Top 2012 Performance Trends for Incentive Travel

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link


Peering into the looking glass for incentive travel trends, one key area stands out amongst the rest as a clear and distinct focal point – incentive travel design. The industry has greatly capitalized on driving operational cost efficiencies and achieving flawless execution. But, it’s of even greater importance that we ensure our strategies are leading us down the best paths of participant engagement if we’re going to achieve today’s more aggressive business objectives. This requires a more people-centered set of design practices that provide for approaches that are more connected to and aligned with participant stakeholders. Here are five elements to consider as you begin incentive travel design discussions for future programs:

1. Participant-Driven Design
Participants having a stronger hand in helping co-create incentive travel design will continue to rise. While we’ve tended to ask participants in the past what they thought about program experiences, we’re realizing more and more that we also need to ask them what they think as well - beforehand. It’s this forward looking view that helps organizations unlock the greater potential value that exists for better motivating incentive travel participants. This practice will be the linking pin for those organizations that are looking to move performance outcomes from good to better.

2. Beyond Generational Diversity
Today’s participants are more diverse than ever. This is commonly thought of as “generational differences”, but incentive travel design decisions have to go beyond this as a sole consideration point. For instance, experiential, educational and cultural diversity are other considerations that simple generational segmentations don’t consider. These and other forms of diversity are influencing how we think and act at both the organizational and participant level. The growing engagement of incentive travel participant stakeholders in conversations during the design stage will help lead to improved decisions, stronger motivational appeal, and better business outcomes.

3. Maintaining Motivational Engagement
There have been a number of consolidations – organizationally and incentive travel specific - the past few years, plus a shift to more open-ended incentive program structures. These are a few examples that are resulting in more participation and more earners on programs. So, what about the ability to effectively network, interact between peers, management, leadership, etc.? That doesn’t have to diminish, and organizations are looking for what their best options are from the participants’ viewpoint. These are resulting in program waves, where two or more groups follow one another at a destination to maintain cost and operational efficiencies but also retain high levels of engagement with more manageable attendee levels. In addition, organizations are also creating tiered performance thresholds; of which, keep earners engaged even after they achieve minimum program goals so that they have the opportunity to further plus-up their reward and recognition experience even further.

4. Family Friendly Incentive Travel
About 70 percent of American children live in households where both parents are in the workforce. Now, add to that that the average American only has 13 days off per year. Sure, we now have more mobility thanks to technology, but nearly half of American workers are now bringing work home with them regularly. Incentive travel family participants are struggling to create some degree of work/life balance. Program design considerations with family friendly guest policy features will create a significant shift for incentive travel strategies over the next few years. As such, organizations need to avoid making broad assumptions and gain a clearer perspective on how they can be not only more accommodating, but friendlier to participants with a family. What’s the potential for distraction from agendas? Would participants’ without children mind? Do we help pay for, subsidize or create buy-in rate options? These and other questions need to be identified and answered to secure the longer-term relevancy of your program’s design.

5. Redesigning Qualification Structures
So, the waters of open-ended versus closed-ended qualification structures will be tested once again, but there’s more to it. Here’s the thing, this approach to rewarding and recognizing performance comes with higher performance standards for achievement. A limiting factor is that closed-ended incentive travel qualification structures are often meaningful to only a discrete number within the participant base – top performing “A-players”. Breakthrough performance will require new thinking about how to engage the broader participant audience. This will bring in deeper discussions on qualification structures (open vs. closed) as well as the potential returns for added, more targeted incentive travel program tiers – think of these as programs based upon what levels of performance participants achieve. These added programs might involve different features, or be totally separate designs to provide a stairway of motivated performance.

Understanding what’s important from the participants’ viewpoint has to do more with what views are shared between the organization and their program participants – past, present and future. This doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it has to involve active and on-going efforts to clearly understand and gain insights on participants’ needs, wants and preferences. Every organization is unique, so too are their incentive travel participants. Running a one-size-fits-all design approach can be a gamble and operational hazard in the short, mid and long-term.

Why Your Participants Should Design Your Next Incentive Travel Program

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

True or False? Asking participants to help design an incentive travel program will only drive up costs and make it more difficult to appease all their wishes.

Answer: False. Instinct, past experience, managerial judgment, beliefs and budgets are simply not enough to effectively drive participant engagement and business performance. Planners need the participants’ insights.

Times, and probably the people involved in your incentive travel program, have significantly changed. Incentive travel strategies aimed to effectively motivate the behavior of program participants must change as well. Generational, ethnic, family structure, and the plethora of social and economic forces impacting your participant base is having a profound effect on what people want from your incentive travel program.

Considering this, incentive travel participants need to be viewed as and treated more like a stakeholder. In our opinion, they are the key stakeholder. Why? Your success hinges on whether these individuals commit to achieving your goals and targets. Given the importance of personal commitment, it just makes sense for your employees and channel partners to have a voice regarding program design. At the end of the day, these individuals will weigh the experience against the required level of investment of both their and their families’ time and effort.

Authors James Gilmore and Joseph Pine first coined the words “Experience Economy” in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article Welcome to the Experience Economy. Paraphrasing a bit for the purposes of our industry, people seek unique and personally meaningful experiences. Travel programs represent some of the best opportunities to create these very meaningful and highly motivating experiences. Getting the most from your incentive program requires a more complete understanding of the motivations of these individuals. This understanding translates into better program design and a better experience.

Organizations that view incentive travel programs as part of a broader strategy of creating “places of engagement” for their people can achieve great results. It all starts with placing a seat at the stakeholder table for the participant to help better inform incentive travel design decisions. After all, it’s the people who create the business results. It makes practical business sense to include them in the conversation.

Increasing the Awareness of Your Incentive Travel Program

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

True or False?  3 of 10 people eligible to earn travel rewards don’t know it?

 

Answer:  Fact.  The existence of your company’s travel incentive program should not be debatable.  Leave that kind of uncertainty for Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.

Shockingly, anywhere between 25 percent and 35 percent of your incentive travel participants may not even know about the program’s existence.  That’s a large number of participants that won’t be motivated or influenced, which reduces the potential impact to your business goals and objectives.  What’s the main culprit?  A primary suspect could be the communication’s model.

Today, companies need to assess and design a communication’s strategy that takes into account a fragmented participant base.  Technology has created significant shifts that are impacting how we communicate.  We, as individuals, are becoming increasingly sophisticated and diverse when it comes to what we read, listen to and how we interact.  Consider the following two communications model approaches:

§         Traditional Communications Model

Filled with one-way print, dimensional, direct mail and web communications, these approaches follow legacy practices that do not incorporate or benefit from viral or two-way interactions with and between program participants.

§         Advocacy Communication Model

In this approach, participants help create and foster communications that further drive awareness and program advocacy.  For instance, by leveraging and sponsoring program rallies or social media networking events, whether proprietary or third-party based, participants are encouraged to show, share and talk about the incentive opportunity with their friends, colleagues and family.  

Program sponsors and planners can further encourage these discussions, as well as benefit from them, by not only sharing additional program specifics, but also determining enhancements that further drive the participants’ motivational appeal and perceptions of program value.

Embracing one communications approach over another doesn’t take into consideration that participants are at different levels of preference and maturity as it pertains to receiving and participating in communications.  Today’s communication efforts need to be less about which channel you use and more about integrating efforts in ways that further inform and engage diverse program participants in different and more meaningful ways around incentive travel programs. 

Why Incentives Trump Cash

Great article featured in Meetings and Incentive Travel titled, "Why Incentives Trump Cash".  Take a look to further seperate fact from fiction as to why non-cash based incentives, specifically Travel, create more Motivational, Meaningful and Memorable experiences that provide both immediate and long-term tangible and intangible returns - click here.

The New Normal for CMO's

Avi Dan authored an article featured in AdAge titled, The New Normal for CMO's - click here. Based upon the blog comments he received, there were mixed sentiments on what people thought. Regardless, customer engagement is a key takeaway from this article.

Ideal customer engagement today would be best defined as the appropriate timing of relevant messages that are unique to each individual consumer - an aspirational tone from past and current CRM efforts. Beyond that though, there are various ways to engage today. From social media marketing, traditional advertisements to other engagement strategies such as meetings and events, the one thing we know based upon past experiences is that everyone is wired differently. Such is the case, having a one-size-fits-all strategy is a thing of the past, now is the time to truly adopt integrated strategies that better connect organizations with their customers (past, present and future) for more effective outcomes that better support and align to business objectives.

There's an obvious shift in the media mix more so now than ever; and that will continue to further evolve moving forward. We've moved on and evolved our preferences, as consumers (whether B2B or B2C), from an engagement standpoint. Digital tactics, both web 1.0 and 2.0, are increasing in their roles as traditional media plays less of a dominant one; although still critical to varying degrees depending on a variety of variables such as markets and customer types. However, the first-level of engagement evolution, specifically websites and email marketing, have saturated and overwhelmed many customers. For the most part, we've managed these new media platforms with a traditional approach. Analytics needs to and will be key way in how these and other contemporary channels integrate with traditional formats to increase relevance, conversion rates, advocacy and other key performance indicators included in a robust lifetime value model.

The CMO's main responsibility has always been to focus on market needs and identifying how the organization best addresses these through product and service offerings. However, to remain effective in a rapidly changing set of markets, CMO's have to work in a more latitudinal way. Latitudinal from the sense that while identifying effective strategies that support business objectives remain a core function, they also need to better ground their evaluations and expectations of their business plans and priorities based upon sensible tactical executions. Considering the many changes and shifts in the market, identifying best-practices and keeping a keen eye on their customers needs and preferences (at the individual level) will better ensure the continued level of competitive differentiation, customer demand and market presence required to be successful.

A Different Point-of-View: Why Bashing Millennials is Wrong

We've all read our fair share of "generational" articles and, for that matter, probably harbor your own thoughts on the degrees of fact or fiction that apply. This is especially true when it comes to either B2B or B2C marketing for the purposes of promoting relationships through motivational incentive and loyalty based programs. I encourage you to read the article published in Fast Companies titled Why Bashing Millennials Is Wrong - click here.

Here were my thoughts...

Individually, we're all wired a bit differently in terms of our social norms, beliefs and values. There are strong commonalities when we breakdown our population into demographic buckets based upon age (i.e., traditionalists, baby boomers, generation x and generation y, etc.). This is clearly due to key influencers of the time; for instance, the technological explosion that continually shifts attitudes and behaviors in how we work, relate and interact with one another. However, the important point here is that we can't assume or stereotype too much solely based upon simple generational cuts alone. We need to go deeper and focus on what best works for a personal, business or individual perspective; especially when it comes to the areas such as education, communication, motivation and others.

Overall, the focus shouldn't be about millennials in the workplace, but rather more so about how we better engage different people in varying ways to drive performance in the work place. The ability to help individualize work experiences and engagements through areas such as meetings or even motivational efforts to leverage unique talents and skills has and remains a key towards driving a diverse workforce. This is NOT just a millennial issue; it's about "how you engage others" to best achieve both individual as well as business level performance objectives.