I was somewhat honoured to be asked to be the opening speaker for an annual conference, which students of the Tecnologico De Monterrey University hold every year. And I’m always up for travelling to far flung cities I’ve never been to. I do have some experience of lecturing but this time, it was to an audience of over a thousand guests (gulp!). “Strong beginning, strong end,” I thought; so I decided to make a couple of films and beg favours from my network of retail experts.
The conference, held on the 20th October, invites specialists from various marketing sectors and I was grateful that retail display is such a visual medium. Lots of slides! Rushing around London, I filmed rough clips of the best windows and in-store displays, I could find. This I would edit into a fast-paced, collage set to the Petula Clark hit, “Downtown”, to kick off my talk. Then I interviewed around 8 industry ‘stars’ to give the audience many different perspectives and opinions about shopping as an entertaining, leisure activity, to end on.
In between, I was able to use one of our recent projects, for Westfield Stratford, as a perfect case study to demonstrate entertaining windows which, in this case, had no branding and no marketing message, as such. I talked about how shopping has to be experiential and how hard retailers with similar product offers have to compete, to win the loyalty of an evermore savvy consumer.
Truly surprising myself, I relaxed into the situation, and quickly felt at ease on stage. The students asked me intelligent questions towards the end and made me feel extremely appreciated. What more could I want? Gorgeous sunny weather, a hotel with a rooftop pool, a chauffeur to show me the town, exquisite Mexican food and luckily, 3 seats to spread myself out on, on the return flight home.
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