Elevating Events

The Challenge

The world’s leading events organizer was holding too many events to truly understand what makes each one special and different. Hosting 7 million people a year at 500 events in 30 different countries, Reed Exhibitions realized they’d gotten too broad to have a truly global understanding of the different needs and motivations of event attendees across the world. The Sound was brought on to bring event attendees to life and to help identify a few key behavioral typologies, in order to help Reed prioritize areas of investment and insights-based territories for new product development.

The Approach

Taking Reed’s existing research, we developed hypotheses about the different motivations and needs attendees have when going to events. We then used online mobile ethnographies to talk to event attendees across all sorts of sectors in seven different countries – drawing apart different behavior types, which we then validated quantitatively. Finally, we conducted interviews with event enthusiasts around the world, bringing each typology to life through a short, creative, documentary-style film, which could be shared across the entire company to get every function on board with the new focus.

The Impact

Taking the time to think about commonalities and differences helped galvanize Reed’s fractured business units around core human needs and desires. We helped prioritize spend on short-term digital innovation and helped them think about longer-term opportunities to better connect with attendees. Beyond that, our work was so well-received that it’s been brought on the road to each of their unique business units across the globe, ensuring it’s taken forward as a central strategy for each event, and it received the prestigious Market Research Society award for best B2B strategy.