Event Branding: Everything You Need to Know About It

Event branding has changed exponentially over the years. After COVID-19, people are also preferring to attend online events. Whatever the mode of the event, proper event branding is important so that more people develop an interest in joining it. Creating a memorable experience is the responsibility of the event managers. Here in this blog, we will learn to create a nice event branding, giving you a basic idea of how branding is done.

What is event branding?

Event branding creates a special identity and perception for an event to make it memorable. This involves many things like emotion, social currency, trigger points, messaging, logos, etc. It is very important for creating a coherent and engaging experience for attendees.

Here I will be sharing my experience of one of the event brandings that I did for a 3 day YOGASHALA event which was organized by an NGO named GEETA SANGH FOUNDATION. It was an event of yoga which was to be organized for a vast audience in Gurugram, Haryana.

Social currency:

Proper social currency was important to attract more people. What is Social currency?

Social currency refers to the value that a brand gains from its interactions. It’s important for creating a reputation in the market. Two important steps involved in this are:

1. Intrinsic uniqueness

2. Make people insiders.

Intrinsic uniqueness means marketing something in a very unique way that makes something interesting, surprising, or novel. You just have to brainstorm about what makes the thing stand out.

For branding the YOGASHALA event, we created a series of custom-designed yoga mats that featured unique artwork that reflected the event’s theme and had important knowledge about yoga in written form which was taken from the book of the father of yoga: Rishi PATANJALI’S YOGA SUTRAS. We promoted these mats through social media campaigns, where participants can receive a discount on event tickets when purchasing the mat.

People can feel insiders when certain forms of scarcity or exclusivity can be created for the audience. If something is difficult to obtain, people assume that it must be worth the effort. If something is unavailable or sold out, people often conclude that the product is good. You can offer your product for a limited time, only at certain locations to create scarcity of it.

Trigger point:

In event branding, trigger points play a very important role. Trigger point means certain slogans that trigger the people to purchase your product. A proper trigger point can only be created with slogans that are linked to people’s day-to-day activities. For our yogashala, we used the slogan, “Can’t rest? Yoga can give it the best.” So whenever people crave proper resting, they will immediately remember this slogan. Then we ran a social media campaign and daily featured different sponsored ads with this slogan.

Your slogan must not necessarily have some rhyming scheme rather it should be simple enough that the common public can resonate with it while doing their daily activities. This trick gave us more than 1000 registrations and we were confident of a successful event.

Emotion:

Adding emotion to the campaign is very important. People work for emotions. According to JONAH BERGER in his book CONTAGIOUS, positive emotions like awe, excitement, and amusement (humor), tend to drive more audience. Negative emotions that trigger anger and anxiety also bring more customers. Following this rule, we chose excitement. Before designing the campaign, we asked 3 questions from our team, and we mostly got the same answers.

Q: Why should we do Yoga?

A: To remain disease-free.

Q: Why should we remain disease-free?

A: For getting a healthy mind.

Q: Why should we prefer to have a healthy mind?

A: To make good decisions for life and society.

Now this was a strong emotion. Our emotional trigger was to help people to make good decisions in life.

“Want to make better decisions in life? Yoga will help you in doing that.”

This is a very positive emotion triggering excitement level. In the campaign, we made ads that showcased a person doing TARAKSVASANA. It is one of the most difficult yoga postures. This also created an AWE emotion.

Along with that, we made another campaign that showcased people doing PADMASANA. It is the most recognized pose and shows contentment emotion. To our surprise, the former campaign resulted in more registrations. So, we discarded the latter one and went on with the former campaign.

Also Read: Importance of Market Research in Business Decision-Making

Making things public:

It has been proven that people react in synchronization with their networks, peers, and surroundings. So, we had to make people believe that many people have benefitted from yoga and it has let them change their lives and also in making better decisions in life. People don’t want statistics, rather people do what others do. So, we took certain steps:

1. On the website of the Geeta Sangh Foundation, we added video format testimonials of different
   people who have benefitted from their previous yoga classes. This way people could see those
   testimonials before registrations. We put stalls across the city and sold paper badges for our yoga shala. We also told volunteers of the Geeta Sangh Foundation to wear those badges everywhere they go. All these steps were taken 15 days before the event. Even we encouraged the people who attended our program on the first day, to wear those badges wherever they go. This has resulted in more registrations for the second and third days.
2. A screen was put up outside the venue that showcased previous yoga shalas organized by the
   foundation. And also the event was shown live on the screen for three days.

The phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just our tendency to follow others. If people can’t see what others are doing, they can’t imitate them. So, to get our products and ideas to become popular, we need to make them more publicly observable. All these steps were taken to make the audience believe that more people are registering for the YOGASHALA program organized by the GEETA SANGH FOUNDATION.

Practical value:

People love to receive some practical value. It improves the chance of making a purchase. As I said earlier social currency is about the seller, and practical value is all for the receiver. It strikes in the minds of people deeply. You can create practical value for your product in the following ways:

1. Offering certain discounts on your product.
2. Increasing the quantity of any product at the same price
3. Providing useful information to the public

We need to highlight incredible value. We also need to package our knowledge and expertise so that people learn about us while they pass it along. We need to make it clear why our product or idea is so useful that people just have to spread the word.

At our yoga shala, we started a similar campaign. On Facebook, we started sponsored ads for our NGO page. We did highly targeted marketing, especially for the people of Gurgaon, Haryana. Every day we started posting reels where one of the team members of GEETA SANGH FOUNDATION told us about the importance of yoga and some important facts about yoga. We made hoardings on which we gave 10 important benefits of yoga and placed those hoardings on our registration stalls.

On our Facebook posters, we also offered a discount of 1000 rupees for registration. Earlier our price was 2500 rupees for registration which was reduced to 1500 rupees after discount.

Story creation:

Story creation is very important to build a brand. We also created a nice story for our YOGASHALA. Creating a brand story requires so many details. So we will be discussing this in the next blog.

After applying so many marketing tricks, we got very outstanding results. We got 450 registrations for our YOGASHALA program.

Here are some quick maths to measure the success.

• We took private land on rent for three days which cost us 9000 rupees.
• All our marketing expenses (mostly Facebook ads, hoarding cost, stalls, and paper badges) were
  35000 rupees.
• Vesta Business Studios charged them 20,000 rupees for total business service.
• General refreshment cost us 6000 rupees.
• The general expense was 15000 rupees

So, our overall expense was 85,000 rupees.

We received 700 registrations and each registration gave us 1500 rupees.

So, we earned 6,75,000 rupees.

You can calculate the profits!!

Conclusion:

Marketing and branding is one of the most complex topics. People generally don’t know what must be the path in branding. Running any ads on social media platforms is not going to yield any results. We must give some social currency through our product, create some great trigger points during our advertisements, create positive emotions in our ads, make things public, create a great brand story, and provide practical information to our audience through our advertisement campaigns.

There are some other technicalities that we have to look over for proper branding. We will slowly look over all these aspects in subsequent blogs and hence you will become a great marketer.