Diageo Planning Conference

Diageo Consumer Planning Conference

Diageo (www.diageo.com) is a market leader in alcoholic beverages.  The company has a collection of global brands including Guinness, Smirnoff, Captain Morgan and Baileys.  With a number of brands set up all around the world, Diageo consumer planners come together at a conference to share their practices, insights and knowledge.

The global consumer planning conference was held at The Grove, London, providing good facilities to accommodate for the 130 delegates in attendance. Due to the differing locations of the delegates, it is uncommon for such conferences to take place. This made the context of the conference all the more important – it had to be informative and provide the team with useful content to take away with them.

It was decided that the most effective way of making the conference engaging to the delegates was to let the delegates themselves direct the overall plan. This was done using iPad technologies which were used by delegates to comment, share ideas and questions which would then steer the agenda.

An important aspect of a conference is to allow the attendees to network, even more so when it’s a rare opportunity to do so. A number of out of session activities were organised to keep minds active, this included high-tech pub quizzes – encouraging team bonding.

Diageo had clear outcomes in mind with delegates leaving with a vivid and positive impression of the day – but also to leave with a sound understanding of the concepts discussed.  To recap, reinforce messages and visually communicate the outcomes at the end of each session, elements of the conference were drawn by two graphic facilitators as they occurred. This acted in a similar way that minutes are taken in a meeting.

A good event company takes the worry out of a large scale event for the organisers. In the case of this event, we were asked to help plan the concept of the event (ie making it as interactive as possible) as well as the staging and – crucially in this case – ensuring that the complex technology functioned in a seamless manner. Without all of these elements working, the event would have been memorable but almost certainly for all of the wrong reasons.

The conference received excellent feedback from the delegates, all of which found the event useful in deeming their responsibilities and actions needed going forward.