Live connection with different cultures
While connecting a company to a crowd, an event also needs to resonate with its cultural surroundings. Experiential marketers have learned through regional experience how to get the most out of a location.
'We generally work with international brands,' said Antony Spanbrook, founder and managing director of Luminous, a Hong Kong-based experiential marketing company that specialises in live experiences. 'In terms of the brands we are addressing, our methods are similar. But some environments are obviously more difficult. We may have to tailor the message and be more culturally sensitive than with others.'
Mr Spanbrook said businesspeople on the mainland were price conscious about events. However, to reach Chinese audiences enthralled by western brands, where events tend to be in Putonghua, they need to be culturally 'tweaked'.
In Macau, an emerging events scene is growing out of the city's entertainment ambitions, creating a close-knit environment that is increasingly being tailor-made for international spectaculars.
'Macau offers an incredible selection of venues for intimate, mega events and that is the edge that it has on Hong Kong,' Mr Spanbrook said. 'There is still a great deal of construction, but much of the major stuff on the Cotai Strip will be done by the third quarter of next year.'
The experience, though, if seamlessly created, can cross cultures to universally resonate with an audience and, in an internet-dominated age, a live experience is unlikely to go unnoticed. But as Luminous makes best use of global communications, it sees an event as being an experience for a physically real crowd that is ultimately live; the better it is pulled off, the more net-worthy it becomes.
'Within minutes, a good event might go out on YouTube. We use the Net a lot in the pre-production and follow-up of live events. We use it to gather and track registrations for conferences as an information source for guests before an event and then, of course, to follow-up and disseminate information after the event. There are some events for which we do a live webcast of the proceedings, but this is an add-on as opposed to our core business of live experiences.'
