Now We’re Talking
The Energy of Many
By Bruce MacMillan, CA
I’M THRILLED THAT THIS MONTH’S ISSUE OF ONE+ IS DEDICATED TO BRANDING, OR STORYTELLING AS I LIKE TO CALL IT. Storytelling for your business, your destination or your events has never been more important to differentiate yourself and to establish a powerful value proposition.
But where storytelling is taking on unprecedented significance is around our industry and profession. So what’s our story?
As has been told to me by numerous industry oracles, the meeting and event industry was born out of the hospitality industry’s need to monetize space in their venues and abodes. But a funny thing happened on the way to the breakout: Meetings and events delivered on vital individual and organizational objectives such as education, sales and marketing and human performance—increasingly high-value elements in our growing knowledge economy. At the macro-level, meetings and events became platforms upon which to drive national economic and social development, prompting massive infrastructure investment and touching off big-money global competition among virtually all industrialized nations.
What then are we? From a supply chain value perspective, meetings and events are part of the tourism/travel industry or the broader hospitality industry. From the standpoint of the stakeholder, they are seen as a crucial element of sales and communications (just ask the global MARCOMM agencies that are in acquisition mode). If you’re in the learning or human performance industry, meetings are critical to deliver your results. Intellectual gymnastics? Perhaps. Increasingly problematic? Absolutely.
Because when we finally started attracting a lot of attention from governments and media, we could not tell our story. So they made one up for us, populating it with words like “boondoggle” and “junket.” Out of defensive necessity, we got our act together through the Meetings Mean Business (MMB) campaign lead by the crew at U.S. Travel. Our MMB storyline contained words like “jobs” and “GDP impact” as we defined ourselves in the terms politicians get excited about. And it worked. The rhetoric stopped.
But we need to write a storyline around the game-changing performance value that meetings and events deliver. We’ve got the research, and more of it is coming. We now need the story. And it needs to start with us. We need to be talking about ourselves in compelling terms that get the attention of our clients and business leaders to ensure the focus of the meeting is not on just how much it costs but on how much value it produces. Nobody remembers when a meeting comes in under budget. But when it delivers great performance results, it’s a game-changer.
The good news is that through the Convention Industry Council, we are developing compelling storylines and soundbytes to compliment the MMB message, so that if your client calls about cancelling that event because of budget issues or if 60 Minutes shows up in your reception area with questions, we’ll all be better equipped to answer.
I was recently asked to speak at the 10th Annual World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, South Korea, where business leaders from all over the world gathered to share insights on the direction of the world economy and innovation. For the very first time, meetings and events were included as an industry. Increasingly, global leaders such as Korean president Lee Myung-bak see their role is as platforms from which to re-energize economies and inspire new innovation. Sounds like the beginnings of a great story to me.
BRUCE MACMILLAN, CA, is CEO and president of MPI. He can be reached at bmacmillan@mpiweb.com. Follow him at www.twitter.com/BMACMPI.