Our journey toward the project NEC

Objective of the project

We were given fully responsible to make a research on what NEC can improve as the venue provider by comparing with other venue in the UK, Europe and international venue. It was a taught call for us as a student but it will challenge our creativity as student. These reflect on our innovative ideas and sell it to NEC to improve. This is not as usual assignment but it gave you opportunities to learn more on how to make a proper research and what is the best for NEC, later on the outcome from the research, we have to create a proposal and present it to the senior management NEC.

Planning

During planning, I was been given a task to make any research on earls court venue. When I did my research I found one event that really attracts me to attend the event. The reason why I choose the event was because NEC did the same event early before earls court did, so I wanted to make comparison on what aspect that NEC can improve from the event. In order to evaluate, I did my research on both venue trough their social media, .marketing strategies and other. I found out earls court is highly rated venue where it can attract more people to come especially international people such as people from china, middle east and so on. My research doesn’t stop here, I made deep research on earls court where they have won several awards such as 2010 Event Magazine Green Award. They got this award base on their sustainability initiatives in the areas of energy efficiency, recycling and waste management. We as a group decided to make a visit to NEC and one of the events which was Traffix event to look any possible ideas for NEC to improve.

·         During the visit

13^th April 2011 I went to earls court to attend the event London book fair 2011. I got some email from the venue mentioning about the London book fair and what was the programme for the day. I was keen and look forward to go, I used train from Birmingham to London Euston and used underground tube to Kingston station. It took me 2 hour and half to reach there. I was quite impressed that earls court collaborate with underground tube by giving out information to the visitors who never been to earls court before just like myself. The first thing I saw at the tube station was a signage mentioning about the event going on and guide me to the venue. This gave me additional information and idea for me to implement and suggest NEC to collaborate with the train station at Birmingham international. There was lot of banner, poster and other marketing tools that been used by earls court just to attract people to come to the venue and indirectly market their venue as London destination for exhibition. I could say there is lot of aspect that NEC need to improve on such as signage, marketing and so on. The motive of this is because earls court is a small venue compares to NEC, there are using media technology such as digital advertisement, the signage is clear, and I felt welcome by them. Overall of the visit was awesome because I learn new things, unexpected marketing strategies and different approaches from other venue. I just notice, in order for us to be successful we have to think critically in term of marketing tools and other ways of approaches.

·         Other research

Right after we gather all the information from all venues that we visited, we as a group divided our task accordingly to create a better proposal that we need NEC to implement and improve. According to the proposal I was given a responsibility in doing customer experience and marketing within short term implementation. The first step that I did was getting to know more about NEC marketing style, I search toward their website, went to NEC over and over again just to confirm every marketing aspect that they did. Secondly I went to several events at NEC such as sign digital and other event on the same day. I found lot of interesting design that NEC could use such as Digiglass that print a creative signage. I contacted them and research on what can be implement at NEC. We presented this during the proposal presentation.  

·         Family friendly

I castoff the existing event that NEC used to organised which was Fun world fun fair as the short term investment toward the benefits for NEC and community in west midland. From the research that I made based on the event previously I found out there was lot of complaints and people tend to compare NEC event with winter wonderland. So I decided to make a change and create aggressive marketing method to promote the event for their future event such as apply event marketing 3’Es. Apart from my experience from winter wonderland event that I attended, I also went to Alton tower to comprehend how they market and attract people. I identified that both winter wonderland and Alton tower used social media as their main attraction to attract people to come to the venue and event. I came out with several ideas for NEC that they could use to market the event and add-on activities such as firework display that encourage people to come to the venue for their friendly family event in future which can benefits them in terms of revenue and indirectly market their venue as the destination for exhibition and event venue provider in the UK.

Presentation

We as a group combined all the elements that can benefits the NEC, by combining the entire element we manage to come out with great proposal presentation. In the proposal we include all aspect of social media, customer experience in long, Medium and short term benefits, the improvement of the signage and what can NEC gives toward the communities or social responsibilities. Together with the proposal, we also include all information about our research on venues that we visited. The combination of the both venues information and proposal would help NEC to improve and guide them which area they should cover and improve so that they will be more active and productive in building their branding.

Team work

Team work is really important in this project as it can provide support from every angle of the project. We also share the experience and knowledge that we gain from this project with each other giving us further knowledge. By brain storming, comment on each and every work that we have done can create a better quality of works as well as outcome. I am so proud and thankful for giving me these opportunities to work in a group so that I could do better and produce a perfect research indeed.

What do we learn from the project

I have learn lot of things in this project, I gain knowledge in creating more networks, interacting with companies in order to further my research, having a different prospectus ideas from what we had before. This also helps me to combine the research methodology both qualitative and quantitative as the main reasons of this research. It is not only about the knowledge that we gained, but we were been given an opportunities to expose our self to the real event world and explore what is new, implementing event new approaches and others. If we can gain all this new approaches and knowledge, fortunately we could produce a Wow factor event in future.