On Monday, 22 February, I had the privilege to address about hosted buyers at the Asia-Pacific Incentives and Meeting Expo with Lucan Creamer, Executive Manager for Commercial and Marketing for Events Melbourne. AIME is an expo where Hosted Buyers from the Meetings, Incentives Conventions, and Events (MICE) Industry congregate to meet with exhibitors who serve the MICE industry.
You may be wondering as to why someone from IBM was speaking at this event, but IBM has been quite active in the Events Industry as evidenced by the launch of our Events Business late last year. We are the innovation and technology partner for such global events such as the Tennis Grand Slams: Australian Open; French Open; Wimbledon; and the US Open, The Tony Awards, and in Australia, Melbourne Spring Fashion Week. IBM's interest and our natural affinity for events stems from our keen interest in data and analytics. Let's take a look at how events are becoming increasingly powered by insights generated from data analytics.
To understand this, we need to go back to 2007, when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in San Francisco. This is the year that the Genesis for digital disruption on a massive scale began led by what we call the Consumerisation of Information Technology. Before the iPhone, we had technology enthusiast such as me who were attempting to piece together ubiquitous, always on devices by buying Personal Device Assistants such as the Compaq iPaq and then buying modems or Wifi cards. You had to be a complete technology enthusiast to put it together, and it only worked together some of the time if you tried very, very hard. But with the launch of the iPhone, we now had a device that democratised the use of technology to the point where my two year old son could navigate his way across apps to get to his favourite game. (I.e. The Consumerisation of IT)
Instrumented, Interconnected, Intelligent
In 2008, IBM's Chairman, and CEO, Sam Palmismo, launched the Smarter Planet initiative, which was really an observation and extrapolation of how this trend of the Consumerisation of IT would affect great societal change. The message was simple: 1. the Consumerisation of IT is creating a world where everything and everyone was becoming Instrumented; 2. The Internet has created a world where everything and everyone is becoming interconnected (either through Social Media, the Web, or the Internet of Things); 3. Finally, the interconnectedness created a collective Intelligent that allowed us to get access to crowd sourced knowledge from devices and each other. A great example that I like to use when discussing the Smarter Planet is a shopping trip that I recently had at Myer, an Australian Department Store to buy a TV. As I walked into the consumer electronics department, I pulled out my iPhone and read reviews on the TVs on offer on Amazon. I then comparison shopped prices at other Electronic online retailers. My phone made my instrumented. I was interconnected to other people and organisations through Amazon and online retailers, and this made me more intelligent in terms of making an informed decision to buy a TV.
Know me, Listen to me, Empower me and Serve me
In 2009, IBM began our annual study around how this trend was affecting consumers, the Smarter Consumer Study, by surveying 32,000 consumers across the world. The consumers came back with a very clear message: the balance of power has shifted to us, and we have demands that if unmet, will cause us to take our business elsewhere. This was the awakening that created the fertile ground for Uber, AirBnB and other digital disrupters. The empowered consumer was asking the following of organisations that were serving them: 1. Listen to Me, 2. Know Me, 3. Empower Me and 4. Serve Me. This was a roar of an awakening giant who had finally understood the power that the Consumerisation of IT had afforded them. Consumers were leaving feedback for organisations serving them in many forms: Social Media, Spending Behaviours, Feedback with Staff, Location Information. They were more than happy to share information with organisations if these organisations used this information to get to know them as individuals. Consumers also wanted choice. They wanted to interact with organisations in the manner that is most convenient for them, and they wanted the ability to move from touchpoint to touchpoint, whether a bank branch, an ATM, a mobile app or a call centre, and they wanted the context of their relationship to follow them in every interaction. Finally, consumers wanted organisations to serve them in a manner that was contextual through joined up experiences that utilised the data collected by listening to the consumers, that knew them uniquely as individuals and engaged in the most appropriate touchpoint. Not much to ask!
Events made Smarter
So how do these trends and observations apply to the domain of events and meetings? It comes down to the concept of listen, know, empower and serve me for the empowered event participant. The last best experience that anyone has is the standard by which they assess every subsequent experience. As retailers, airlines and banks across the world begin to transform customer experiences so that they put their customers in the centre of their organisation, and transform their organisations to serve the customer across all touchpoints, we are all collectively becoming more demanding in what we expect of experiences including for the conferences, meetings and events that we attend. IBM's work in the events industry has seen the rise of Design Thinking in the way our clients are crafting unique and personalised experiences for participants.
Let's explore how our clients in the events industry are listening, knowing, empowering and serving their customers. At the centre of all of this is data, our clients are collecting data from their customers in both traditional and contemporary ways: they are capturing information from registration forms, industry body databases and storing this in customer relationship management platforms; and they are also gathering information through more digital means such as social media, digital interaction on web, mobile time and location data. A good example of this is the work that IBM did with the Australian Open in 2015 around CrowdTracker. We crowdsourced location data from mobile phones in the Melbourne Tennis Precinct to determine where people were congregating and spending time. We also captured social media data from Instagram to determine the location from which photos were uploaded. This allowed us to gather data around crowd activity around the tennis precinct at any point in time and get context as to what was possibly attracting the crowds.
Next comes Analytics. Through all the data that is collected for event participants who attended many conferences or events, we can start segmenting participants who exhibit similar behaviours and even create a unique profile of every unique event participant over time. A good example of this is the work that we did with global coffee retailer where we performed analysis transactional, weather and social data to determine how we could create a more compelling coffee experience in order to increase same store sales growth. In this particular case, we found that it was the Barista who was key to the experience. We found that sales store growth dropped dramatically when too many of the Baristas turned over at the same time as would happen at the end of every summer when university student Barista went back to their studies. We also found that we could predict that at exactly 24 degrees Celsius, the coffee orders would switch from hot drinks to cold coffees, and that a well placed promotion to the right customers would increase sales when the Mercury would rise above this temperature.
The key for the final step of empowering and serving the event participant is the value exchange that comes from co-creation with the event participant. First comes the development of interaction platforms with which to empower the event participants. This could be a mobile app, a mobile web page, a hashtag on social media, or social dashboards plastered across a city. Finally, the value exchange comes from using the interaction data from each participant to understand their unique requirements, and then to craft experiences that are unique, memorable and useful. A very good example of this is the work that IBM has done with the City of Melbourne for Melbourne Spring Fashion Week in 2014 and 2015 as part of our three year relationship with them as Innovation and Technology Partner. In 2014, we created responsive web application that allowed event participant to plan their participation at the opening night of Melbourne Spring Fashion Week: ShopHop, where the retail precinct within the city was activated through promotions and events. This allowed event participants to use their iPad or desktop at home to plan for the event. We also used a social hashtag #MSFW, to allow the conversation around the event to begin even before the event. On the night of the event, the web app was accessed by participants on their mobile phones where they could see on a map of Melbourne where photos were being uploaded from Instagram where the hashtag #MSFW was being used and determine where the excitement was occurring in the city. Finally, all the information on Social Media was analysed post event to allow us to better plan for 2015. We used the Social Media Analytics to identify key influencers who could amplify MSFW 2015 on social media weeks before the event occurred. We also used the key influencers to identify potential customers who would buy tickets the designer series shows happening at Melbourne Town Hall through our IBM Marketing Cloud capability and Facebook.
In 2016, we intend to continue to leverage our insight into the Smarter Planet and Smarter Consumer as the way to craft a compelling and differentiated experience for Melbourne Spring Fashion Week.
