The Handshakes Business v2.0
It was January 2015 when I took to the stage at the first UFI Global CEO Summit to discuss digital strategy in event businesses. A decade later, even though the world has changed drastically, the central premise holds true:
Events businesses are handshakes businesses
This phrase was the hook of my presentation, “What is a Digital Strategy?” It was based on Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen's famous “Job to be done” theory. I argued that our customers hire our events to create new business relationships; therefore, any and all digital transformation needs to cater to that, and only to that job. Creating handshakes.
Having spent the better part of my 20 years in the industry on this topic, I cannot stress this point enough. Once you start making progress on your digital transformation, it is very easy to lose track of where to stop. You might easily find yourself developing capabilities none of your customers asked for. Even worse, you can convince yourself that you’re the innovator (à la Henry Ford or Steve Jobs) who knows what your customers need better than they do. Breaking news, you’re (most probably) not.
I believe there are three levels to this:
1- Building better events:
Go all-in on this. Build a good data architecture that underpins your deliverables across your organisation. Create a basic (but robust) stack that allows your customers to connect to their buyers efficiently at scale. Do the basics incredibly well, and try not to venture out too far from your core business.
2- Building Media Assets:
You can find clever adjacencies here only when you have the brand permission to do so. This generally follows up on the above with “always on” ways of creating leads for your customers. These are inherently lower-value interactions, but you can foster many of them and position your event brand as the yearly meeting point of your media asset. I’d highly recommend reminding yourself that you’re still doing this to support your events. Being a standalone media and leads business requires a genuinely different setup. (leads in the thousands, delivery SLAs in seconds, complex integrations… not our ballgame as event organisers)
3- Vanity Projects: To boldly go where only some organisers have gone before. (and felt sorry afterwards)
These are business model innovations that, despite their (highly) intellectual connections, don’t have any organic links to events. The general misconception I see is the adoption of an existing B2C information business model to the world of B2B through our well-structured but (unfortunately) infinitely small customer data. These require sizeable investments into software, teams, and infrastructure. If you’re not a software provider, or a large media group, do not go there. Even if you are, this won’t add anything to your events customers who’ll end up paying for it.
My advice?
Remaining faithful to your core business as an event organiser is key. Concentrate on establishing solid foundations that provide value to your customers and consider adjacent opportunities only when they naturally enhance your events. Do not assume that your customers want, or more importantly, are ready to buy “more than events” from you. You need to earn that position if it is in your business strategy to do so. You need to build towards it.
Is this new information?
Not at all. Here's the takeaway from 10 years ago on UFI's webiste:
".....While there were plenty of takeaways, one phrase that really resonated was a comment from Dr Baris Onay at ITE Group that we are in the ‘Handshake Business’ as distinct from ‘Eyeballs businesses’ by which he referred to digital media, “[Exhibitions] are still part of the marketing mix, but the clients don’t look at this as one against the other – it’s run from different budgets by different people. Digital, in that case is complimentary, not contradictory. We’re selling handshakes and monetising our user-base by square metre....”
If you’d like to have a chat about your digital strategy, drop me a line here.
Dr. Barış Onay
