I recently gave a keynote presentation at the 2nd International Planning and Creativity Competition, in Hangzhou, China.
In my presentation, I highlighted three issues affecting the development of higher education for events in the UK:
Articulating the value of a degree in events management, as opposed to ‘just’ having industry experience or completing work-based training.
How to effectively teach about creativity and technology, when most events degrees are taught in business schools.
The questions of whether we we helping to develop and enhance the ‘profession’ of events management, or just creating individual professionals.
This event brings together academics, industry figures and students from across China for presentations, workshops and and an event planning competition for undergraduate students. Last year, I was able to speak at the event in person, and a group of our students from the University of Greenwich took part in the competition. Hopefully, we will be back next year. You can view my presentation below:
I recently gave the keynote presentation below as keynote for the Zhejiang Global Exhibtion Forum in Hangzhou, China. You can view the presentation, below. In it, I emphasised three areas of potential collaboration: the fusion of creative and tech; incentive travel; city-city partnerships for event destinations.
Changes in political economy, the rise of emerging economies outside of the traditionally USA-dominated trans-Atlantic region and the globalisation of culture enabled by democratised technological channels, have led to profound shifts in the balance of the global economy. Attempting to explain this geopolitical shift, commentators and academics have introduced terms such as the ‘Chinese Century’ (Beckley, 2012; Brands, 2018; Hartley, 2008; Hongling, 2015; Pan, 2013; Stiglitz, 2015), the ‘Pacific Century’ (Borthwick, 2018; Scott, 2008) and the ‘Asian Century’ (Atonopoulos, 2017; Morrison, 2014).
The aim of this special issue is to consider the impact of these macro-level changes on the events industry and research into events, and to help to address a geographical, but also an ideological and cultural, imbalance in events management research, which has tended to focus on the traditionally dominant global economies of North America, Western Europe and Australasia (Kim & Kaewnuch, 2018; Robertson et al., 2018; Spracklen & Lamond, 2016). Recent research has begun to engage with this new context in areas as diverse as education (Werner et al, 2018), events and public diplomacy (Wang, 2018), regional development (Hussain, et al., 2018), the growth of the Chinese events industry (Liu & Lou, 2018) and mega events (Liang, et al., 2016).
Anticipated
themes
Papers for this special issue should
engage with the context of the Chinese Century, and the implications of this
for events management research and practice.
Relevant, recently published research has include the following thematic
areas, suggesting that they are worthy of further examination, although the
list is not intended to be exhaustive.
Event
Management Education
The
Development of the Chinese Events Industry
The
Political Economy of Events and Public Diplomacy using Events
Events
and Regional Development
Innovation
in the Events Industry
Events
and Urban Development
Mega-Events
Manuscript
submission
Authors should submit to James Kennell (j.s.kennell@gre.ac.uk).
In the first instance, authors should submit an abstract for consideration and
feedback, according to the timeframe below.
Last week, I was very pleased to be invited to speak at the launch of the Cultur WB network, in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Cultur WB is a new network to support the development of Cultural Tourism across the Western Balkans region that has been set up with ERASMUS+ funding in a project with partners from Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, The Netherlands, Austria and Germany. When I was there the project was also bringing in new contributions from the UK, Greece and Albania.
The Cultur WB partners in Sarajevo
The Cultur WB project aims to not only strengthen ties between people working on cultural tourism as practitioners and researchers in the region, but also to to develop life-long-learning programmes for people working in tourism and new Masters programmes in cultural tourism. At the launch event, I gave a presentation on how small and emerging destinations can use cultural events to develop their tourism, and how we should think about measuring the impacts of these events. You can view the presentation below:
The launch event was fantastic, with presentations from politicians, academics and practitioners. Sarajevo itself is an amazing city and the organisers of the event, Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures, are doing an incredible job of trying to get their city onto the Cultural Tourism map, which I have no doubt they are succeeding in.
As the use of historic building as venues for commercial activity grows, events management professionals working in historic buildings are faced with a number of sustainability challenges, including conservation, preservation, social value and financial sustainability, as well as with satisfying their clients. In particular, these professionals are required to maintain the complex balance between the competing priorities of historic value and contemporary relevance. Little research has thus far investigated the role that sustainable events can play in the management of historic buildings, beyond considerations of the trade-off between conservation and income generation. This research analyses the contribution that events can make to the sustainable management of historic buildings, with an emphasis on understanding the perspectives of event managers within these properties, based on qualitative interviews with historic building event managers and stakeholders in London, United Kingdom. A key finding of the research is that event managers within historic buildings have complex views of sustainability that are specific to these properties and which are not captured in the mainstream events management literature. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on sustainable events and also develops earlier research on the role of events and other income-generating activities in historic buildings
The 2nd edition of our events management textbook, ‘Events Management: An Introduction’ has just been published by Routledge. As well as a great new cover, it has updated international case studies throughout, new industry person spotlights, lots of new material and it is now also full of great colour photos.
My freshly arrived copy of the book!
You can buy it from all the usual places, like Amazon, and if you’re a teacher or researcher interested in an inspection copy, just go to the Routledge website to request one.
I recently spoke at the 2nd annual International Conference for Students in Tourism and Gastronomy, in Skopje, Macedonia. My presentation was about how small tourism destinations, especially in emerging economies, can use major events as part of their tourism branding. You can view my presentation below:
To get an idea of what my presentation was about, have a look at this short video about the recent stage of the World Triathlon Championship that was held in Jersey, a small island of 100,000 people off the coast of France. With a worldwide television audience of 3 million people, hosting this event provided media exposure that Jersey Tourism could never afford.
Along with my colleagues Denise Hawkes, Emma Abson and Paul Booth, we’ve recently had a new book chapter published which looks at the relationship between motivations to attend events and the spending that takes place at them. This research was carried out over three months during a series of festivals held in an area of London, in the UK and it has been published in the book ‘Impact Assessment in Tourism Economics’
The findings of this research indicated that there was a significant relationship between attendees’ motivation to attend the events in the festivals and the amount of money that they spent during the events. We used Beard and Ragheb’s ‘Leisure Motivational Scale’ to categorise attendees by their motivation and we found that the highest spenders were people who had come to the event to meet new people and socialise. The lowest spenders were those attending events to spend time with their families. If you would like to read this research, but you can’t gain acess to it, please contact me.
The conclusion of this chapter suggests:
“The literature on event motivations focuses on the marketing of events and on attendee satisfaction with events. Such studies…have made recommendations for event development, market segmentation and promotional activities. Linking motivations to expenditure, as we have attempted in this paper, suggests a range of new approaches to these areas of successful event management.
For example at these events, segmentation by motivation has allowed for the identification of a high-value segment, those who are attending ‘to meet new people’. Meeting the needs of this segment could be suggested as an area of event development such as the creation of opportunities for social interaction and the provision of enhanced food and drink retail opportunities at the events. Attracting this lucrative segment would require the promotion of the social aspects of the events and a significant change in approach from the current marketing approach [of many public sector-supported events], which concentrate on local media and emphasises the inclusive, familyfriendly and low cost aspects of the programme.”
The paper was written by four of us and my co-authors were Denise Hawkes, Emma Abson and Paul Booth. It was an analysis of the relationship between motivations to attend events that were part of a festival, and attendee expenditure. We carried out quite an extensive review of the literature, and found that this relationship had not really been explored before; most published research looks at the relationship between motivations and attendee satisfaction, or how to target marketing towards motivational segments. This is the presentation that I gave at the event:
The abstract for the paper is below, if you’d like to read more, then get in touch. We’re hoping that the paper will be published in one of the post-conference publications.
This paper explores the impact of motivation factors on spending at a local authority’s programme of cultural events. This paper takes a closer look at the motivational and demographic data collected as part of the study and, using regression analysis, it identifies large variations in spending by different motivational groups of attendees. Attendees motivated to attend to ‘meet new people’ were found to be the highest spending group by some margin. In addition, the data shows that local audiences are the lowest spenders at these events and that there is no link between previous attendance and event expenditure. We identify a significant relationship between event attendee motivation and event expenditure, which suggests ways in which these public sector events can be developed and marketed in the future, as local authorities balance the competing priorities of local inclusion and generating local economic impact, through their event programming.
My colleague Charles Bladen and I have just had this paper published in the journal ‘Events Management’. In the paper, we are argue that Events Management degrees need re-examining, to ensure that they are helping students to develop the kinds of skills and attitudes that employers, and society need. You can read the abstract below and, if you’d like to read our paper but you don’t have access, please get in touch.
“This article discusses whether event management can yet be classified as a bona fide profession, how staff working in the industry can be effectively professionalized, and how professional university education programs can be better designed to achieve this end. The article discusses the findings and limitations of some of the existing literature concerning professionalism within event management, and whether event management can yet be wholly described as “a profession” according to conventional definitions. The event management profession and event management education are discussed in terms of improving pedagogy in relation to the requirements of event industry practice. Finally the work concludes that the challenges of educating future event professionals require a rethink of events education so as to develop more reflective practice.”
