What is the measure of RoI from a business event?

Be it meetings, incentive tours or conferences, business events are investments made by the company in its stakeholders. These investments can help organisations grow in size and stature. How evolved is the brand custodian in the country, to view these spends as investments?

Is there a measurement (for RoI) that is followed? Is it scientific? Is it reliable? And how does it quantify the intangibles that experiences are made of?

There is more than one element that goes into creating these experiences, and there is more than one contributor to the process. Each event, crafted with facilitating business interaction as its objective, is different. Each experience should be differentiated too. Take offsites, for example. In principle, each offsite for any company should have differentiated objectives, depending on a multitude of factors beginning with the profile of people involved. But is that the reality today? How does the brand go about co-creating that experience with the experiential marketing specialists and other service providers? What role do the Corporate Communication and Human Resource arms have to play? What role does the venue or destination have to play, and how can they add value to the experience?   

In the case of incentive tours, specialist MICE players and event and experiential marketing agencies have successfully offered customised experiences to a many, many corporates. But even then, these specialist units promising 'experiences' face competition from travel service providers. Many of these travel service providers are looking at creating 'experience tours', rather than offering just ticketing and hotel bookings at the best possible rates.

So, 'experience' is in. How are such experiences being conceived, and how are they being enriched? What are corporates looking for?

All this and more, discussed at EVENTFAQS MaxiMICE, on November 16, 2008.