Tips for Better Festival Marketing, Part One

Marketing lessons made obvious at the Scottsdale Culinary Festival’s “Great American Picnic”:

Last Saturday, 4/17/10, I attended the Great American Picnic in Scottsdale AZ. (A quick overview: The Great American Picnic (GAP) is the culmination of the annual Scottsdale Culinary Festival. Six days of food and specialized food/wine events. The GAP is their two-day outdoor event which features booths by restaurants and spirits vendors.)

The GAP also includes the Southwest Beer Festival in which visitors can pay a cover charge and enter a roped-off area where they have their selection of 200 beers to sample.So I went, camera in hand, looking for interesting food and liquid refreshment. I came back, as usual, with an observation of the marketing techniques we can learn from this. Yes, I’m boring. I admit it.

Every event like this gives us an opportunity to observe what’s working and what isn’t. Putting up a booth at an event is a very expensive proposition in both time and money. So we want to make sure we've made a good decision BEFORE we book space at the event. We want to ask pertinent questions that will determine (roughly) the response we’ll get from our presence.

Lesson #1: Learn the demographics of the people who are expected to attend.

This is HUGE, and often overlooked. This is probably the MOST IMPORTANT question to ask before you register for an event. If the right people are there, you’ll do well. If not, you won’t. It’s that simple. Make sure the demographics of the attendees are within your target market. If they’re not, don’t go. Save yourself the time and money.

Audience demographics observed at the culinary festival:

• Average age: Early 30’s. Most people 21 – 35. Yes, a few people 40+, but fewer.
• Average income (at a guess): $40k/yr.
  

The attendees were "beer-drinkin’, cocktail-swiggin', listen-to-rock-music while hanging out with your pals” type of people. Not trouble makers. Just good casual people. There were some higher-income people, but the majority of them were the well-drinks-and-rock-music crowd. And while that’s good for spirits vendors, that’s NOT good for wine and specialty foods.

Evidence:

Most popular vendor of alcohol: The Southwest Beer Festival:
The place was packed and the line to get in was at least 60 feet long (see the photo below). The cover charge was $15 on top of the $10 to get into the festival. But that didn’t stop people from lining up.




Least popular vendor of alcohol: Robert Mondavi wine.
Despite the easily recognized name and the comfortable surroundings of Mondavi’s pavilion, there were only a few people trying the wines (see the photo below). Why? Because the majority of the people at the GAP were in the younger age bracket: they were there for the beer and pizza, not for the tasting and discussions that tend to accompany wine.

• Most popular food booth: BBQ Pork sandwiches (notice the long line in the photo below).
• Least popular food booths: specialty foods like artisan cookies and rum cakes.
  

The lesson we can remind ourselves of is: know the audience. Who will be there? What’s their average age, income, marital status, etc.? If the vendor renting the booth space can’t tell you, you might want to reconsider buying a space.

Despite the large crowd at the GAP, several specialty food vendors (and one big wine company) looked like they were not doing well because people weren’t at their booths during the event. So take the time to learn who’s in the audience. That one simple question can make (or save) a whole lot of money.



Lesson #2 is coming in a couple of days. This would have been too long if I tried to cram them all into one post.