VIDEO: Understanding your audience

Organising a successful event is more than just venue sourcing, according to former FreemanXP worker Kim Myhre in an interview with The Future In 15. Talking with show host Caleb Parker, the former Senior VP of FreemanXP’s London office wanted to encourage event planners to carefully consider their attendees and rethink the way they treat venues.

FreemanXP has changed with the shifting tides for 90 years and has grown into a $2.5 billion (£1.9 billion), and Myhre believes its success lies in working closely and directly with its employers, which have included some big names.

“When you’re crafting experiences for a particular audience, you need to understand that audience, you need to understand what motivates them, what their inhibitors are, you need to bring that knowledge,” explained Kim Myhre. “It doesn’t happen by accident, you just don’t bring a group of people together and achieve your goals, so that’s a design principal.”

The interview goes on to discuss key focal areas, as well as where he believes the future will take the industry, from the digital world to virtual reality and beyond. Similar to other interviews with The Future In 15, data is a major factor but understanding how to implement it won’t help if you don’t know the starting point, something that has cost other firms their business in the past.

“[Other corporations fail] because they don’t have the right data, they don’t have the right metrics and measurements, but I think mainly they tend to be logistically oriented in their thinking,” continued Myhre. “So someone would say ‘I think we should do an event’ and their first questions would be ‘Where? How many people? How many days?’ when it should be ‘Why?’”

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