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Research from the University of Central Florida Rosen College
Edited by Dr Fevzi Okumus
Introduction
Convention centers rely on operational and marketing decisions to maximize occupancy. In an interview with Mary Wood, a research analyst for a major convention center on January 10, 2006, she indicated, "convention center management used to be order-takers and now we have to sell, market, and serve the convention center customers like never before." A marketing scholar, [32] Rust et al. (2000, p. 6) notes, "products come and go, but customers remain". Convention center management has not escaped the shift to consumer driven approaches for the booking and rebooking of space.
Further fueling the drive towards consumerism is an increase in competition due to growth in the supply of convention space. The term "consumer" requires defining the various consumer groups in this industry. These consumers include attendees, exhibitors, and meeting planners. The end-users of the convention center are the attendees and exhibitors, while the meeting planners are an important intermediary consumer. They represent corporations, associations, and various independent parties. In this role, the meeting planner directly interacts with the convention center, the agency they represent, and the attendees and exhibitors while booking, planning, and executing events. This gives the meeting planner a great deal of influence on the decision-making process in conventions. Unless meeting planners sign contracts, attendees and exhibitors will never occupy hotels, eat in local restaurants, shop in local stores, seek entertainment, and be transported within the event destination.
Since the perspective of the meeting planner is critical to the economic success of convention centers, marketing to the different types of meeting planners with diverse objectives and needs for their events is vital. This study answers the call for more consumer-based studies in the industry by exploring the meeting planner's perspective particularly their insight of the overall experience while working with convention centers. The first step of the customer equity (CE) approach ([32] Rust et al. , 2000) was chosen for this study. This approach allows for a more consumer-focus study and can provide information to the industry in terms of a rich viewpoint of meeting planners. CE is defined by as: "The measure of each customer's expected contribution toward offsetting the company's fixed costs over the...