In Events, Value Isn’t a Slogan — it’s the Job is a contributed article from Peter Lindsay, Chief Strategy Officer, RX
Strategy can sound complicated. But a good strategy is just about defining clearly the few significant choices that you are making to seize an opportunity ahead of you.
In this industry, our job is to create marketplaces where customers can meet the right people, have productive conversations, reengage their passion for their work, and return with concrete opportunities to build their businesses. If that happens, the event works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Everything else is secondary.
You don’t figure that out in a meeting room. You figure it out by staying close to customers, at events, in conversations, understanding what they’re trying to achieve and what isn’t working. That’s how I approached the role when I joined RX, and it’s still how we approach it now, because it’s very easy to become abstracted from reality. If you lose that connection to what is actually going on at an event, you stop designing things that are useful.
Making the Market Work
When you strip it back, the role of the Event Director is to make the market work. That means bringing together the right mix of people, creating the right conditions and making it easy for valuable interactions to happen.
I tend to think about it in two ways.
The first is like organising a good party. You want a mix of familiar faces and new ones. You want the right people in the room, and you don’t want anyone wondering why they came, or feeling worried they don’t know who to speak to.
The second is more like being a conductor.
You’re not playing every instrument yourself. But you are responsible for how it all comes together, who comes in when, how different parts play in harmony, and whether the end result transcends each individual musician. That’s what great event teams do. They’re not just organisers. They’re curators of environments where the right things happen.
There are patterns across our global portfolio. When I think about making a market work, I keep coming back to three elements. They’re not a formula, but they show up consistently in the events that stay relevant, grow in the right way and genuinely deliver value over time.
First of all, every event must be designed around its specific customers. You can spot themes across industries, but you can’t shortcut the work to understand the specific problems your event is solving for the customers in their particular industry. Every market is different. If you try to standardise too much, you lose relevance and it’s very hard to retain credibility.
Secondly, we have to think carefully about who isn’t in the room yet.
A good example of this is the PGA Show in the U.S., which for decades has been a leading marketplace for the golf industry. What’s changed more recently is how that market is evolving. Golf clubs are looking for new ways to increase participation, maximise revenue and improve member experience, and categories like pickleball and padel are becoming increasingly relevant. When we also introduce these racquet sports into an established golf marketplace, we’re not just adding more exhibitors, we’re expanding the opportunity for everyone there, from new buyers to new partnerships and we’re enabling entirely new conversations. The key is doing that deliberately, so these adjacencies — that’s our industry term for that kind of expansion — strengthen the existing ecosystem rather than sit alongside it. Get that right, and you’re not just growing the event, you’re evolving the market. If you get it wrong, it just feels bolted on.
Thirdly, the event itself isn’t enough anymore.
Customers are trying to achieve something over time, not just over a few days.
So, we’re building digital tools that help them connect before they arrive, be more targeted while they’re there, and follow up afterwards. When delivered well, these tools can turn a customer who has one or two fantastic conversations across three days into one who is fully productive for most of their time.
Want to read more from Peter about AI strategy, value creation and what RX is doing to make events useful to participants? Check out the full piece in the next edition of Trade Show Executive Magazine on August 1. Subscribe to receive a copy in print here, or click here to receive digital editions and our weekly newsletter.
