10 dimensions of event planning!

Event planning is an important part of marketing promotion. If a brand wants to come alive and sales want to move forward, activities are indispensable. Event marketing, communication campaigns, user participation, terminal promotions, e-commerce promotions, brand launches, ordering meetings, dealer conferences, etc. that we often mention fall into the category of activities. Event planning is a very learned and sophisticated subject.

At first, I always had a plan to train my colleagues and subordinates on event planning. Later, I condensed the courseware into an article on the official account, "4 Key Actions for Good Event Planning."

Later, online games became more and more popular in China, and a large number of books on game design were introduced and published in China. I read seven or eight of them and was greatly inspired. I found that game design mechanisms can be naturally integrated into event planning and membership management. This is gamification.

To this day, Jane McGonigal's classic book "Games That Change the World" is still one of the must-read books I prescribe to advertisers, especially planners.

At the beginning of 2020, I did an online live broadcast on the advertising circle’s top account “Mad Man”. The topic I shared at that time was “How to Plan a Screen-Sweeping Event”. I also wrote an article about the outline of the live broadcast, “Want to Create a Screen-Sweeping Event? Avoid these three misunderstandings first! 》.

Personally, I have benefited a lot from event planning. In 2010, I planned a promotional event for my then client Jinjiu, which won the Guangzhou Daily Cup's Top Ten National Marketing Cases of the year. At that time, the event organizer funded and sent the creators of each winning case to visit and study at the 2010 Asian Advertising Festival held in Singapore.

At that time, the Internet was undergoing a major transformation and major advertising companies were competing to update their advertising methodologies and brand tools. At the Advertising Festival, I listened to the latest concepts and cases shared by top advertising companies from all over the world, which was a spiritual baptism for me.

Let’s get back to the topic.

Although event planning is very important, when we talk about event planning today, many people pay more attention to some execution-level work , such as 5W1H, including event time selection, event location setting and venue layout, inviting attendees, event theme writing and background board design, event process and form steps, on-site material production and staff arrangement.

In fact, if an event is to achieve sales targets and fulfill the purpose of brand communication, it must truly influence a large number of consumer groups. So when we are planning an event, we cannot just consider these tactical issues, but we need to focus on some more important points.

So I will talk about event planning from ten dimensions, including value, IP, insight, topic, group, motivation, incentive, co-creation, guide, and fission.

So, let’s officially start this topic.

Lecture 1: Value

What is the purpose and significance of event planning?

When it comes to event planning, we first need to answer a question: Why does a company hold events? What is the value and significance of activities for brand marketing? When a company organizes an event, does it just involve offering discounts, promotions, and forwarding prize draws? I will talk about this question at the very beginning because only by understanding the purpose of event planning can we plan a good event.

In traditional times, the main way to build a brand was actually through advertising exposure. I have summarized the three strategies for a brand: “ spokesperson + TV advertising + opening stores and selling goods ”.

Since brand awareness is mainly established through advertising, brand value and image are mainly conveyed through advertising. Therefore, the activities that enterprises carry out offline and at terminals are mainly of a sales nature. To the C-end, the main activities are promotions, discounts, and buy-one-get-one-free; to the B-end, the main activities are distribution activities, such as ordering meetings, dealer conferences, etc. After the advertisements are placed, they start to attract investment and open stores to distribute goods.

But in today's Internet age, the way of building brands has changed. It is no longer one-way exposure and dissemination, but two-way communication and social interaction. It is very important to interact with consumers. During this interaction, consumers experience the brand, build cognition, and form a solid relationship.

So how do brands interact with consumers? It is definitely not enough to rely on a dry hard advertisement. At this time, a very important carrier is the event. The significance of the event to the brand is threefold:

Strengthen brand communication

Accelerate brand consumption

Deepen brand experience

Event planning is aimed at influencing consumers’ psychology and behavior. Only by planning events based on this purpose can we create truly valuable brand marketing activities.

Therefore, companies need to consider two points when planning activities:

The first is whether consumers have a sense of gain in the activity, not only in terms of material benefits but also spiritual rewards. Otherwise, why would people participate in your event? Can't they just place an order directly?

The second is whether consumers feel involved in the event . Many activities appear to hope for consumer participation and interaction, but in fact they are one-way communication. The activities do not spread through consumer word of mouth and social topics, but through media publicity. This is what becomes event-based hard advertising, and the purpose of doing the event is to find materials for the press release.

Lecture 2: IP

How to brand an event?

We see that many companies are doing activities all year round...

From the traditional festival nodes Spring Festival, Valentine's Day, Women's Day, May Day, 520, Mother's Day, Children's Day, Father's Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Chinese Valentine's Day, Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, Double Ninth Festival, Christmas, New Year's Day, Winter Solstice.

As for the major nodes of e-commerce, there are Super Brand Day, 618, Double Eleven, Double Twelve... there are more than a dozen nodes in total.

Finally, there are major annual events, such as next year’s Winter Olympics, World Cup, Asian Games, etc.

Activities at dozens of marketing nodes in a year constitute the marketing plan for the whole year. But so many activities also caused the entire company to be exhausted and the marketing department to collapse. But will the more activities you hold, the better the company’s marketing results will be?

You have to know that everything on the Internet is perishable and consumers are very forgetful. No matter how big an event or news story is, it will only remain popular on social media for two days before everyone moves on to other things.

This is especially true when companies organize events. It is very likely that a huge amount of money was spent on publicity, but the popularity did not last for even half a day and then dropped. Such activities certainly cannot bring sustainable growth to the company.

In fact, when planning corporate events, what should be pursued is quality rather than quantity. It is a branded operation, which turns the event into a brand, and this is the event IP. It can become a private marketing platform for enterprises and a traffic pool to retain users. Failure to pursue sustainable event management, but only considering each event and spending half a day on the screen, will not bring sustainable growth to the company.

For example, Amway Nutrilite's Vitality Health Run event was first held in Shanghai on June 8, 2002. This event has been held until today, and Amway Nutrilite has maintained this event for 18 years. Today, "Healthy Running" has become a powerful brand of Amway Nutrilite. When people mention healthy running, they think of Amway Nutrilite. Isn’t this the best way for a company to offer its users?

There is also the catering and food industry. For them, a key focus of annual marketing planning is to launch new products, new dishes and new flavors, so as to capture consumers' desire to try new things and stimulate consumption. Without new products, consumers will easily become aesthetically fatigued. However, launching new products requires a lot of marketing expenses, otherwise consumers will not know that you have launched new products. If a company launches a few new products a year, its annual marketing budget will be used up.

So Lao Xiang Ji launched an event called "New Dishes on the 1st of Every Month". Through fixed time nodes and fixed consumption rituals, user memories are formed, thereby reducing the cost of promoting new products and accumulating brand assets.

This is a brilliant event design, and this is an IP-based event brand.

Lesson 3: Insight

Where does the inspiration for event planning come from?

In his famous book "The Tipping Point", best-selling author Gladwell proposed a formula for detonating popularity, which are:

Individual character rules, adhesion factors, and power environment.

I will share the first two rules with you in the next two lectures. This talk will talk about the power environment.

Why is it called Weili Environment? It means that if your marketing plan is in line with the overall social environment today and the consumer psychology of the group. Then it is more likely to explode and become a popular hot spot.

Where does inspiration for event planning come from? It is to find inspiration from social culture. Start planning from the fracture points in society, and then cleverly integrate them into the product. Such event planning is associated with the importance of environmental factors, and therefore has a better chance of becoming a hit.

Like Li Ning went to Dunhuang to hold a product launch conference, and Xtep reached a cooperation with Shaolin Temple and held a launch conference in Shaolin Temple, why? Because national trends are the general backdrop today, everyone is looking for traditional cultural backgrounds when organizing activities. Such activities are more likely to gain recognition, spread and forwarded by everyone on social media.

There is also the rise of the equal rights movement, and the values ​​of women's independence are gaining more and more recognition, so we can see various activities targeting women. For example, the super-powerful super-woman and SK-II’s blind date corner marketing. Cultural insights are very important.

There is also the 2008 Queensland Tourism Bureau of Australia's "Best Job in the World" event planning. When Queensland was trying to promote itself, the financial crisis had just broken out in late 2007. People were worried about losing their jobs and were certainly not in the mood to travel. At this time, it was useless to communicate with consumers about tourism and emphasize how beautiful Australia was, so Queensland instead organized a career selection competition. To hire an island guard at a high salary, his daily job is just vacation, vacation, and vacation. Once the jobs and salaries were revealed, Queensland suddenly became the focus of global attention.

This is the starting point of event planning, insight. Without deep insights into culture, there can be no effective operation of content.

Lecture 4, Topics

Are the people participating in the event more important, or the people watching?

When we organize activities, we often have a misunderstanding, which is that we think that the activities are for the people who participate in them to see. In fact, this is completely wrong. Due to time and venue constraints, usually the number of people participating in an event is no more than a few hundred, or at most a few thousand. Over ten thousand is already very exaggerated and extremely rare. However, the cost for a company to organize an event may be hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan. If it can only affect a few hundred people, it is not cost-effective.

So everyone must remember that the event is for the spectators, not for the participants. The number of onlookers was at least 10 times the number of participants. This is especially true for online events.

The meaning of doing activities is to watch, not to participate. If you can realize this, then you will naturally think about a question: why do consumers want to watch you? That's right. If you think about this, it means you are good at event planning.

If we look at the new product launches, new car test drives, etc. held by many companies, the main audience invited to the events are the media, and users are very rarely invited. Why? The main purpose of inviting the media to attend the press conference is to encourage them to write and publish articles, thereby influencing more readers and helping them learn about corporate information and new products.

It goes without saying that there are activities of a branding or public relations nature. Even for promotional activities, we cannot just focus on customers who place orders. We also have to consider how to continue the promotion after it ends so that more people are willing to place orders.

However, simply publishing articles will not be enough to influence today's Internet consumers. This is a very traditional public relations way of thinking. If you want to attract people to watch and create a screen-sweeping effect, you need to design the activity's traffic flow. By creating topics and content through activities, we can connect online and offline and achieve the maximum dissemination effect of the event. The value of the event itself lies in creating topics and outputting content, thereby bringing about secondary diffusion.

You should know that event execution is only 1/3 of a perfect event planning, and the other 2/3 is topic generation and content diffusion.

Topic ignition - activity execution - content diffusion, this is the complete path of an activity.

Of course, the order of priority can be adjusted according to the specific situation. For example, you can carry out the activities first, generate topics and content through the activities, and thus form social diffusion to influence more people. Alternatively, you can create a topic first to spark everyone's attention and interest, and then spread the designed content to influence more people. When many people turn their attention to you, you can then execute activities, which will naturally attract traffic and you won't have to worry about no one participating in the event.

For example, Baidu Nuomi held a promotion when the Minions movie was released, offering free bananas when buying movie tickets on Baidu Nuomi. Just imagine, of course no one would pay attention to such a small activity, and few consumers would forward it to their friends just for a banana.

So before Baidu Nuomi launched this campaign, it first created a topic #Minions selling bananas were driven away by urban management#. They didn't actually go out to sell bananas on the streets. They just invited a few people, got the costumes and props ready, took a few photos, and posted them online. But this topic quickly became a hot topic on Weibo and attracted a lot of media coverage.

Finally, Baidu Nuomi made an official announcement, admitting that this was a promotion organized by itself, and then invited everyone to buy movie tickets on Baidu Nuomi. The event was naturally a great success.

This is the importance of topics and also the complete steps of event planning.

Lecture 5: Groups

How to identify the target audience for event planning?

In the last lecture, we talked about that the ultimate goal of event planning is to influence a large consumer group, but in order to influence this large group, the event must actually be targeted at a minority group.

Because your target audience is so general, your activities will easily lose focus and intensity. Such activities seem to be aimed at everyone, but no group will have a sense of immersion that "this activity is for me".

A typical example is SK-II’s blind date corner marketing in 2016. SK-II filmed a series of documentaries targeting “leftover women” and organized an event marketing in Shanghai’s blind date mecca People’s Park. This activity targeted the group of “leftover women”, but it touched all women and had a huge impact at the social level. If SK-II simply targets all women with its general brand appeal of "rewriting destiny", it will not actually have such an effect.

Suppose, for example, I am a community fresh food store and I want to organize activities to drive user growth. What should I do? The simplest example is a promotion where if you spend a certain amount of food, you get a box of eggs for free. Such an activity is certainly effective, but it will not cause any spread or topic because it does not have a point for people to spread it. So it can't affect more people, you're just giving away a lot of eggs.

Then I changed this promotion into an activity of giving away eggs to office workers. For example, I hung a banner at the door of the store that read "Care for 996, eggs are a blessing for the body" and used this as the main body of the promotion, and combined it with some small materials. Then, people passing by might smile knowingly or feel at a loss whether to laugh or cry, and then take photos and post them to their friends or the community owners group. This activity has the potential to spread, right? This is why the accuracy of the audience makes it easier for you to produce content and topics, thus having stronger communication penetration.

Of course, once you have identified your target audience, it will be easier to find your opinion leaders (who will help you spread the activity), and this group will become the source group for your activity to spread outward.

Lecture 6: Motivation

Is it necessary to give out prizes when doing activities?

Many times, in order to attract consumers to participate in activities, event organizers often make two mistakes:

First, lower the threshold for activities. They are worried that it is too difficult to participate in the event and consumers are unwilling to participate. The result is that the activity mechanism is too simple and looks quite stupid, which makes consumers even less interested in participating.

Second, set up a large number of prizes to attract consumers to participate in the event. As a result, the activity failed to influence the users it was intended to influence, but instead attracted a group of freeloaders.

You should know that there is a term in psychology called "expulsion effect", which means that rewards will squeeze out fun. For example, if you are a parent, you hope to cultivate your children's good habit of reading more. So what should you do? It should stimulate children's interest in reading, right? But you tell your child that you will give him 10 yuan or a toy as a reward every time he finishes reading a book. Then you're in trouble because the more money you give, the less interested the child will be in reading. Once the reward disappeared (or became smaller), he would no longer study.

Monetary rewards are inherently suitable for less attractive activities. The reason is simple. Why does the company pay you a salary when you work, but no one pays you when you play games? When you offer prizes, you're suggesting to consumers that the activity is boring.

In psychology, there are two types of human motivation: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation . We can call these two motivations doing things for interest and doing things for reward. With intrinsic motivation, the behavior itself is the reward. With extrinsic motivation, the reward comes from outside the behavior.

Good event design must arouse users’ interest and truly attract their willingness to participate, rather than relying on prizes.

Lesson 7: Motivation

Can event planning be as addictive as games?

Whether it's ancient chess, go, mahjong and poker, or today's various online games, mobile games and sports events, games have always had a large number of players participating in them, and they are immersed in them and full of joy.

So, why does playing games make people happy and addictive? This is because the game's design inspired us in two ways:

1. Each game will give people a clear goal and a set of rules (that is, methods and steps) to achieve the goal. The characteristic of human beings is that once they have a goal, they will be very motivated to do things. Why do many people feel confused and bored in real life? It is precisely because many people do not have a clear and quantifiable goal in life, or they have a goal but do not have the rules and methods to achieve it.

2. If you work hard in the game, you will get clear feedback. For example, if you defeat enemies and monsters in the game, you will gain experience, treasure, equipment, health points, force points, etc. Instant feedback can tell you how far you are from your goal and allow you to see the results of your efforts in real time. Feedback gives people a sense of accomplishment and control, which is the source of fun.

So what is a game? The standard definition formula is game = goal + rules + feedback. These three basic elements are indispensable for any game.

For event planning, the most important thing is to provide clear feedback and incentives to consumers who participate in the event, so as to inspire consumers to participate in the event and enjoy the process.

This incentive mechanism is called PBL - Points, badges, and leaderboards. PBL is the most basic game element.

Points are integral points that provide users with a sense of purpose and create fixed expectations. As long as you take corresponding actions, you will be rewarded. For example, the membership points system of major merchants.

Badges give users a sense of honor and increase their sense of accomplishment in using the product.

(The badge I got from WeChat Reading)

Rankings allow users to compete and compare with their peers, which is the key to implementing fission.

(For specific gameplay, please refer to the gamification design related articles mentioned above)

Lecture 8: Co-creation

What kind of activities can sweep the screen?

Good event planning must be co-created with consumers and involve them. This requires opening up nodes for consumer participation during event planning and designing ways for consumer participation. Consumers participated in the event and created content for the second time. They are willing to spread and share the activities. Only with UGC content created by users can an event have the potential to become popular on social media.

For example, Fancl, the most typical screen-sweeping case in the Internet era, is the result of consumer co-creation. For example, the recent popularity of Mixue Bingcheng's advertising songs and Watsons distilled water advertising songs on Bilibili is actually inseparable from the efforts of users.

I personally have summarized two very classic activity participation mechanisms: one is called the challenge mechanism, and the other is called the team mechanism (imitation and PK).

The challenge mechanism is easy to understand, such as the roll call challenge, ice bucket challenge, smile challenge, bottle cap kicking challenge, broom standing challenge, paper ball kicking challenge... It has been spanning China's Internet for 20 years, across generations of social products such as blogs, Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin. Its goal is to trigger imitation by a large number of users. Because it is difficult for consumers to create out of thin air, giving them a template or a reference to imitate, and then adding a little difficulty to inspire them to challenge themselves, can easily trigger large-scale user participation.

Why do people like to imitate? First, because we are always eager to challenge ourselves and prove ourselves. Secondly, because we always want to find authority to obey, and finally, because we always want to integrate into the group, do what others are doing, and gain a sense of belonging to the group.

To describe it in three words, it is "people, follow, crowd", which means to prove oneself, obey authority, and belong to the masses.

The second mechanism is easier to understand. It means who do you stand with? Let consumers take sides. Sweet soy milk or salty soy milk, which one do you support? Are you a sweet or salty rice dumpling fan? If your mother and your girlfriend fall into the river at the same time, who would you save? Each question was so fatal and could easily lead to quarrels and arguments, so the topic quickly became a hot topic and the event was a great success.

For example, in order to promote its new product, Golden Crispy Chicken, KFC held a campaign to let consumers choose between Golden Crispy Chicken and classic Original Flavor Chicken. This activity attracted many consumers to vote, making the promotion of the new product a great success.

This is the power of designing activity mechanisms and allowing consumers to participate in co-creation.

Lesson 9: Wires

How to design user behavior paths to facilitate sales realization?

The activity guide design discussed here is different from the activity planning path discussed in Lecture 4. The "topic-execution-content" path in the fourth lecture is the process of activity dissemination and diffusion, and the guide I am talking about here is the path of how to guide consumers to participate, purchase, and other behaviors.

Stanford University has a behavioral design model called B=MAT. B stands for Behavior , which means that the occurrence of a behavior involves three elements: the first is M, Motivation; the second is A, Ability; and the third is T, Trigger.

To put it simply, human behavior is influenced by three factors: whether one wants to do something, whether one has the personal ability to do it, and whether the external environment can motivate him to do it. None of them can be missing. This is the power, the ability, the thrust.

Therefore, if you want to encourage users to make purchases, you must focus on these three points.

The first is to increase motivation. Motivation can actually be divided into two aspects: rational and emotional. Rationally, you need to explain the benefits of the product to users clearly; emotionally, you need to make users feel a sense of responsibility, accomplishment, guilt, etc., so that they want to participate and buy the product.

Secondly, whether users can afford to buy your product. It depends on your pricing, that is, whether users can afford it; and channel, that is, whether users can buy it. This is generally not directly related to event planning.

When it comes to activity design, what we can do is not to enhance users' capabilities, but to reduce users' resistance. This requires us to tell consumers what we want them to do and provide clear steps to indicate the path to purchase. At the same time, we should try our best to dispel users' doubts and reduce decision-making risks. Predict what users are concerned about when making decisions, whether it is price, quality, ease of use, etc.

Finally, thrust is provided. For example, by limiting time and quantity, you can create pressure on users. Provide users with role models through the examples of others. And we need to constantly remind users what we want them to do (such as repeatedly urging them to place orders during live broadcasts).

This is how you design user behavior paths.

Lecture 10: Fission

How to make activities popular and spread in society?

The goal of fission is to make good use of consumers' social networks and the power of social culture to spread activities and brands and reach more consumer groups. There are three ways to play fission:

The first one is called interest fission. This way of playing is that merchants provide benefits and discounts to consumers, but consumers need to share them in social circles and interact with friends in order to receive the discounts and benefit together with their relatives and friends. Like Pinduoduo's bargaining, Luckin's original coffee gifting, Didi's taxi red envelopes, and now WeChat Reading's unlimited card, all work this way.

The second type is called game fission. This gameplay is to leverage the user's social circle through the design of gamification elements, allowing consumers to fight for honor. This is what we talked about in Lecture 7 . The core is to use rankings to allow users to compare scores and compete for rankings. Various small games like to use this gameplay, such as the 360 ​​Security Guard's computer boot speed test, where you would judge how many computer users across the country you have defeated.

The third type is called relationship fission. In social networks, relationship chains build barriers to fission. The main motivation for users to share your brand with their relatives and friends is for their self-expression. For example, NetEase launches a large number of test H5s every year. The color test launched this year allows you to test what your representative color is. After the test, consumers are willing to post it on their Moments, thus attracting more people to imitate. This is essentially an act of self-display.

At the end of each year, there is NetEase Cloud Music's annual listening report, annual payment bill, and Air Travel's annual flight report. Consumers are willing to post them in order to showcase their unique taste, wealth status, life experience, personal charm, etc.

No matter how developed the Internet is today, for humans, who are naturally social animals, the best advertising is still word of mouth. The best way to sell is not to rush up to the other party and sell to him directly, but to influence him through his 2-3 friends. This is what fission means.

Author: Empty Hand

Source: Empty-handed