What do Incentive Travel Participants Think about their Program?

The Site International Foundation and the Incentive Travel Council (ITC) commissioned Dr. Scott Jeffries and Monmouth University to conduct a joint study focused on The Incentive Travel Participant Viewpoint.

With the study currently underway, insights and findings will be shared over a period of time beginning with initial outcomes in mid-October release, providing dialogue for 2011 IMEX America and the Site International Conference events in Las Vegas. The full published report will be released at the end of the year and will be distributed globally via both organizations.

"Collaborations like this one are important and benefit a diverse group of industry professionals, said Steve O’Malley, SITE International Foundation president. “When we leverage the power of shared resources we can deliver some amazing data. We are positive The Incentive Travel Participant Viewpoint study will deliver insight into participant behaviors and key motivators that each of us can consider as we design and deliver extraordinary motivational programs in the future."

Jim Ruszala, past president of the ITC commented, "The incentive industry has made strong strides over the past few years in better providing transparency into the business values achieved through incentive programs. However, the industry is still starving for specific incentive travel based insights on ways to improve that business value by creating more meaningful, motivational and memorable experiences for its incentive travel participants.  Organizations are increasingly facing new as well as unique business challenges every day. To overcome these challenges and help achieve business performance objectives, we need to approach incentive travel design differently with an added attention towards how we can better engage and improve participant experiences.”

Why Independent Dealer Networks Should Consider Incentive Travel

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True or False?  Incentive Travel Improves Channel Performance

Answer: True. Incentive travel helps organizations achieve targeted business performance goals, but they also represent a sound approach towards establishing and building strong relationships in your independent distributor channel.

Recently, one of our clients asked us to help provide further performance insights into their channel-based incentive travel program. This organization has run an incentive travel program for its dealer network for several years. While it understood the sales volume created by the dealers that earned the trip, it also wanted to understand other ways in which the program created value. Essentially, we wanted to answer the question – how has this long running, annual program provided value from the participants’ viewpoint? Here’s what we found…

Participants firmly perceive the incentive travel program as a strong and effective influencer in helping the organization drive performance through the dealer channel. A common participant response was, “the opportunity to earn the incentive travel award greatly encouraged me to increase my performance efforts.” As for whether the program was creating brand loyalty and advocacy, our findings were best summarized with another participant statement that said, “The program creates loyalty to the company, showing myself and other dealers just how much the organization cares and wants to help us.”

By continuing to establish and nurture dealer relationships through an incentive travel strategy, our client also created and experienced added, long-term value that went beyond short-term measurements. Program participant comments such as “I think the best part (as always) is networking with other distributors” and “[the award program is] a great way to build a long-term bond with other distributors” echoed throughout our findings.

To the dealer, relationship building is viewed as a high-value opportunity. With other channel representatives on the program, participants are continually afforded a setting where they can establish and build relationships with one another. This creates substantial, long-term value, as participants are able to further exchange ideas and insights on best practices, market shifts, challenges and business opportunities.

If you have distributors, sales networks or other channel partners, where are they fitting into the incentive travel mix?

Should Meetings be a Part of the Incentive Travel Mix?

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True or False?  The Integration of meeting elements into group incentive travel experiences is a new trend?

Answer: False.  The inclusion of formal meeting elements into group incentive travel programs has been a mainstay since its inception.

According to a SITE International Foundation 2010 survey, the trend of including business meetings in incentive travel programs will continue to grow over the next three years. So, why add meeting elements to an incentive travel program?

• Recognition - Calling out and recognizing an individual, in a formal meeting setting, with their peers, leadership team and guest(s) represents the gratifying highlight of the motivational experience for incentive travel earners.
• Communicating Future Business Direction - With top performers all in one place at the same time, this affords a great opportunity to provide a preview into future business direction to inform, excite and motivate earners.
• Networking Opportunities - Formal meeting time where program earners can network and interact with managers, leaders and other top performers to share and discuss best practices or market trends helps prepare for and align individual performance with future business objectives.
• Tax Laws - Participants on an incentive travel program maybe issued 1099’s or have the fair market value reported as income. Adding business meetings can reduce or eliminate this tax burden on your participants.
• Helping to Avoid Reputational Risk - Some organizations are concerned and want to minimize any potential risk that can damage their business brand by including more business meeting related content.

While this trend is anticipated to increase, it’s also met with a growing concern from incentive travel stakeholders. The potential impact on the participants’ viewpoint of what creates the type of experience that will inspire people to achieve the aggressive goals established for the program is a legitimate cause for concern. A careful and thoughtful approach is required to “strike the right balance” and avoid diluting the motivational value participants perceive in the incentive travel program’s design.

In the end, presenting a program that hits the mark for the “Wow” factor is key in getting the attention and active engagement of your participants.
What do you think?

Is My Travel Program "Reward and Recognition" or "Incentive" Based?

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True or False? “Reward and Recognition” and “Incentive” programs are really the same thing.

Answer: False. Reward and recognition programs focus on reinforcing behaviors by providing awards and personal recognition based upon an observable behavior. Incentive programs inspire participants by influencing efforts that help achieve future business goals.

Think about the basic qualification structure of these programs. Often, open-ended qualification structures are more incentive-based while closed-ended qualification structures reflect a reward and recognition orientation. Closed-ended structures tend to fall in line with the Pareto principle (80/20 rule), where 80 percent of your performance is contributed by 20 percent of participants (“A” level or top performers).

The challenge with closed-ended qualifications occurs when only the top portion of your sales team feels they can achieve the award. Also, keep in mind that the effectiveness of a program’s performance can be misleading as “A” level performers tend to perform despite what’s going on around them. As such, if your next level of participants (“B” level performers) are not motivated by the program design, it will not achieve the best possible results. Representing the majority of your participant base, “B” level performers can easily be disengaged from your program’s sales targets because of a closed-ended qualification structure. They already know who is going to earn the award and don’t feel that they can achieve the qualifying performance objectives.

Consider the situation faced by Pacific Life. While their “A” players were motivated by the incentive travel program, their “B” players weren’t because they didn’t view the sales targets as attainable. Maritz Travel suggested a shift to an open-ended qualification structure that kept the top performer program intact, but extended the motivational value for mid-level performers by establishing attainable sales targets that would not have qualified them under the old closed-ended qualification structure. These targets represented significant new volume for the company and resulted in “B” level performers contributing 80 percent of total sales growth for the year and $14 million in incremental profit.

By focusing on these two distinct concepts companies can create more effective programs.

Generational Differences and Incentive Travel Program Design

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True or False? Incentive Travel participant preferences vary greatly based on generational differences.

Answer: False. Based upon a National study by Maritz, there are actually more commonalities than there are differences. The key is discovering what program design decisions are common versus unique and how the order of individual preferences fall.

During the design phase of any travel incentive program, stakeholders and planners face the harsh realities of making choices that need to be the right one’s to effectively drive the broadest levels of motivational value. This challenge is made even more difficult by an increasingly diverse participant base. Making the right decisions in program design go a long way towards creating the “WOW!” factor that drives excitement, buzz and performance.

Demographics have been used for years to cluster and understand what might best motivate incentive program participants. One of the most frequently used demographic categories is based upon age, which in turn also allows us to breakdown a participant base into what is commonly known as generational segments. These generational segments are then used to infer program design choices.

Generational segments are greatly influenced by such areas as the world events and societal trends that they are raised within. In addition, we tend to think about how generations tend to think, feel and react differently throughout the course of their life. However, the important thing here is that generational differences and lifecycle assumptions alone can also be quite misleading.

Based on a number of surveys completed by Maritz that look at the question of effective program design, we can see some interesting information on the role generational attributes play in incentive program design. For example, a large insurance company client, with many of their earners in the 50-60 year old range, discovered that their greatest design request was that the guest policy be expanded from being able to take children on family friendly programs to also including grandchildren.

While generational segments are important, they are not the only consideration for program design. Overall, the focus shouldn’t be just about generational differences, but rather more so on how you better engage different people in more meaningful ways to drive performance. Attending to this fundamental shift will help better shape incentive travel program design as it relates to destination, activity, rule structuring, promotional communications and other decisions to achieve stronger and broader motivational appeal and value for participants.

The Evolution of Meeting and Event Communications through New Technologies

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Successful meeting and event programs are built on the foundations of effective communication efforts with audience members. Communicating well and communicating often is a proven way to keep your audience engaged, informed and motivated. Today, companies have more communication options to choose from based upon their meeting or event needs, as well as the preferences of their audience. But, this wasn’t always the case.

Historically, meeting and event planners were limited in terms of what communication options they had available. Creating and supporting levels of engagement during a program period was one thing, but leading up to and creating an afterglow experience post program involved a number of challenges that required new, more interactive tools and approaches. Through the course of the last several years, communication options have vastly evolved, leading towards much broader opportunities to further excite, engage and extend the overall attendee experience.

Think of it this way, today’s communications have shifted from just supporting one-way informational exchanges to helping better create more engaging, two-way dialogues between hosts, speakers, sponsors and attendees. Consider the following periods of meeting and event communications, from where we were to where we are now:

• Event Communications 1.0 - In the early years, meeting and event communications mainly involved traditional hard copy mailings, outbound calling and fax transmissions. These one-way communication exchanges may have helped logistically, but were highly limiting when it came to one-to-one promotional relevance or communicating real-time shifts, changes or program updates.
• Event Communications 2.0 - The dawn and mass market adoption of the Internet brought an immense improvement to meeting and event communications. Websites were created as a central linking point for program attendees to reference and register. In addition, emailing was integrated into communication strategies, providing a new and more effective mix for marketing efforts; it also could be used to provide ongoing announcements leading up to and following meeting and event programs. We’d have to wait just a bit longer for technologies to evolve and enable us to create more effective, two-way and interactive communication experiences.
• Event Communications 3.0 - New technologies and new uses of existing technologies have impacted and created significant shifts in how people manage, operate and socially interact with one another. Face-to-face meeting and event interactions now are more informed and greatly influenced by social networking, virtual engagements and the use of mobile applications.

• Social Networking  - Whether you like it or not, social networking is occurring already with regards to your meeting and event efforts. Ignoring it would place your program and organizational objectives at a disadvantage. Embracing social networking involves a number of considerations and can range in its level of adoption, but its inclusion can greatly enhance your ability to inform, motivate and extend your program’s communication reach.
• Virtual Engagements - The term “virtual” is often defined differently based upon who you ask. There are a number of technology advancements that have created different engagement options. For instance, the use of virtual worlds or Virtual Engagement Platforms (VEP), regional satellite broadcasting, web casting and collaboration as well as telepresence are all primary industry formats available and in use today. However, each type has its strengths and weaknesses, but the right combination with specific face-to-face meeting and event types and audiences can substantially improve levels of reach, engagement and program performance.
• Mobile Applications - A growing number of attendees are demanding more integration of mobile applications into the meeting and event programs they participate. Mobile platforms have become today’s intersection point of the physical meeting or event, virtual experiences and social networking interests. Put simply, program attendees want experiences that are more convenient, interactive and integrated with their mobile devices. Making appointments, noting calendar commitments, sharing contact details and having access to interact with other attendees, sponsors and speakers 24/7 are among a variety or inclusions they’re looking for in today’s meeting and event programs.

These types of communication options can be deployed as tools to extend the overall attendee reach and experience throughout the lifecycle of a program – before, during and after your meeting or event.

Organizations have greater opportunities today, over programs of the past, to create better business outcomes with the right integration of two-way, interactive communication options thanks to new technology advancements. Such opportunities enhance the value of meetings and events by further engaging an organization’s people – employees, channel partners and customers. While situations vary, so should the strategy. Otherwise, organizations run the risk of an ineffective, one-size-fits-all approach. Planners need to consider what the right mix of communication options can best help extend their program’s content, expand the audience reach and create enhanced ways for program attendees to interact and engage others.

The future of meeting and event communications isn’t coming, it’s here. What have you found that works better for your program, organization and attendees?

Increasing the Awareness of Your Incentive Travel Program

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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.