Turning an event into something that everybody recognizes as a brand is not an overnight process. It’s a process that goes through distinct phases.  Although money and other resources can speed up the process, you don’t want to skip any of these phases:

Phase 1: The Concept is the star – Creating an Idea that has the power to attract people

Phase 2: The Culture is the star – Creating a Feeling that is unforgettable

Phase 3: The Community is the star – Creating Tailored experiences

This article ended up being longer than anticipated, but I’m not sorry because I believe it contains valuable, counterintuitive information that took me 20 years to accumulate.

I hope it will help you avoid costly mistakes and encourage you to take your event to the next level. Consider saving it so you can revisit it later.

You can watch it on YouTube:

Or continue reading here:

Phase 1: Operate within a clear category, while providing a unique concept.

When you say “I want to have a Gin festival in my hometown,” or “I want to organize an AI conference,” you are operating inside a category.

If you are first to introduce this category in your broader region, it could be enough to just start here and provide a great category-level event experience. However, you’d be missing out on great opportunities to build a brand. A brand could still emerge down the road, but if you take the next step, the seeds of your brand can start from day one.

Drill down and niche to define a concept

This next step is to drill down within your category to define your niche. This niche is communicated through your events concept. As a creative person, this part has been one of my favorite parts of creating events, so just to help clarify the ideas here, I’ll present two hypothetical events:

GinGenius Festival – Where professional Mixologists share their best Gin creations and why they work. Throughout the festival, you’ll be able to taste products from different Distilleries, Producers, and Artisan Spirit Makers. We’ve even commissioned our Mixologist to compete in new creations using our exhibitors’ Gins. If you are a Gin enthusiast or work with Gin, this event, full of new Gin Experiences, live music, food, and parties, will be an event for you.

My comments: There is a clear concept, a curiosity built in that goes deeper than the category. And, I think it can attract not only vendors and professionals but even the general population.

Inference To Edge Summit – The cutting edge technologies that bring AI to Edge Devices – At this summit, we bring together top experts and industry leaders to share how to set up leaner inference pipelines to save your organization money. And, which AI architectures work best for low-latency edge devices.

My comments: Notice the difference between: “AI Summit” and “Inference To Edge Summit”. It’s still a huge market, but it clearly communicates who should come and what exactly they can expect from the event.

Btw. If you feel as excited about these ideas and want to make something like this happen, I would love to be part of that journey.

You want to create a concept that moves people to the event by the power of the idea alone. When you don’t have a brand yet, this is what will seed it for you.

The concept behind my own event – The Chase Festival – Inspiration from Vintage Clips

For context, this was a swing dance event in Heidelberg and became one of the largest events of its kind, with a clear position within our ecosystem. Our unique concept was that each workshop class was built around historical footage that the instructors would build into their classes. Our motivation was to entice everybody to dedicate more time to the history and heritage of the art form. A great side effect was that each instructor created unique content for this event. At the time, a problem that was emerging was that instructors recycled the same material too many times, leaving participants unhappy.

Use a clear category to save money, create a powerful idea to attract people.

Be clear about the category you are in to save yourself the challenge of educating the market. But it is the concept, the idea itself, that will act as the magnet to have people choose your event rather than anything else.

Every decision needs to enhance the concept. The selected venue, the special guests, the artists, everything is selected from that perspective of the concept. A person might be difficult to work with, but perfect for your concept, bite that bullet and make it happen.

Excess marketing prevents you from validating the power of your idea.

In my experience, I believe more resources can absolutely help you speed up this phase, but probably not in the way you might think.

When your event gets passed a certain size, so much of your attention will be channeled to logistics and you won’t have the capacity to think about concept creation (phase 1) and culture creation (phase 2) activities.

So, although more resources could buy more marketing to fill up your venues and pay for higher-profile guests, excessive usage of resources would mask your understanding of the power of your concept.

This is why you want to stay here just long enough that you’ve validated the actual idea. Keep the events anywhere between 20 – 500 participants in size.

Instead, tour with the concept or repeat it 2-4x per year to go faster.

This strategy to repeat the event more times per year instead of making it bigger is a more effective way to learn faster, build a stronger network, and refine the concept while you are not bogged down by too much logistics.

Phase 2: Design the feeling you want people to experience, then ritualize everything to free up development capacity.

In this phase, the important aspect is figuring out all the opportunities you have, to create rituals and special moments that are unique to your event, perhaps even a bit quirky, and primarily make sense within the context of your concept. This also makes your ideas hard to copy.

If we use the examples from above, we can imagine the following ideas:

GinGenius Festival:

• Imagine introducing a ritual where every time a guest tastes a new drink, they should first clink their glass with three other people for good luck. Enroll your exhibitors, vendors and mixologists and bartenders to be a part of this idea and “act a little superstitious” when somebody doesn’t do it. So I can imagine this scenario where people start running around the festival and clinking glasses with other people, and creating wholesome moments where strangers meet and have a moment of interaction with each other.
• Imagine a moment where suddenly red lights go on and the “police” announce that we’re in a “prohibition era”. So all exhibitors and vendors need to take down their drinks, and instead, what they do is to present finger foods and pastries. What the “police” don’t know is that these finger foods and pastries are Gin infused. Of course, your customers need to know that, but it creates a whole other way to experience Gin, and creates a big shift in what the whole experience is like. And if you strategically place it within a time where people are feeling “peckish” anyway, it can really create a magical experience.
• This idea is a little bit more complex, but you can, for example, have the highest voted drink mixes of the event be the drink of choice during the big party. This opens up new opportunities: it allows you to enroll your exhibitors into an affiliate marketing campaign, where any exhibitor who sells event tickets, to be part of this competition, and all the drinks sold go to the exhibitors. This could make the top three vendors a good amount of money from the party, and it motivates the vendors to help you attract customers to your event.

Further down, I’ll explain how we can help you with our affiliate infrastructure.

Inference To Edge Summit:

• Perhaps a hot-seat moment could attract companies to present their structures for the sake of being “grilled” by the experts and get their feedback while the audience learns.
• You could set up a networking lounge with free coffee and snacks that is open to any group of 3 different organizations who enter together to promote more networking.

The Chase Festival:

Here are some of the culture ideas we kept:

• We repurposed a Jazz tune and wrote our own lyrics to it. These lyrics did two things: 1) had everybody chant “at the chase” over and over again, which people still do to this day, 4 years after I last ran this event. And 2) introduce our artists in a unique way.
• We had a ritual where, at around 2 am, we surprised people with free finger food and snacks so that they had the energy to continue partying until early morning.
• We had a concept where every instructor had a TV in their workshop space (very unusual for our industry) and showed a historical clip related to the class topic.
• This one was expensive but also worth it; we commissioned all the artists to learn a choreography to perform during the festival as a group. And, of course, we embedded iconic moves that are called “The Chase,” which is where the name comes from (not the bank 😉).

These and many other small and large cultural ideas made our event absolutely unique.

Rituals are not for everybody, but you should do the good ones anyway.

I would explore several of these rituals and games and see which ones are keepers. If you get the impression that around 20% of participants are playing along with these ideas, it can be a keeper. Please note that some people are never going to join such activities, and some are even put off by them. That’s fine; there are other events for these people to enjoy. We want to dare to be different in order to build a brand that is unique.

Ritualize and systematize everything to free up development capacity:

I believe it is important to turn your ideas into rituals that are done the same way for each edition. This is important because each of these takes time to conceptualize and introduce, consuming your “development capacity.” This is why you want to turn these concepts into standards that you re-run for each edition. You have the manuals, the creatives, the budget, and your stakeholders know exactly how to run the playbook. Throughout this phase, keep creating and testing new ideas, then ritualize the best ones.

You can throw more money at it? Sure, use it to build a more powerful “Enriched Environment”.

Just as for phase 1, you don’t want to jump past phase 2; there are just too many valuable learnings and insights to be had at this stage to rush through. However, resources can help you do more to create your own world that your guests enter into upon arrival.

“Enriched Environments”

The red thread in my life, my “why” or “north star” has been about helping people experience what in the Alzheimer research community is called an “Enriched Environment.” I learned about this while I was doing my Alzheimer’s research work at TU-Darmstadt, and it captivated me so deeply that it became my obsession ever since.

The concept came from experiments with rodents that showed that intensely stimulating experiences significantly regenerated neurons, helping prevent dementia and depression.

My “Hold-My-Beer”-Moment

Although the scientists’ conclusions were that it’s too hard to create such experiences for humans, I felt I had experienced such “Enriched Environments” during dance festivals. This idea captured me so strongly that I decided to dedicate the rest of my professional life to developing Enriched Environments for people through the experiences I created.

Our startup is just a continuation of this desire to help more people experience Enriched Environments by building the solution that helps organizations have the operational capacity to make it happen.

The more you manage to rebuild the venue to create a concept-fitting oasis unlike anything they’ve seen, the easier it will be for your guests to be present at the event.

All these unique experiences are intended to bring people to the present moment. Help them feel open, curious and receptive to new input. These experiences leave them recharged and ready to tackle their own challenges with new inspiration and elan.

I believe this is as true for a consumer-centric festival as it is for a B2B conference.

With more resources, you can afford better production, which creates an even more enriched environment that enhances your concept and culture.

During this phase, you want to start growing your event past the 1000-guest mark to build the operational muscles to service larger crowds.

Phase 3: Create tailored experiences for your guests that enhance their experience while also helping your bottom line.

This phase is the golden phase for your event. From an operational standpoint, the most valuable benefit of hitting this phase is that the tables turn from you chasing after people to people chasing after you.

To thrive in this phase, you want to gently phase out people who are very complicated to work with—those who add unnecessary friction to the event operations.

This frees up new development capacity that you can reinvest into creating more tailored experiences for sub-segments of your community.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve built multiple communities in different cities, through online platforms, and through festivals. Throughout these experiences, I’ve learned an important but rarely discussed truth:

“Segmentation is the secret to a good community that no one talks about.” – Ali Taghavi 🌕

Yes, people want to feel connected through shared values and a common purpose. But they don’t want identical experiences. Within the context of your event, meaning your category and your concept, people want to have tailored experiences that better align with their particular interests, needs, aspirations, and even, their willingness to pay at that particular time of their lives.

As the organizer, you want to find ways to curate powerful moments for people in a way that they could not do for themselves.

However, a lot goes into doing this right in order to avoid creating a toxic experience where people feel stuck and isolated because of the segmentation.

If people start noticing the smell of ‘better than’ oozing in the air, the magic is broken. I’ll dedicate a separate article for this topic as it’s rather complex. Drop a follow or connection to stay in the loop 😇

Let your inventory lead your segmentation strategy:

Within the context of an event, your inventory is the culmination of

1. the physical capacity of your event space
2. the talents you bring
3. the energy and opportunities that come from having large crowds

All of these together make up the value that you can call inventory.

Importantly, the day after the event, this inventory is lost.

It’s this perishable nature of your inventory, and the fact that costs are relatively fixed while revenue is flexible, that you want to let your inventory lead the way for your segmentation efforts. At least, before you choose to expand to create new inventory, as the added revenue from selling this inventory would go straight to your bottom line.

Your segmentation process is a strategic, creative, discovery process.

Strategic: You want to find a segment that perfectly fills your excess event capacity.

Creative: Explore what segments have a positive effect also on the event as a whole.

Discovery: You can find inspiration from watching and listening to your guests. Then, let small experiments lead the design process before you commit big to the segmentation effort, as you don’t know the impact it will have on the whole experience.

When done right, I can’t think of many things that are as beneficial for both your participants and your bottom line at the same time as the process of great segmentation.

However, the success and implementation rate determining factor of your segmentation efforts depends on your operational capabilities.

I want to share with you some ideas of how you can play with segmentations from the lens of our examples.

Improve your operational excellence to sell more inventory.

GinGenus Festival:

Let’s say that our event space has a smaller side room that we can use for a special workshop for our exhibitors to benefit from. But it would need to happen while our setup team is getting the main space ready for the event. This idea might come from the desire to have our exhibitors bring more of their employees to the event, because we want a greater mix of professionals and lay audiences, and believe a special workshop for them can be attractive. However, now, the coordination process of the Friday setup increased significantly in complexity as we want to:

• set up the workshop room space and be ready before 12 pm
• set up the main hall for the weekend and be ready before 4 pm
• give our exhibitors time to set up their booths after the workshop
• give exhibitors time to meet with their assigned mixologists to ideate before the weekend

Out of this, several sub-schedules need to run in parallel to successfully execute this idea. Your operational capability will determine whether this will be a success or a disaster.

⚡ Achtung, I’m going to describe how our software can help enhance your team’s operational excellence for events. (skip if not interested)

Our software is built to increase your operational capacity so that you don’t have to miss out on opportunities by over simplifying your event.

If we take the Friday setup + Workshop example, you’ll be able to give each stakeholder (staff, workshop instructors, exhibitors, and participants) their own individualized schedules that are all connected, so if a change happens in one place, everybody is updated instantly.

You can give a tailored Run Sheet with detailed setup notes to your team:

If you pull this off, you’ll be able to create a powerful experience for the exhibitors who come to your event.

In fact, this can make more exhibitors want to come to this event as the word gets out and suddenly, you’ll become THE industry event.

The challenge is, how can we increase our capacity to handle ever-increasing complexity without overwhelming our team? And even more, as Priscilla Schelp pointed out to me, the high staff turnover in the event industry can result in many challenges of consistency when staff who ran these processes leave the organization.

Because of the risk of staff turnover, and also to increase our ability to run complex events, we’ve built the ability for your team to build Workflow Dependencies to capture this knowledge into the software (in the next weeks also tasks and chats), so that each new edition of the event is built on the knowledge of the previous once with just a quick event cloning function.

Inference to Edge Summit:

Let’s say we want to utilize the excess capacity we have for our event as “currency” for our marketing strategy.

This means that if you know you are not going to sell a bunch of your exhibitor capacity, why not use it as part of the affiliate commissions to partners?

Let’s say for example, you reach out to several exhibition strategies such as Michael Arief Gunawan to help exhibitors create great booth execution plans. And you offer them the option of selling a package deal that includes booth space in combination with their services. Because this would have been lost inventory anyways, you can be very generous with your affiliate commissions.

We’ve embedded this into our infrastructure. You can offer each affiliate partner a tailored (and isolated) ticket booking page and have all the guests booked from any of these pages automatically integrated with the main event infrastructure.

Chase Festival:

We created several different tailored experiences that helped us double our profits. While costs remained relatively unchanged, revenue increased, and all this new revenue went straight to our bottom line.

We explored time-based segmentation, interest-based segmentation, and “type of participant”-based segmentation, meaning figuring out who would have a synergetic effect in terms of value created at the event for everybody.

For example, when it comes to our venue cost, which was by far our biggest cost point, we ran events from 9 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next day, two days in a row, with only five transition times between each activity. This allowed us to suddenly have a lot more inventory available within existing resources.

The red thread across all of these phases lies within the “Operational Excellence” of your team.

In phase three – your ability to create tailored experiences for subgroups of your community and still have the capacity to invent, test, run different playbooks, systematize, and so on.

In phase two, the ability to capture opportunities to design the feeling of the event through rituals and quirky concepts that are unique to your event.

In phase one, exploring which concepts results in the idea that captures people’s imagination, that attracts them to your event. And exploring ever-increasing concept-enhancing experiences.

Then, at every stage, develop, test, systematize, and free up new capacity to continue moving from one phase to the next.

Large events are expensive and complex. Not finding more ways of creating value with these resources is wasteful and missed opportunities.

Great events aren’t built by simplifying – they’re built by tailoring unique experiences at scale.

This is where our startup can support you. Our solution helps your organization free up more development capacity to keep creating value for your guests while keeping your team healthy and intact.

If you know anyone who would benefit from this article or what we are building, I’d appreciate the introduction. 🙏

Thanks for reading this article.

Ali Taghavi