Why Corporate Conferences Still Matter: The Experience
Live performers, musicians, paid talent, professional speakers, and chef-prepared food. Not the combination that comes to mind when you hear “corporate conference,” right? Well, every bit of the experience at the annual La Quinta conference was just that. This three-day production held the purpose of educating and empowering over 900 General Managers (GMs), corporate leaders, hotel owners, franchisees, vendors and partners. It was also an opportunity to get the company excited as we celebrated La Quinta’s 50th birthday.
Corporate conferences are becoming a lost art with a growing number of companies moving away from the grand production and replacing them with smaller, less costly alternatives. While this can save a great deal of time and money, you may be missing out on valuable opportunities to connect with your leadership team, employees and partners.
At the La Quinta conference in particular, the planners went above and beyond to make attendees feel valued. The conference kicked off with a high-energy performance by Diavolo, an America’s Got Talent-winning dance company. From there, mornings and afternoons were spent attending educational sessions, some presented by company executives, and others by professional speakers.
Annual conferences encourage relationship building to ensure employees feel valued and to allow even the smallest of voices to be heard.
So, “how does greenlight fit into this?” While La Quinta worked for months to plan the conference, the agency worked simultaneously to design signage, presentation decks, prize packs and two full trade show booths.
This gave greenlighters the perfect opportunity to explore, and when it came to the booths, that explorer wanted to create something special — not just a booth, but an experience that every participant would remember.
One booth was an experience for the brand’s rewards program, La Quinta Returns. Education was an important goal for the booth, but nothing is less engaging than simply handing out materials. To make this an experience, it was game time. Literally.
With the help of La Quinta’s sales team, the booth went interactive with a game called “Have you seen me?” Walking around the tradeshow were four characters dressed as travelers — A sports coach, a business traveler, a construction worker and a medical professional. GMs were given a designed booklet with images of the four characters and corresponding questions to ask them. It was the GM’s job to find one of these travelers and have a conversation with them as if s/he was a hotel guest. If the GM mentioned the Returns program in this conversation, they got a sticker to redeem their prize at the Returns booth.
The engagement was great and led a steady flow of traffic to the booth, and better yet, it reinforced the importance of enrolling guests in the Returns program. Additionally, it helped initiate conversations about the new and improved membership benefits, mobile app features, and enrollment statistics.
The booth itself was designed with a bright green backdrop, eye-catching graphics, and an informational video highlighting the new mobile app features. Even the TVs were designed to look like mobile devices to enhance our booth experience.
This led to another takeaway — booth design is crucial to draw people in, while adding an interactive element creates a much stronger connection than handouts.
La Quinta Salutes, La Quinta’s military initiative, was the focus of another designed booth. Instead of focusing only on awareness with a single flier to hand out, there was a clear opportunity to interact. With this in mind, the booth was designed to be a station for GMs to write postcards to active duty service members serving overseas.
The postcards featured patriotic art drawn by the children of Snowball Express, a military non-profit organization that La Quinta supports. As tradeshow goers wrote their cards, the booth had the chance to talk about all that La Quinta Salutes does to support the military community, including community outreach, volunteer work, and numerous non-profit donation programs.
After a letter was written, GMs were invited into the booth where they could place their note in to one of the many envelopes covering the back wall. The envelope wall was built at the back of the booth and included bold graphics along with 30 large purple envelopes taped across it in rows.
This experience allowed GMs to feel like they were a part of the military initiative, and to top it off, a number of GMs asked if they could take Snowball Express postcards back to their properties so that their staff and guests could write letters to the troops, too.
La Quinta’s military initiative is all about being active in the military community and this activation at the booth demonstrated that better than any informational flier ever could. At the end of the day, the goal of collecting over 150 postcards to include in care packages for our troops was far exceeded.
The success of the Salutes tradeshow booth inspired my third takeaway — by directly involving attendees in your company initiative, they are able to make a personal connection in a much more authentic way.
As an agency, it is crucial to see your client’s conference come to life. First and foremost, the agency has the vision of how work should be executed, so we should be responsible for directing the setup of these attendee touch points. (We’re serious. Sign placement is everything.) Plus, the educational sessions deepen our knowledge of the brand, further positioning us as experts in the industry.
Agency involvement also allows for building relationships with other marketing partners and vendors and broadens engagement with separate client departments. Too often we find ourselves stuck with tunnel vision on projects, but being “in the field” at conference gave us the opportunity to see all moving parts working together to create one kick-ass machine. And of course, we love to keep our eyes open to other inspiring work from our creative peers.
So, quick recap on bringing corporate conferences back to life >>
If you think corporate conferences are “old school,” THINK AGAIN. They impact each and every attendee by educating and empowering, teaching leadership skills, and boosting morale at times when it’s needed most.
Additionally, INCLUDE YOUR AGENCY. We’re in the creative business for a reason, and our involvement will benefit you as much as it benefits us.
And finally, HAVE FUN WITH IT. Whether you’re celebrating year 1 or year 50, find a way to make the experience special — your employees will feel so much more connected to the culture you worked tirelessly to build.
Kaylee Caldwell, greenlight Account Coordinator
