Our inaugural Quirk’s Event London has just wrapped a few days before this writing and I’m happy to report that it exceeded all of our expectations. We were shooting for between 600-750 attendees and our final registration count was over 1,200! Conference-goers were pleased with the quality of the speakers, giving them an average rating of 4.2 out of 5. And our hybrid model of part conference, part exhibition also seems to have been a hit: One attendee kindly offered that we had “put the fun back in marketing research events in the U.K.,” which might be one of the best compliments we’ve ever received.
As with any endeavor of this size, it’s a learning process and we want to get better. What did we learn this time around?
- U.K. researchers, just like their U.S. counterparts, want an event that is both full of quality content and also fun to attend. Marketing research is serious business but there’s no reason we can’t have fun doing it.
- We need to educate attendees that once you’re in the door, everything at our events is free. We often heard people turn down snacks, drinks, photos with Scooby-Doo or other exhibit-hall experiences because they thought there was a charge. Perhaps the Brits are simply more polite than the bulk of the attendees at our Brooklyn Quirk’s Event, who are not shy about availing themselves of the freebies on offer (and demanding more when the supply runs out!).
- Getting to the event at 9 a.m. was hard for many. London is, well, London – a major metropolis with legendary traffic. Attendance at some of the first sessions of each of the two days was good but it could have been better. We also learned that attendees will stay late, something we weren’t sure of given that many conference-goers were locals who had families to head home to rather than a hotel room. In fact, some of the late-day sessions drew the biggest crowds. So for next year we will start later in the morning and keep the event going a bit later.
- Exhibitors who spend some time and money thinking about how to engage attendees fare far better than those who simply stand at their booth waiting for a prospect to approach. We heard some anecdotal comments that the London client-side attendees were “more reserved” than those at our U.S.-based events and were harder to engage in sales-related discussions. We stress repeatedly to exhibitors to make their booths inviting, interesting and fun. Whether it’s a unique tchotchke or some kind of virtual reality simulation, give people a reason to stop by. And if you can’t swing any of those things, then an upturned, smiling face always helps. We saw and heard about a few too many exhibitor heads tilted down reading e-mails, even during the busiest times of the conference day. Nothing says “I’m not interested in talking to you” more loudly than that.
- That the phrase “ambient packaged cake” exists. Despite my love of ambient packaged cakes, aka those tasty pastries and other desserts that are sold in supermarket bread aisles rather than bakeries, I had never heard them called that before attending a London session. That’s one of my favorite parts of conference presentations: you get glimpses into all the different business niches and their attendant lingos and acronyms.
If you joined us in London and have feedback on how things went, please let me know at joe@quirks.com. If you didn’t, we will be back in February 2020, again at the Intercontinental O2. Hope to see you there!