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Effective Use of Corporate Events and Public Relations: Both Online and Offline

Corporate events and public relations are more effective than hard selling.

Jimsun Lui

April 17, 2008

Proper public relations and corporate events are more often about making an emotional appeal to your customers rather than addressing product features and benefits.

In many situations, audiences are unable to imagine the advantage of product features and benefits. For example, if your company wants to promote a 2.0 bluetooth headset supports A2DP, salesmen may mention the product features to your customers. However, they may be unable to understand the terminology or visualize the benefits salesmen mentioned. On the contrary, if you organize an art show and use the art show to demonstrate the product features and benefits. Customers can “see” the benefits as well as enjoy an art show. Indeed, memory about your product and the benefits can be more long term.

Whatever you are promoting, you need to explain to your audiences on an emotional level how it benefits them or others they care about. Every good product, every good service is, at its heart, a means by which to help people live, work, or play better.

It is also true for brand building.

Experiential Marketing uses brand relevant experiences to appeal to both the rational and emotional buying triggers of the intended audience. Sometimes, it is also termed as customer experience marketing because the idea is to communicate the essence of the Brand through a personalized experience.

Experiential marketing deals with customer experiences and is quite different from traditional forms of marketing, which focus on functional features and benefits of products. Consumers’ decisions are much more influenced by emotionally generated feelings than by their rationally derived thought.

According to Luminous, the idea of experiential marketing reflects a right brain bias because it is about fulfilling consumers’ aspirations to experience comfortable and pleasure feelings and helps consumers’ to feel the benefits through interactive experiences, and creates an emotional desire to purchase.

Let me give you an example of experiential marketing:

Cathay Pacific organizes an 60th Anniversary Gala Celebration. Instead of inviting 3000 VIPs to attend a dull celebration ceremony, they invite the VIPs to attend a theatre show with more than 100 performers and 300 crew and staff. The events enable VIPs to further understand their company and let them understand how much they care of their VIPs by inviting them to attend such a grand celebration without the need to hard sell any messages.

If you are not a big company, does it mean that you cannot make use of the concept? No!! You may use your website to host online events, too. For example, online competition games, live online video show, and etc. It really depends on your creativity and whether your event can deliver the proper messages to participants.

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