The second event-attendee persona in a series, based on Valuegraphics research into professionals who attend events regularly
We will call this persona Sam. She is around 34 years old and works as, let’s say, a creative strategist. She has been to enough conferences to start tuning them out. What she’s after now is the one that finally feels different.
Along with the folks from the last persona Elliot, she accounts for 44% of the seats in your sessions. And she’s scanning the agenda for the one session that might surprise her. We know what makes Sam tick because we studied her, using our billion-data-point database that catalogs what matters most to people. Sam reacts to everything based on the values of experiences, self-expression, positive environments and personal growth. Four values that tell you what matters most to her.
It sums up like this: Give me something new.
She’s not here because she loves conferences. Something about this one convinced her she’d find that original idea or experience here. She’s placed a bet on your ability to build a program that gives her more of what she’s looking for.
Sameness is the first deal-breaker. 75% of the “Sams” in your audience said an event that feels like every other on their calendar is reason enough to skip it. Recycled topics land close behind at 48%, and a schedule that drags on too long at 47%. Sam has sat through plenty of all three. The events she remembers are the ones that showed her something she’d never seen before.
Read More: Unleashing Imagination: 5 Essential Steps to Transform Creative Event Design
Sealing the deal is that same idea turned inside out. She wants something genuinely unlike the rest of the circuit, and 67% of people like her said that uniqueness alone was enough to make her say yes and sign up. Specifically, she wants a speaker list with real range, packed with names and faces she hasn’t seen before. And underneath all of it, she wants the sense that whoever built this thing understood what she came for. Don’t we all crave that?
You are competing for her time with everything else in her life, not just other events. She will happily give her time to whatever feels new and alive, and your event is up against everything that delivers on that promise.
Get that right, be fresh and Sam comes back, shows up early and talks you up to her whole network. She turns into the delegate every event planner wishes they could clone.
This is the second in our series of profiles of the people who show up at your events, and what they actually need from you. Get the full report at www.davidallisoninc.com.
Read More: Meet Elliot. Please Don’t Waste His Time.
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David Allison is a keynote speaker, author and CEO of a research firm. His interviews are based on the results of the Values Identifier, a product of Valuegraphics.
