Inside EC’s psychology-based roadmap for event design
Stop guessing, start measuring: Why unlocking human behaviour is key to event ROI
EC didn’t simply bounce back from the pandemic: it thrived. The past two years have seen it undertake a successful rebrand, open a New York office, and grow its full-time staff from 120 to 140. Such success in a highly competitive market is doubtless due to myriad factors, but a uniquely fascinating one is the company’s psychology-based approach to event design.
C&IT spoke to EC’s marketing director, Abby Hartley, who was bought into the fold in early 2023 to help its repositioning from a heritage event production company to a full-service agency with in-house creative design. Her goal, in her own words, was “making the extraordinary everlasting”: creating events that wouldn’t be ephemeral, but would stay with attendees, move them, and ideally change them.
To figure out how best to do this, the brand consulted renowned behavioural scientist Richard Shotton (author of The Choice Factory), who works with advertising brands to make their campaigns more persuasive using the principles of ‘cognitive heuristics’.
These are mental shortcuts, such as unconscious bias, anchoring bias, and confirmation bias, which help us process information quickly, simplifying complex decision-making to allow people to make swift judgements. Usually, we’re unaware we’re deploying them, and they’re effective ‘prompts’: for example, a beauty brand offering customers free samples draws on the “endowment effect”, where an act of generosity prompts reciprocation, leaving people feeling more obliged to buy something in return.
The success of behavioural sciences in advertising is well-documented, but Shotton’s work with EC was the first time he brought his theories to event design. The approach they collaboratively designed served two purposes: first, providing a behavioural science framework to help the agency understand how attendees perceive, remember, and engage with events. Then, to leverage that knowledge to provide quantifiable data on an event’s long-term impact.
Hartley explains: “ROI is always critical to our clients, ever increasingly so. They have to justify every pound spent. We’re looking to try to support clients with this, by moving beyond short term traditional metrics such as attendance and sentiment to establishing the longer term behaviours and actions we want to infuence through the event moment, which are important to organisational success.”
The framework is a fascinating marriage of psychological science and creative thinking. It’s designed to offer clients tangible KPIs via metrics which can be measured both short and long-term, such as the adoption of new strategies, enhanced brand engagement, altered purchasing patterns, or improved team collaboration. At EC, it breaks down into four key elements for design strategy.
The halo effect: small details, big impact
Psychologist Edward Thorndike first coined the term ‘halo effect’ in 1920, describing the phenomenon by which a person’s entire character may be judged by one or two key attributes.
“If you’re friendly and kind and generous, people can often associate you with being beautiful as well. It’s just human nature,” says Hartley. EC has turned this into the principle of holistic impact: crafting key details in event design to inform delegates’ experience of the whole.
“Companies have to cherry-pick what is important to them, as a brand, to make people feel one thing throughout an event. You can’t do everything. Do one thing brilliantly, and that will have a halo effect on the rest.”
For example, if a brand wants to position itself as future-facing, the event could incorporate high-tech and immersive technology, such as VR experiences, AR overlaps, projection mapping, or interactive, gamified exhibits. This doesn’t, however, mean planners can cut corners elsewhere, as the same principle applies in reverse – commonly known as the ‘horn effect’. For instance, having flawless tech may be ruined if the occasion has bad food.
“It’s about creating an overall impact that’s greater than the sum of its parts,” Hartley continues. “We ensure concierge level planning, from the lighting, to the food, to the sound, to seamless tech, that works like clockwork, for a seamless experience, but with key details beautifully executed to give that halo effect.”
The scarcity effect: keep your event exclusive
One of the biggest challenges in justifying event investment is ensuring attendance, Hartley says. “Clients always ask us how to get bums on seats. The threshold for attendance is getting higher, expectations are getting higher.”
To drive attendance, EC draws on the ‘scarcity effect’, a behaviour first identified by psychologists in 1975. It’s simple: if people think there is less of something, or that it is hard to obtain, they’ll want it more.
It’s easily observed when brands release limited edition products, or in the booking frenzy to obtain tickets for Taylor Swift’s tour. In the world of events, it’s about creating something that feels unmissable, or exclusive.
“It could be cleverly framing the event around pivotal moments for the business, an important milestone, providing a unique learning opportunity, or hosting it in a rarely accessible venue,” Hartley says.
Sometimes you can create something genuinely spectacular. She gives an example of an event EC organised for a global asset management firm which flew 1,200 delegates to the Bahamas for a week-long summit at a luxury resort, with industry-leading speakers and five-star dinners. The scarcity factor was amped up by inviting Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the guest speaker. A private address from the Terminator himself: unmissable.
Such an example may need a client with impressive coffers, but Hartley adds that there are ways to leverage the same principles on a budget. “On a smaller scale it can be as simple as hosting an event for a company where the CEO speaks, a product launch, or a rebrand.”
The generation effect: make attendees co-creators
First defined in 1978, the ‘generation effect’ is a psychological phenomenon which describes people’s tendency to remember ideas or information more vividly if it’s self-generated, or participatory. “If an individual has invested energy into solving something or has had a choice in something, they are more personally invested in it and have more affinity with it,” Hartley explains.
An example from advertising is a Guinness ad, which pictures a pint of the famous stout with the tag “Gu _ _ _ ess who?” By prompting readers to fill in the blanks, the brand name registers with them more memorably as a puzzle they’ve ‘solved’. As EC uses it, it becomes a ‘participatory’ design.
“This is about encouraging active user involvement and co-creation,” she says. “For example, attendees can take part in ‘myth-busting’ exercises by sharing their perspectives on key challenges. The panel can then provide feedback, revealing collective opinions and comparing them to broader trends.”
These live sessions can be easily facilitated by AI and smartphones and can make guests feel as if they’re influencing an event in real time.
Planners can also tap into this by allowing delegates to plan their agenda at a conference, or consulting them to choose session topics for a meeting. Interactive workshops, where attendees work together on a common task, also tend to be more memorable than a lecture for the same reason.
The peak-end rule: pockets of memory
Defined in 1993 by Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Frederickson, the peak-end rule suggests our memories of an experience are focused on the most intense moments of an experience, and the way it ends. You can see it within cinema: a mediocre action flick becomes fixed in your mind as great because it had an incredibly exciting shoot-out at the end, say.
EC utilises this in event design to strategically plan emotional high points, followed by something calmer, to maximise memory retention.
“You take dynamic moment highs [such as Schwarzenegger speaking] – but you offset those with moments of respite, what we call palette cleansers, which can be anything from a ginger shot, yoga, to some entertainment that refreshes you again and energises you for the next phase of the event.”
Over multi-day conferences, these memorable high points operate like ‘memory windows’ into the rest of the experience, better-positioning people to recall the event as a whole. Hartley says, “They create a sense of a narrative, leading to a sense of an emotional climax, giving delegates something emotional to connect to, and remember.”
“We have a limited amount of memory for experience. We remember moments in time and then fill in the gaps for the rest.”
Using process as a storytelling tool
Using behavioural patterns to craft events could run the risk of seeming reductive, but the intention isn’t to treat audiences as a homogenous group, Hartley explains. Rather, it’s about being more effective in the choices you’re offering.
“It’s about not making assumptions about the individual in the room,” Hartley explains. “You have a choice, you decide the journey you take.”
“Instead of having swag bags at conferences, we might set up a store for people to select what they want to take with them,” she says; this approach also eliminates the wastage that usually comes with pro forma gift bags.
EC’s approach offers an intriguing roadmap for other agencies seeking to create experiences that resonate beyond the event itself. Far from turning events into a cookie-cutter exercise, the four psychological principles help EC craft experiences that connect with audiences on a deeper, more emotional level, via clear, data-driven processes.
“It’s about storytelling, at the end of the day, that’s what the creative industry does. I’m passionate about that.”
