrid events. Given this change, it is vital that conferences and conventions keep pace with developments, in order to maintain their competitiveness. However, research has not been able to keep up with these changes. As a corollary to this discussion, the chapter closes with an investigation of why face-to-face contact is still an important part of conference and convention attendance. Understanding this may be vital in the continued success of face-to-face conferences and conventions in the future. The final chapter in Part III is Chapter 10, which is devoted to changes in the world market for conference and convention destinations. Although much of the chapter concerns Asia, other up-and-coming destinations are also discussed, including the Middle East, South Africa and South America. The chapter concludes with the identification of one of the risks of increasing competition - the potential for over-supply of venues. This is a problem that has already become apparent in some parts of North America and may lie in store for other countries in the future.

The final section of the book, Part IV, proposes an agenda for conference and convention research forward into the future. Chapter 11 highlights a raft of issues that are potential topics for study, and poses a selection of potential research questions. Although these questions do not necessarily represent every topic that we need to study, they certainly outline a broad agenda for the future. The book concludes in Chapter 12 with a plea for more theoretical and empirical rigour in this area: using theories from other disciplines will underpin the future conceptual development of the conference and convention area of study. This will represent a sound foundation for future research in this vital and fascinating industry.

Part I

The key players

2 Definitions and terminology

Conferences and conventions form only one part of the business events sector. This sector of the economy is sometimes known by the acronym MICE: meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions. In practice, business events and MICE tend to refer to the same thing and the use of one term or the other seems to vary by country and region. The industry anecdotally prefers the term ‘business events’ (although it is difficult to say whether the meaning of this term is clear to those outside the industry), but MICE is commonly used in the academic literature. This chapter will briefly examine the different components of the MICE industry before moving on to consider the different types of conferences and conventions, and will conclude with an overview of the differing definitions for conferences and conventions, highlighting the difficulties that this causes for researchers.

2.1 Components of the MICE industry

Meetings

There appears to be little agreement as to a specific definition for a ‘meeting’. Indeed, the whole MICE sector suffers from what may be considered definitional fuzziness. Meetings can be international or domestic, large scale or small scale. The term ‘meeting’ is probably the least specific of all the terms understood by the acronym MICE, as it can refer to almost any gathering of people for the purposes of discussing some matter of interest to the participants. The term ‘meeting’ is defined as referring to ‘a gathering of 10 or more participants for a minimum of four hours in a contracted venue’ by the Convention Industry Council (2011); however, it is worth noting that they use the term ‘meeting’ to cover ‘conventions, conferences, congresses, trade shows and exhibitions, incentive events, corporate/business meetings, and other meetings that meet the aforementioned criteria’ (Convention Industry Council 2011). Thus, they define everything in the MICE sector to be a meeting.

In some cases, events as large as conventions or conferences can be considered meetings, whilst in other cases, a meeting can be a very small-scale event involving only a few people within a company. According to Abbey and Link (1994: 273), ‘75% of all corporate meetings has fewer than 100 people in attendance’. This suggests that most meetings are smaller events, whilst many conferences, especially international ones, can have more than 1,000 delegates. Davidson (1998) points out that the different categories of the MICE market often merge into one another, with a conference taking place that has an exhibition running alongside it, or a meeting in an exotic location, attendance at which may be considered to be a reward, making it incentive travel. In short, the definitions of ‘meeting’ are, at best, highly diverse. Meetings are most commonly associated with the corporate sector or large international associations.

Incentives

Incentive travel has been defined as ‘a type of pleasure travel that has been financed for business reasons’ (Mill and Morrison 1985: 115) and also as ‘offering the reward of a visit to a highly desirable destination in return for meeting clearly defined and attainable objectives within a fixed programme period’ (Witt and Gammon 1994: 19). A more conceptual definition is that offered by the Society of Incentive Travel Executives (SITE): ‘a concept whereby company employees, distributors and sales teams are motivated to achieve uncommon business goals by the prospect of an extraordinary travel experience as a reward for attaining the goals’ (SITE 2013). Incentive travel is also defined as a global management tool that uses an exceptional travel experience to motivate and/or recognise participants for increased levels of performance at work (SITE 2013). The incentive travel acts as a reward for recipient staff who may spend significant time away from work-related activities during their trip. Incentive travel is the least researched part of the MICE industry (Mair 2012), partly because it is hard to differentiate between those travelling on business trips and those travelling on incentive trips, as both are paid for by businesses and a proportion of incentive trips include an element of business, such as a meeting or tour of company offices. Incentive trips are also only rarely recorded at a national level, which makes it very difficult to track. Indeed, a review of business events literature published between 2000 and 2007 failed to identify more than a small handful of academic papers on incentive travel (Mair 2012). Of the research that has been carried out recently, of note is the work by Xiang and Formica (2007), which examined incentive travel managers' perceptions of the business environment.

Conventions

Within the MICE industry there is a plethora of designations for what is essentially the same thing. Conference, convention, congress, symposium, forum, seminar, consortium, summit and workshop – all can be said to be in essence a gathering of like-minded individuals for some common purpose. The difference is generally one of size and scale. Definitions used in this part of the MICE industry will be discussed in detail in the next section, and the research that has been undertaken into various aspects of conferences and conventions (including delegates, venues, destination selection, economic impacts and environmental issues) will form the remainder of this book.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions are an important component of the MICE industry. Although ‘exhibition’ and ‘trade show’ are frequently used interchangeably to refer to showcases of products and services (Breiter and Milman 2006; Polivka 1996), technically, ‘exhibition’ has a broader meaning than ‘trade show’. Exhibitions can be subdivided into three categories, of which a trade show is only one. The other two categories are consumer shows, and trade plus consumer shows (Rittichainuwat and Mair 2012). Exhibitions provide visitors with an opportunity to examine products, see how products work, look for something different, and enjoy entertainment at the exhibitions, as well as to see the latest innovations and observe market trends, often well in advance of their public launch. Rittichainuwat and Mair (2012) identified a range of research in the exhibition sector, noting that prominent areas of existing research into exhibitions include: exhibition service quality (Jung 2005); association meeting participants (Lee and Back 2008); the economic impact of the exhibition industry (Kim and Chon 2009; Mistilis and Dwyer 1999); trade show managers' use of technology (Breiter and Gregory 2004); criteria for evaluating trade shows (Berne and García-Uceda 2008); exhibition site selection (DiPietro et al. 2008); antitrust regulations (Abbott and Lanza 1998); positioning of Asian exhibition host cities (Kim et al. 2008); and the exhibition industry at specific destinations, such as Beijing (Wei and Go 1999), China (Jin et al. 2010; Zhang et al. 2010), and Thailand (Chen and Lalopa 2000).

As has been discussed, the divisions between the different segments of the MICE industry are rather blurred, and often one event can incorporate a large meeting that could be defined as a conference, an exhibition running in tandem with the meeting, and several delegates attending through an incentive programme at their place of work. Therefore, before going any further it is important to stress that this book takes as its focus conferences and conventions, and so this sector will now be examined in more detail.

2.2 Types of conference and convention

Historically, the conference market has been divided into either two or three sections (association, corporate and government). However, it is clear that there is discord amongst those authors who have written on the subject with regard to how to classify the market segments of the conference industry. Most authors divide the market into three segments – association, corporate and government (for example, McCabe et al. 2000; Shallcross 1988). Others prefer to split the market evenly between two segments, defined by Abbey and Link (1994) as ‘association-type and corporate-type’ (inter alia Smith 1990; Clark et al. 1996; Weirich 1992). Shone (1998) also concurs with a division of the market into two segments – association and corporate – but ‘with the proviso that not all organisations or all conference activities will necessarily conveniently fit these respective categories’. Rutherford (1990) segments the entire MICE market into only two sections – association conventions, and trade shows and expositions – a rathe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The key players
• PART II Destinations
• PART III Trends and changes
• PART IV Research agenda and conclusions
• References
• Index