Since a meeting can be held once or often, the meeting organizer has to determine the repetition and frequency of occurrence of the meeting. Options generally include the following:
· A one-time meeting is the most common meeting type and covers events that are self-contained. While they may repeat often, the individual meeting is the entirety of the event. This can include a 2006 conference. The 2007 version of the conference is a stand-alone meeting event.
· A recurring meeting is a meeting that recurs periodically, such as an every Monday staff meeting from 9:00AM to 9:30 AM. The meeting organizer wants the participants to be at the meeting on a constant and repetitive basis. A recurring meeting can be ongoing, such as a weekly team meeting, or have an end date, such as a 5 week training meeting, held every Friday afternoon.
· A series meeting is like a recurring meeting, but the details differ from meeting to meeting. One example of a series meeting is a monthly "lunch and learn" event at a company, church, club or organization. The placeholder is the same, but the agenda and topics to be covered vary. This is more of a recurring meeting with the details to be determined.
Buyers
The meetings market is the most diverse of all the sectors of business travel and tourism. Demand for meetings facilities and services originates from a multitude of different types of customers, all extremely varied in terms of the sizes and purposes of the meetings they hold. These can range from a small manufacturing business in search of a local venue in which to hold a sales strategy seminar for six people, to the United Nations inspecting cities all over the world with a view to choosing a destination for its 2001 summit on racism, with 10000 delegates, including several hundred heads of state. It is, therefore, vital for those responsible for providing and marketing venues and other services for the meetings industry to be able to segment the market in a meaningful and operational manner.
Market demand is usually synonymous with the buyers in that market. However, in the context of the meetings industry, the term 'buyer' is ambiguous. On the one hand, 'buyers' may refer to the actual initiators of the meetings events - those organisations whose needs create the demand for meetings of all kinds. On the other hand, the word 'buyer' is also used to describe those individuals who are employed directly or indirectly by these organisations to select destinations and venues and to plan the meetings events themselves.
For the purposes of clarity, in this context the term 'buyer' will be reserved to describe the organisations that are the initiators of meetings, while the term 'meetings planner' will be used to describe the individuals employed by those organisations to organise their events. Demand in terms of buyer organisations will be considered first.
Segments of the market
It is possible to envisage several alternative segmentations of the overall demand for meetings. For example, the market could be segmented by size into small and large meetings; or it could be segmented according to the main purpose of the event -educating, motivating, informing; or even according to the types of people who attend the events - local residents, out-of-towners, visitors from overseas, etc.
|
|
However, the system of segmentation used most commonly defines the different types of demand primarily according to the type of buyer involved, i.e. the actual initiators of the meetings. Under this system, the two main segments - meetings of business corporations and meetings of professional or trade associations - between them account for most of the overall demand by far in this sector.
Corporate demand
It is generally recognised that the corporate sector, consisting essentially of private businesses of all sizes, dominates in terms of the sheer number of meetings it needs in order to function effectively. Smith (1990), for example, goes as far as to estimate that about 90% of all meetings are in fact corporate events, although the general consensus is that this proportion is somewhat exaggerated. This market can be usefully subdivided into 'internal' and 'external' meetings. The former are generally aimed at the employees of the company, and often take the form of relatively small, one-day meetings, held for staff training purposes, or as management seminars or board meetings.
External corporate meetings are, by contrast, aimed primarily at the wider market in which the company operates, and consequently involve the company's external partners and associates. Such meetings events may be held for the purpose of bringing together the company's dealers and distributors for product presentations, or its own shareholders for annual general meetings. Attendance at such events may run to many hundreds of delegates. Some corporate meetings involve both internal and external delegates, a good example of this being events organised in order to launch a new product. At such meetings, the company must convince both its own sales force and external distributors of the new product's value. These are generally very striking, spectacular events at which the product - which can be anything from a new model of combine harvester to the latest perfume from a fashion house - is unveiled with great ceremony and its strongest selling points explained to all of those present.
Although practically every industry sector needs to hold meetings from time to time, certain sectors are generally recognised as producing a higher-than-average level of demand. According to Rogers (1998; p.25), the buyers that are particularly prominent in generating corporate conference business include:
• oil, gas and petrochemicals
• medical and pharmaceuticals
|
|
• computing and telecommunications
• engineering and manufacturing
• financial and professional services
• retail and wholesale distribution
• travel and transport.
Association demand
Association demand derives from the meetings held by the countless sectoral organisations that operate on behalf of their members. Such organisations may be professional or trade associations (e.g. the British Dental Association, the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers), or they may serve to bring together those with a common cause or leisure interest (e.g. the League Against Cruel Sports, the US Military Veterans' Motorcycle Club). They may be local, regional, national, continental or international in the scope of their membership and activities.
But, whatever its common purpose or geographical range, the broad aim of any association is to serve its members' interests. According to the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), this means taking measures to (Seaton and Bennett, 1996):
• advance the status and image of the members;
• provide for peer interaction and exchange of information;
• evaluate and project future trends;
• lobby and advance the association members' interests (political, economic, social);
• emphasise the value of membership;
• provide entertainment and informal interaction.
It is clear that a number of these objectives can be met most effectively through the provision of regular opportunities for association members to gather together in order to discuss issues of common interest. Such meetings may be annual or biannual (hut rarely less frequent), their rate of recurrence generally depending on the extent of their membership and how geographically dispersed it is. Consequently, although in number there are far fewer of them than corporate meetings, association events constitute a very significant share of the meetings market. According to Greenhill (2000), there are approximately 7000 such associations in the UK alone, and it is estimated that nearly half of these hold events on a regular basis.
For the international association meetings market, most demand tends to be generated by the same sectors each year. For 2000, the ICCA (2001) report demonstrates that medical sciences, science, industry and technology remained the big four areas in terms of subject matter, adding that education and agriculture were also important, followed by social sciences and economics.
It is clear that medical conferences - and the exhibitions that often accompany them - represent a vast area of demand, both from individual companies and associations. As a result, a number of associations have been formed to identify and disseminate best practice in this specialised field of events. The Healthcare Convention and Exhibitors Association (www.hcea.org), the International Exhibitors Association on Radiological Congresses, and the International Pharmaceutical Congress Advisory Association (www.ipcaa.org) are examples of membership-based organisations that exist to promote high standards in the medical conferences and exhibitions sector.
Other categories
Apart from corporate and association buyers, other categories often identified in segmentation systems include government bodies (local authorities, central government departments and agencies), intergovernmental structures (the EU, the G8 group of nations), as well as religious and trade union agencies, none of which fits convincingly into the two main market segments.
Some of these types of buyers are occasionally subsumed within the association sector with which they share certain characteristics. Indeed, Seaton and Bennett (1996) use the term 'avocational associations', which they define as organisations whose members share sport, recreational, hobby, fraternal, cultural, civic or other social interests. When discussing the segmentation of the North American meetings market, Kotler et al. (1996) use the acronym 'SMERF' (social, military, educational, religious and fraternal) organisations, a term that is not found frequently outside the USA.