How to Make Your Meetings & Incentives Recession-Proof
October 21, 2019SHARE:
Well, a few cracks are starting to show in the American economy after nearly a decade-long run of prosperity. Retail spending is slowing a bit, and U.S. manufacturing output shrunk for the third straight month—something that has not happened since the Great Recession of 2009. As a result, some manufacturing companies are already scaling back their late 2019 and early 2020 meetings and events, while keeping an eye on the Q4 manufacturing output numbers so that, if need be, they can make changes to the events they have scheduled for later in 2020.
In slower economic times, there’s always the temptation among corporations to look at their meeting and event spending to see if it can be cut back without much impact on the firm’s performance. But David Peckinpaugh, president of Maritz Global Events, made some great counterpoints to scaling back or eliminating events in a recent article on MeetingsNet.com. In it, he said this:
“When you look at the 2009 recession, we saw a significant drop in training and educational investment through face-to-face meetings. But the companies who cut a lot in that area saw a dramatically negative impact on their long-term business—it took them much longer to get back where they were once the economy moved past its bottom point. There is a lot of data from 2011 and 2012 that shows the companies that made the short-sighted decisions in 2009 and 2010 really paid the price in the following years, and then they had to get back into the game and revamp, which requires a ton of effort and expense anyway. So, whether it is a sales meeting or incentive, a channel program, or other types of events, the returns will be there for those organizations that stay the course in a difficult economic landscape.”
Also, we at AIC Hotel Group understand that budgeting and return on investment are the two most critical things your bosses want to know about as they look harder at the firm’s future meetings and incentive programs. So we are ready to help you planners with case studies of clients who came to our properties for a meeting or incentive, and show the response these companies got from attendees and the results they saw in terms of employee retention and improved sales figures. We have plenty of testimonials to present, and we can also show you the types of events, activities, and spaces those groups used at our properties to get the best response from attendees and get the most form the meeting or incentive.
In short, we want to be close partners with you in your event planning, execution, and measurement. I’d be happy to talk to you further about these things for any specific program you might bring to one of our properties in Miami, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
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