“Proofing
the concept is the hardest part of the planning phase. Planners want to know
their ideas can be an actual, realized experience. So we have created a
community for them to view their peer's ideas and experiences” (Hsieh, 2013)
On the
8th of January Marriott launched a beta version of its new webpage dedicated to
meeting planners. ‘Meetings Imagined’ supports meeting planners in their
brainstorming phase by visualizing ideas through images. In the ‘Inspiration
Gallery’ the Meeting Planners can select sample photos, ‘heart’ them and add
them to their customized profile set. Three drop down menus are guiding the
search process.
In the
first step, the type of meeting has to be chosen out of seven different
categories: Celebrate, Decide, Educate, Ideate, Network, Produce or Promote. If
you are a corporate planner in charge of organizing a strategy meeting for the
Board of Management you chose the Decide or Produce button in order to be
redirected to the next step. In this second step called “planning essentials”, the
Setup, the Food/Drink, the Tech/Supplies as well as the Experiences are
describing. The third and last menu includes the different brands of Marriott
where you can choose to do the event. For example, say you are looking for
organizing the strategy meeting in a JW Marriott and wish for healthy snacks
during the coffee break, the search engine will propose various food and
dining-themed images e.g. Om Snacks at JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE. This
is the point, where planners start to save the photo-suggestions they like into
their personalized set by creating a professional account.
The smart part for
planners after having completed the desired set, which can reach from simple
Food and Beverage options up to an entire conference program, is to send it
either directly to their clients or to a conference service manager at the
Marriott hotels.
Indeed, it allows planners to collaborate
with participating hotels in order to design meeting experiences. Typically,
hotel meeting websites provide information on logistics such as availability,
rates and space, whereas ‘Meetings
Imagined’ visually displays a meeting experience tailored to a company’s
business objectives. For the preliminary version, four European and five
American hotels were chosen. However, additional ones will be included in the
next weeks. This 'Inspiration Gallery', an innovative tool for planners, gives
a large panel of choices through a range of pictures and content. In addition,
research can be done by category such as popularity, relevance or date, showing
up the past clients’ experiences.
The main challenge represents the continuous updating of information in order to keep one step ahead of the competitors. To conclude, the 'Meetings Imagined' portal is a very useful tool, allowing Event and Meeting Planners to visualize and create and directly select the meeting essentials such as setups online.
Sources:
Image source: www.freedigitalphotos.com
Agathe Domenach and Anja Gunz
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