Gone are the days when clients were easily satisfied with simple and comfortable arrangements at their weddings. Today the clients heavily emphasize on elevating the level of their weddings to make everything appear larger than life, so that the attendees of the event take with them an experience to be treasured for a lifetime. But how can a wedding planner design the perfect experience quotient for a private social event was the subject of an interesting panel discussion at the International Convention of the Wedding Fraternity (ICWF) ’15.
The session was chaired by Vandana Mohan, Founder, The Wedding Design Company,MitjaPrelovsek from Invisible.si, Arpit Vyas of Dishman Pharmaceutical and Culinary Designer MarutSikka. The discussion was moderated by Roshan Abbas, Managing Director at Encompass.
At the beginning of the session MitjaPrelovsek delivered a special presentation where technology was used by him to elevate the experience quotient at public places. Mitja explained that his inspiration to create such experiences is driven by the memories and responses of humans.
Roshan Abbas introduced the theme of the panel discussions by stating that all event planners are similar to dream catchers who make an intangible dream in a client’s head tangible by bringing it to reality. He asked the panelists, “However, to make a dream come true you need a team to help you. So how do you find a team to help you in creating such experiences?”
To this Vanda Mohan responded by saying, “The industry today is very ‘me-centric’ and no one wants to share their work with others. But my way of working is always to collaborate with the best and the deliver the same to my client. I may have a certain sense of style and positioning of things but I would never hesitate to call someone like a SumantJayakrishnan to help me add value to my work. I strongly feel that the way forward in the industry is to collaborate and put aside this feeling of competitiveness and help each other to deliver that ultimate experience to our clients.”
When asked upon what is a great experience for the panelists at weddings, MautSikka responded by saying, “Experience is all about using your senses, so be it the décor of the place that you are visiting or what you see or even the way food is laid out and served is part of an experience. It is also important to take care of the smallest element and details at weddings because the smallest of things gone wrong can end up giving bad experiences to your attendees.”
Speaking on how to create digital experiences in a touch and feel economy like India, MitjaPrelovsek said, “Contrary to the popular belief, digital is not always using smartphones and iPad. What I do is to integrate digital technology with tangible properties so the idea is to make people forget the fact that there is a technology at play here. All I want is for them to just enjoy the moment.”
When asked if technology is the sixth sense to create experience today? Mitja responded by explaining that experience should be designed in order to involve all the 5 senses, the more senses a technology brings alive the better experience will be created.
There are times in a multi-agency pitch when the clients hears your ideas and thoughts but never responds back. When asked by Roshan Abbas on how to make the client respond to the agency in such situations, Arpit Vyas responded by saying, “You have to inspire the clients in your first brief itself. If you fail to do that you can never get him to respond and also as an agency one has to be able to bring and strike a relationship with the client from the get go. If an agency is able to achieve that then they will always get responses from clients.”
Expanding further Vandana Mohan added, “Building the trust and the uniqueness of the concept are two things that are guaranteed to get you the job. If an agency pitches to a client a cut and paste concept that will be shown to them by 6 other agencies they can never get the job.”
