As with nearly everything about event strategy and design, the playbooks for delivering events worldwide and engaging local participants have changed. The core ideas that once defined “global” and “local” have taken on an entirely new meaning for leading marketers.

To expand the impact of your future programs, here are the two insights that are inspiring reimagined global events playbooks.

Investing Ahead—Regional Growth Marketing

While the community-building power of the future of virtual events is continuing to evolve—and our collective digital fatigue is priming all of us for the return of expression—virtual events have proven their strength in one key arena: capturing exponentially larger audiences.

Across our industry, audience growth is now well celebrated as the best-known business-centric benefits of virtual events. Major brand after major brand has celebrated the massive growth of their event registrants and participants. When reviewing these numbers, many brands are finding an even larger growth across previously underserved geographies. With rising numbers from emerging markets, virtual events are removing the friction and hurdles from live brand experiences for people in these regions.

As brands begin to reinvest in in-person experiences, virtual events will remain a vital channel for driving business growth from emerging markets. Beyond just webcasts and hybrid extensions of their in-person flagship counterparts, event strategists and growth marketers will define playbooks where virtual events accelerate regional business objectives. From virtual events that launch the brand into a net-new locale to catalyzing local communities to signaling scale and stability to prospects, global brands will find success expanding their regional-specific trailblazing virtual events.

​Redefining Local—The Global Monoculture

Today’s real-time, always-connected, digital-native humans of the world have changed the concepts of culture. We now live and work within a global monoculture. With the rise of global mega brands and the “global brain” created by the internet, marketers are now developing their brands, campaigns, and experiences to appeal to more than traditional segmentations (and stereotypes) based on demographic factors such as locality and age. To successfully tap into the global monoculture, brands are shifting from segmentation-first tactics to lifestyle-first strategies.

For event professionals, the global monoculture is changing the tenants for experience strategy and design—it is redefining the concept of “local.” Historically, the effective equation used to be, “Local = culture + time zone + language.” The definition of local has now evolved to, “Local = borderless lifestyle.”

This shift in thinking—this push to embrace the global monoculture—will have event professionals asking big new questions: how do we design all of our events around lifestyles? How do we make location relevant to remote attendees? How do we create traditions and rituals that connect across the monoculture? For B2B and B2C event professionals and marketers, the answers to these questions will transform their future global event playbooks.

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