With the New Year (if we can still call it that) in full swing, we’ll soon be looking forward to the Summer months.

In the meantime we have a host of spring events, including the Ideal Home Show, now in it’s second year at it’s new (old) home of Olympia London.  We love the heritage of events like the Ideal Home Show and it is brilliant to see the organisers welcome such huge numbers of visitors through the door every day.  It really does give you the sense that live events are continuing to thrive.

Then before we know it, we’ll then be into outdoor show season, the time when event organisers brave the English weather to put on amazing, interactive events outside!

We have worked with a number of outdoor shows since we set up and our website has a case study for one of the UK’s biggest – Farnborough Airshow.  For those of you that don’t know, Farnborough is biennial, so we last worked there onsite in 2014, it’s astonishing to think that was almost 2 years ago!

It’s not just a biennial project for us, we have been working with the Farnborough team pretty much continuously, to support event development and branding.   This year, we’ll be conducting both trade visitor and public research at the show.  A visit to Farnborough is always a highlight for me personal, there is always a great buzz on the public weekend and the flying displays are brilliant.  No matter how many times you have seen them, the Red Arrows never fail to impress and there’s certainly an extra ‘wow factor’ in seeing them perform live.

However, these visits are more of a privilege of working at outdoor shows than a social day out – I’d like to think of it as a perk of the job!

That said, we’ll also be sending some mystery visitors to gain another perspective of some events this year.  Our mystery visitors are carefully selected to fit the desired profile (i.e. gender, age, lifestyle, interests and so on), to ensure we get an in-depth account of the visiting experience.   This means we get a great feel for the event at an individual level, so it’s important for mystery visitors to give us plenty of detail about the highs and lows of their day.  Mystery visitors are asked to take plenty of photos and videos of the good, bad and ugly, which we use when we report back to our clients.

We’re always on the look out for people to become mystery visitors for us, so if this is something you’d be interested in, we’d love to hear from you.

Posted by Jonathan