Appealing to all the senses with events

Informed about the latest trends at the 5th Convention Forum Vorarlberg: Philipp Ikrath, Urs Treuthardt and Harry Gatterer (from left).People's patterns of experience and perception are changing rapidly. This fact also has a major impact on the work of event organizers. Convention Partner Vorarlberg therefore dedicated itself to this topic at the Vorarlberg Convention Forum. "We can only work successfully for our customers and partners if we know what the expectations of the convention audience of the future are," explained Managing Director Urs Treuthardt.For the fifth time now, the trends in the meetings industry were highlighted at the invitation of the Vorarlberg Convention Bureau. The renowned youth researcher Philipp Ikrath and the managing director of the Zukunftsinstitut and trend researcher Harry Gatterer were guests at the Montforthaus in Feldkirch as speakers. Around 100 visitors from the event and communications industry took the opportunity to learn about the developments and their impact on events.From quails and penguinsIn his keynote speech, youth researcher Philipp Ikrath addressed the needs of the former and new elite, drawing a comparison with penguins and quails: While penguins are sedentary and have adapted perfectly to living conditions, quails do not have a nest; they are migratory birds. Just like quails, the younger generations are mobile, flexible and hard to catch. Young audiences want events that don't follow a traditional pattern or cultural concept, but that cater to very different needs and allow visitors to be stimulated in a wide variety of ways," Ikrath put it succinctly. He pointed to festivals that already meet this requirement and no longer focus exclusively on music, film or literature, but instead bundle all kinds of cultural offerings.Such events allow individuals to put together their very own, individual program. They are eclectic. They take up completely different stylistic elements and experiential offerings and bring them together to form a new whole, appealing to all the senses.The question of whyThe managing director of the Future Institute and trend researcher Harry Gatterer also addressed senses and stimuli in his remarks under the title "Thinking without noise": People are increasingly overloaded with acoustic and visual noise. This makes the longing for peace and order in the mind all the greater. Gatter recommends "creating enclaves of silence, an omission of stimuli in order to be able to get involved in something." In this way, he says, it is easier to deal with complexity.For Gatterer, the question of why, which is asked far too rarely, plays a decisive role in events. "It is much more essential to ask about the meaning than about the target group," he is convinced. For events of the future, however, it's not just the why that's important: guests should be able to be creative and experience happiness and enjoyment. Good stories are important, as is sustainability. "The goal of every event should be to create memories," Gatterer summarized.And: in the future, events will be the live highlights in the digital stream. "In a world of individualization, connections, as they also happen at events, will become increasingly important."About Convention Partner VorarlbergConvention Partner Vorarlberg is an internationally operating full-service agency for organizers of congresses, conferences and corporate events. The Convention Bureau is responsible for marketing Vorarlberg as an event region. In addition, it supports organizers in obtaining offers, organizing accommodation and transfers, creating supporting programs, taking care of participant registration, on-site support and billing. Since March 2013, Convention Partner Vorarlberg has been authorized to certify events as Green Meetings or Green Events.The Convention Bureau was founded on October 1, 2003, on the initiative of Bodensee-Vorarlberg Tourismus and the congress venues Festspielhaus Bregenz, Kulturhaus Dornbirn and Montforthaus Feldkirch, with the support of the state of Vorarlberg and Vorarlberg Tourismus. The Convention Bureau is a business unit of Bodensee-Vorarlberg Tourismus in Bregenz.