Business Events

Rob Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351736817
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The dynamic and fast-expanding business events sector plays a vital role in the professional lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide by providing settings in which they can meet for the purposes of negotiation, deliberation, motivation, the dissemination of knowledge, and the celebration of their greatest career-related achievements.

This book provides a sound practical and theoretical context for the study of this subject by covering, in depth, all categories of business-related events including corporate meetings, association conferences, political events, incentive travel, exhibitions, corporate hospitality, awards ceremonies and SMERF (social, military, educational, religious and fraternal) gatherings.

This new edition has been extensively revised and updated to reflect recent developments in business events, including:

• Five new chapters on business events destination marketing, knowledge, sustainability, ethics and technology
• New 'It's my job' voice boxes offering practical insights from people employed in the business events industry
• A wide range of new case studies illustrating business events throughout the world, including emerging business events destinations such as Russia and the Middle East

Written in an accessible yet analytical manner, Business Events is essential reading for all students of events, tourism and hospitality management.

1 An introduction to business events

Business events in the 21st century

• 3,000 of the world’s leading experts on robots gathered in Brisbane, Australia for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The 5-day event offered a series of interactive presentations, seminars and a technical tour of Queensland University of Technology’s laboratories.
• Over 15,000 managers and owners from the hospitality industry attended The Hotel Show Africa in South Africa’s Gallagher Convention Centre to view a vast range of products for hotels and restaurants, from furnishings and catering equipment to staff uniforms and surveillance systems.
• 64 educators from all over Canada received their nation’s highest honours for excellence in teaching at a prestigious awards ceremony in Ottawa, attended by the Prime Minister.
• Ten top-performing Hong Kong-based distributors of Young Living Essential Oils won an all-expenses-paid incentive trip to Croatia, which included a visit to the company’s premises in Split, where flowers are grown for use in Young Living’s products.

Chapter objectives

On completion of this chapter the reader should be able to:

• Understand the role played by business events in society.
• Identify the principal distinguishing characteristics of business events.
• Understand the various terminologies used to describe business events.
• Appreciate the various benefits of business events and how they may be measured.
• Appreciate the environmental and economic costs of business events.

Introduction to business events: concepts and definitions

It is impossible to imagine how human society could have evolved into our highly interconnected and globalised modern world if the type of events analysed in this book had not existed in various forms since the earliest days of mankind’s use of language. The human drive to meet for the purposes of conferring and trading has been one of the principal factors in our remarkable evolution as a species. Whether the gathering was a tribal sharing of hunting knowledge or ancestral stories; or whether it was the more formal gatherings of ancient Greek or Roman patricians for the seeking of consensus on law and government; or whether it was a medieval fair at which artisans and farmers displayed their products for sale, such events have been an essential element in the development of civilisation and the advancement of human achievement.

In the 21st century, face-to-face business events continue to represent a vital channel for trade and for knowledge transfer and knowledge creation, playing a crucial role in the business, intellectual, and political lives of communities worldwide. They also constitute a major global economic activity, as an entire industry has emerged, comprising the specialist professionals who plan, design and host business events. The activities of many of these individual professions will be highlighted in the pages of this book.

Fundamental to all business events is the basic objective of facilitating communication between the participants. Accordingly, they may be defined as planned, time-bound events that bring together colleagues from similar industries, professions or interest groups to connect with each other in order to share ideas and information, to make decisions, or simply to enjoy and celebrate their work-related achievements. But while most business events have multiple purposes, the fundamental objective is almost always to change the behaviour of the participants in some way, through the facilitating of education, negotiation, inspiration, motivation, celebration and business connections between participants.

Individual chapters of this book analyse the specific characteristics and uses of the principal types of business events and the ways in which they may be designed and planned for maximum effectiveness: corporate meetings, association conferences, SMERF (social, military, educational, religious and fraternal) gatherings, awards ceremonies, governmental and political events, incentive travel, exhibitions, and corporate hospitality. It can be seen from this list of sectors of the business events industry that the definition of ‘business’ employed here goes beyond simple commerce and trade to encompass, for example, the business of government and the business of associations, whether they represent a particular profession or an interest or cause entirely unrelated to the members’ employment.

The distinguishing characteristics of business events

While business events take a great number of different forms, they demonstrate several characteristics that are common to all types.

Location

The vast majority of business events take place in towns and cities. These are the most commonly used destinations as most of them offer the supporting infrastructure required for the hosting of conferences, exhibitions and political events – for example: venues, hospitality suppliers and multiple transport connections. They also tend to offer the type of prestigious sporting and cultural events that are the focus of most corporate hospitality experiences.

But there are exceptions to this rule, and business events are not exclusively confined to urban centres. Incentive trips, for example, may take place in resorts and spas or in wilderness areas offering nature-based activities for participants. And, for security reasons, high-profile political conferences such as the gatherings of the G20 group of nations have occasionally been held in remote communities such as mountain villages or on small islands, where the participants can be more easily protected from disturbances created by protestors. These examples are, however, fairly rare exceptions to the general rule that business events are predominantly urban-based.

Timing

In terms of days of the week, by far most business events are held between Monday and Friday, which tend to be the working days of the majority of participants in Western societies. For corporate meetings in those countries, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually the peak periods, as witnessed by the higher rates often charged by venues for meetings held on those days. Spring and autumn are the peak seasons for business events, which generally avoid the summer months, when potential participants’ ability to attend can be limited by their personal holiday plans.

It can be seen from the above patterns that the timing of most business events is complementary to the seasonality of leisure travel, most of which takes place at weekends and during the traditional holiday period of the summer months. This complementarity with leisure travel adds to the appeal, for destinations and suppliers such as hotels, of hosting business events, which can offer them a means of levelling out the peaks and troughs of tourism’s seasonality patterns.

Mobility

With very few exceptions, the organisers of business events are able to use a degree of discretion in their choice of destinations for the events they plan, because such events tend to be extremely flexible in terms of where they are held. For example, annual events such as association conferences and incentive trips almost always change their destination from year to year, as a means of making themselves more attractive to potential participants. Even exhibitions, which may be held in the same venue and destination for many years, are also capable of being moved by the organisers to a different location if there is a strong business case for doing so. This characteristic of business events makes them an important focus of the marketing and promotion strategies of destinations and suppliers aiming to influence the organisers’ decisions as to where the events are held. The techniques used by destination marketing organisations to win business events for their countries and cities are explored in Chapter 10.

The mobile quality of business events is often contrasted with the non-discretionary nature of individual business travel, the destinations of which are generally determined by the location of the assignment to be carried out by the traveller. The objective of such trips could be, for example, to ‘visit clients to close deals, pitch for business or provide product support; and visit sub-contractors and suppliers to monitor quality control or negotiate new business’ (Beaverstock et al., 2010:1). Opportunities for destinations to attract individual business trips are extremely limited, as the locations of such trips are pre-determined and beyond the influence of the promotional activities of destination marketing organisations and individual venues.

Fusion

Although the different sectors of the business events industry – corporate meetings, association conferences, SMERF gatherings, awards ceremonies, governmental and political events, incentive travel, exhibitions, and corporate hospitality – are widely accepted to be discrete types of events, each with its own objectives and formats, in practice they are often combined into hybrid forms. For example, many large conferences include an exhibition of products and services of interest to the participants. Accordingly, a major conference for dentists may have, running in parallel in the same venue, an exhibition of dental tools, equipment and drugs that participants can visit during breaks in the conference programme. Similarly, most exhibitions are accompanied by an educational seminar programme, whereby visitors are able to attend presentations by experts and panel discussions related to the topic of the exhibition. And many incentive trips include a work element such as a half-day training session or a brainstorming meeting. This fusion between different types of business event is characteristic of this industry and it offers the potential to add considerable value to the events, from the participants’ point of view.

In-person interaction

Even in the age of widespread electronic communication, the type of in-person interaction facilitated by business events represents a major aspect of their distinctive and enduring power. From a psychological perspective, there are a number of characteristics of face-to-face events that give them considerable advantages over other forms of communication. Arvey (2009) outlines these as follows:

• Face-to-face meetings allow members to engage in and observe verbal and non-verbal behavioural styles not captured in most computer-mediated communication.
• Face-to-face meetings occur in ‘real time’ as opposed to non-synchronised time. Computer-mediated communications can be delayed for a variety of reasons, not always received, and sometimes disrupted because of technical problems.
• Face-to-face business meetings provide human contact, which is a fundamental primitive need among human beings, as we are social creatures.
• Face-to-face business meetings afford participants opportunities to develop transparency and trust among each other in ways that are not always possible with other forms of communications.
• Face-to-face business meetings allow members to evaluate and judge the integrity, competencies and skills (for example, the verbal skills) of other participants and leaders in ways that are not easily evaluated in computer-mediated communications.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the extraordinary advances in technology-enabled communication formats in the 21st century have produced systems that, for the organisers of some types of event, provide an attractive alternative to in-person events at which all participants are physically present. This theme is explored in Chapter 14, which focuses on technology.

McEuen and Duffy (2010) contend that the decision as to whether to use technology-enabled formats for meetings or to bring the participants physically together is an extremely important one, because face-to-face meetings require the greatest investment of all meeting types, and thus carry the greatest expectations for a high return on investment. But these authors highlight three business situations in which they believe that a face-to-face format is most likely to be the best approach:

1. To capture attention: when participants’ full attention is required, as the objective of the event is to initiate something new or different, such as a new or different relationship, culture, strategy or product
2. To inspire a positive emotional climate: when, in recognition of the power of inspiration and the importance of a positive emotional climate as a real cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of images
• List of case studies
• List of 'It's my job' voice boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to business events
• 2 Corporate meetings
• 3 Association conferences
• 4 SMERF meetings
• 5 Awards ceremonies
• 6 Political meetings
• 7 Incentive travel
• 8 Exhibitions
• 9 Corporate hospitality
• 10 Destination marketing for business events
• 11 Business events knowledge
• 12 Sustainability for business events
• 13 Business events ethics
• 14 Business events technology
• Index