Kicking off second year with Bucks Live & The Hearing Dogs
After our first year success of planning and carrying out our event "WinterLand" I was excited to say the least when we were informed that throughout our second year we will be carrying out our live music event off-campus in partnership with the Hearing Dogs Trust on their 30+ Acre site. Once we were informed we were going to be in complete control in the planning process of the event all of us in the class had a lot of enthusiasm considering the higher responsibility and opportunities that we have been granted with this year in comparison to last year in order to carry out this event in May 2018.
We began the lectures with briefings of what the Event Management course had lined up for us this year, before paying the Hearing Dogs Trust site a numerous amount of site visits to help begin to fuel our creative minds of what we are working with and what we wish to conduct during the lead up to the event and on the day itself. During the first year, with the Winterland event, I was placed in the Production Team and very much enjoyed the responsibilities and tasks that came with it, however also showed an interest in the Marketing Team hence the participation in some of last years marketing events, including dressing up as Rusty Buck and walking around the town of High Wycombe, not being the fondest memory ;). As a result of this I decided to give the marketing team a go for this years event. However, marketing this years event is proving to be very different to marketing previous bucks live events, which we had predicted due to us working for a client as opposed for ourselves. This has so far proven to have both positives and negatives to it in the way that the negatives are we don't originally know the hearing dogs audience and social media presence, along side with how they decided to conduct and promote themselves through marketing due to being a charity of course. Never the less, we are beginning to get to know our client and their intentions which is a huge positive due to the much higher social media following they have than our bucks live social media presence.
Furthermore, our preparation to marketing the event has been strengthened even further in the last few weeks after our team, alongside with the music business team attended the Christmas market event at the hearing dogs trust to get an idea of the social fabric of an Hearing Dogs Trust event. We were able to conduct this not just be showing our faces at the event, but also due to the help of the music business students who designed a public questionnaire to gain market research to build hub of information for us marketers in particular to base our marketing focuses off. The information gained has since been converted into clear easy to understand graphs and figures by the music business students for us to use as a bases to focus our marketing in-depth.
To sum up the start of this years planning of our event I would say in particular within marketing it has been very much a preparation semester where we have done more research than marketing so far due to the circumstances and importance of understanding our client before we jump in. Kicking off semester 2 we are equipped and ready to market this live music event as we will have all the bucks live accounts handed over to us to re-skin, after being used for the 2017 winterland event with the first year. Additionally, we will have all the information we need to take advantage of our clients social status alongside with all the traditional type of media opportunities we have in and around the local area and surrounding towns. I'm looking forward to the next step in this creative journey all the way up to the day of the event!