Getting to listen to Amanda speak was honestly an honor!
Here is part 3 of our AMA ATL wrap up series! Today we are talking about Amanda Chamov’s talk!
The link I mentioned: https://www.amexglobalbusinesstravel.com/downloads/
If you would like to be apart of the St. Louis chapter of the AMA please check out: https://amasaintlouis.org/
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Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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Transcript:
Earlier this month, we attended the annual conference for the American Marketing Association St. Louis at Webster University. It was an amazing well-run conference with some great speakers – and today, I’m going to share some of the key takeaways from a presentation by Amanda Chamov, Director of North America & APAC, the Experience Studio, American Express Global Business Travel, as well as my thoughts!
Of all of the presentations given at the conference, this was the one that utilized the most original research with studies supporting a lot of the conclusions that Amanda had to share, so you can guess I was paying rapt attention to everything she shared! And they have a ton of free research materials available regarding travel and event planning – you can find them via the link in the show notes.
So let me take a cue from Amanda’s presentation and tell you that what you’re about to hear is going to be exciting and it may change your mind about how you think about events, both as an attendee and as a person who plans them and puts them on. These tips can scale to any kind of event, from a dinner party to a major multimedia spectacle at an enormous convention.
I’m going to be your guide through what Amanda had to share, and you won’t believe what’s going to happen next!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So it turns out the secret to event planning is, surprise surprise, to spend a lot of time thinking about the experience that people who are attending your event might want to have. And you don’t need any scientific research or special understanding to figure this out. If it’s a lunch meeting, you’d better serve lunch. If it’s a birthday party, you’d better bring cake. And if it’s an AMA Saint Louis annual conference, you’d better realize that many people in the room are regulars who attend chapter events frequently but that there’s another group of the people in the room who’ve never been to an AMA event and who are hoping to not just walk away with some great perspective, but also some new contacts.
And to illustrate that, Amanda had all of us regulars stand up, hold our hands high, and make believe we were lighthouses for the other people in the room to see. She then instructed the first timers to make eye contact with the lighthouse people and to make eye contact. She then encouraged those people locking eyes to meet up during the break and introduce each other.
This sounds rather silly, and it’s a rather awkward icebreaker. But it had a purpose. One of the keys to putting on a great event is to create moments that people can remember and connect to through memory, and believe it or not, this diversion did get some people to make friends with one another later in the day! I heard a few conversations begin with, “so, you’re supposed to be my lighthouse, and I thought I’d introduce myself.”
So don’t count it out as a technique you can use when you’re amidst an audience of seasons pros and absolutely newbies!
Amanda’s tips from that point forward really referenced a lot of research from in-depth interviews they had done, including with a neuroscientist subject matter expert.
One of the areas where the research turned up some opportunities was with reward strategies, because giving people things turns out to be a really fantastic way to elevate their emotions. I know I’ve been to conferences where I’ve been handed a bag that’s basically just a bunch of papers and maybe a plastic water bottle or something. That’s a memorability failure – most of that stuff goes straight in the trash.
But when you give out high value items, it really can make a big impression. I went to one conference where they handed out nice hiking backpacks with a copy of one of the speaker’s books. I can tell you so much more about that conference, because little details like that made it so much more memorable! I went to another one where every attendee got an iPad back when those were still shiny and new, and I remember that conference so well I can talk about specific speakers and conversations I had!
But you don’t always have to go big or go home. One time, I heard the Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner speak, and he remarked that research shows people will line up for free things regardless of the value. Maybe even, he said, for something as insignificant and maybe even a little patronizing, as hand sanitizer! And sure enough, as we filtered out of the auditorium after his talk, there were tables of small bottles of hand sanitizer “complements of Stephen Dubner,” and we all lined up to get one. I even kept mine, unopened, for awhile, because there was such a neat story behind it.
I wound up using it during COVID when my kids needed some hand sanitizer one day, but the fact that I know that tells you how memorable that little bottle was.
Going back to Amanda’s talk, she referenced the notion of social exchange theory, which is the source of the term “cost-benefit analysis.” And where it applies here is in the idea of personal identity alignment – if you want to get someone to attend an event of any sort, they have to not just feel it’s valuable in terms of price and time commitment, but that it also fits their social identity.
Most people would not attend an event that they feel represents values that are contrary to their own no matter how good the gift bags are. But if you can make them feel that an event will fit their personal identity, you can build interest and buzz prior to the event and create excitement about what’s happening.
And buzz is important building anticipation for another psychological concept Amanda referenced, which is the Peak-end rule, an idea proposed as an extension of the snapshot model created by Barbara Frederickson and Daniel Kahneman. The basic idea behind the Peak-end rule is that people judge an experience based on its most intense point rather than an average of the entire event.
I can relate this to professional sports, especially baseball. I worked at Busch Stadium here in St. Louis one summer in concessions. If you go to a St. Lous Cardinals game, I’d say at least 80-90% of the experience is pretty boring. But when that exciting moment does happen – a triple play, a break in a strikeout streak, a home run – then the excitement swells and that’s what people remember. Not the hours of monotony in the stands, but the moments of excitement that break out in between.
And participating in, or hearing about, one of those big moments gets sports fans excited to be there again to experience another one. That’s why sports organizations often try to use highlight reels and stories of past rivalries to excite crowds and get them in the door. The drama and excitement of what could happen makes them all the more meaningful when they actually do happen.
And so, Amanda said, an event really needs to focus on providing these big moments to bring out these emotional highs. Not only will this make the events more memorable and exciting, but they’ll also make the attendees more willing to wait out the things they’re less interested in and to anticipate the next big surprise, particularly if it’s telegraphed that there will be one.
Steve Jobs mastered this when he was the CEO and pitchman for Apple in the early 2000s with his “one more thing” additions to his presentations, and he was able to use this tool – first a surprise, and then an expected component of his talks – to make a particular piece of news hit his press audiences as a stinger that they were absolutely going to talk about when they reported on the trade show or event. In fact, the buzz before an event would be, “What is Steve Jobs going to surprise us with this time?”, building anticipation and excitement for his talk.
Amanda also zeroed in on how to build excitement during an event, and her tips focused on four main themes:
- Create a connection between members of the audience, which was exactly the purpose of her lighthouse exercise
- Shape the journey that the attendees will be on, ensuring that there are still opportunities for peaks amidst the highs you’re hoping to provide, and also periods of engaging rest for emotions to calm down so they can be brought back up again
- Use the senses to create opportunities for personal and emotional connection, with smell being the oft-ignored sensory element that’s easy to provide at scale
- Provide some sort of VIP treatment to each attendee in some way, balancing needs and expectations
What about after the event? There are ways to ensure that you provide connections to help attendees relive memories and retain information. Amanda referred to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve pointed out that often, people tend to check out after 20 minutes when a speaker is onstage and only really retain about 30% of what they hear at an event within that first 24 hours.
So you can provide them with reminders of key takeaways, pictures or videos that evoke big moments, recaps of what they learned or other memorability-enhancing tools to ensure that they come away from your event with an ability to recall much of what was provided for them. Social media is really useful for this, but so is following up with attendees to hear about their experiences and takeaways, and so is crafting a communication strategy to keep them engaged after the event.
In Amanda’s line of business and American Express Global Business Travel, she said getting people together is often an opportunity to think about them as individuals and to try to cater to their personal needs as much as possible. When money’s no object, really amazing experiences can be provided with some creativity and effort, but money often is an object. So what can you do in that case?
Amanda boiled it down to three things.
- Remember how you make people feel and try to make them feel as positively about the experience as possible
- Science-based strategies are not optional, and the frameworks she suggested are the ones to start with. That includes the social exchange theory, the Peak-end rule and the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve she referenced in her talk
- Anticipate the emotional peaks and make sure to reinforce them overtly through continued communication and reminders
I have to say – this talk really got me excited about my next event, and even today, I’m reviewing my notes and thinking, “what if I brought this same philosophy to my next research presentation or classroom talk?”
Every opportunity to talk to someone is an event in itself. What if we could bring this philosophy to meetings, family dinners or even one-on-one conversations?
The opportunities are endless!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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