Incentive - October 2008 - (Page 6)

HEADLINES Where Are We? PAGE 8 If you can figure out where in the world we are this month, you can receive a $50 gift card Platinum Praise PAGE 9 Incentive’s readers voted for this year’s Platinum Partner award winners for travel, gift cards and merchandise Motivation and the Economy The 2008 Motivation Show took place as Congress was bailing out Wall Street, but attendees remained largely upbeat BY LEO JAKOBSON ith investment banks going belly-up and major insurers and other titans of the financial industry coming hat in hand to Congress, this would seem like a reasonable time for incentive providers to be worried about business in 2009. And yet, while there are concerns, the attitude of many of the incentive professionals attending The Motivation Show in Chicago last month—as congressional bargaining on a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, designed to stave off growing financial panic, raged—was remarkably upbeat. At the show, Carlson Marketing’s executive vice president of global engagement and events, Fay Beauchine, said her firm has been impacted by the economy—two of the Minneapolis-based incentive giant’s clients in the financial markets have merged in the recent financial market meltdown, and she considered another likely to be acquired— but not very badly. “Eventually the dust settles,” Beauchine says, “and [these companies] still have the same issue: How do I move product?” Another area that Carlson Marketing W Buyers and suppliers meet in the travel area of the show floor continued on page 11 6| Incentive | October 2008 | incentivemag.com Photo taken by Alex Palmer with a Sony DSC-H50 focuses heavily on, employee engagement, will become more important as companies merge and hunker down, she adds. “There is an opportunity,” Beauchine says. “If [a company] reduces its budget for incentives it usually increases [budgets] elsewhere.” Paula Godar, brand communication director of Maritz Motivation, part of St. Louis–based Maritz Inc., echoes that, noting that mergers mean “there are new goals and values to communicate.” She adds: “We have not seen big changes in people’s programs. They are not canceling [incentive award] trips.” That said, clients are shrinking the number of attendees or trimming budgets in other ways, Godar notes. In fact, more than a few companies are cutting incentive travel budgets, according to Incentive’s Travel IQ survey, which was sent out in June and July—before the worst of the current economic crisis. Fully three-quarters of those surveyed say that reasonable cost is the most important criterion they are using to select a travel destination, and nearly half said the weak dollar had dissuaded them from planning a trip abroad. Just under half of the respondents who have decreased budgets chose less expensive destinations, more than one quarter reduced the number of qualifiers and not quite one fifth gave qualifiers more free time rather than plan pricey activities. An interesting prediction was made by Brett Hatch, global corporate gifts manager for Motivation Show exhibitor Maui Jim Sunglasses, which sells its products primarily as extra gifts given to travel program winners in the incentive industry. Hatch says he expects the financial markets’ http://www.incentivemag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Incentive - October 2008

Incentive - October 2008 Contents Editor's Note Headlines Cover Story: Face Time with Senior Executives is the Top Motivator of Cisco Systems' Chairman's Club Winners Incentive Interview Safety Incentives: Safety Drives a Limousine Service's Motivational Efforts Case Study Primer Learning: Diving into Incentives for the Mind Enhances Both Loyalty and the Bottom Line Research: Travel IQ Travel News Florida Coast to Cost Caribbean Escape Potentials Here and Now Gadgets & Power Tools: High-End Roars Seen at the Motivation Show Advertisers Index Off the Cuff

Incentive - October 2008

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