How Great Southern E-vents (GSE) uses marketing to create sales and success

Named last year’s National Special Event Organiser of the year, GSE works across numerous industries, producing special events and award ceremonies, product launches, outdoor and national promotions, consumer shows and brand experiences. We speak with Managing Director Jeremy Garling, the ringmaster behind the curtains of Australia’s biggest events, about his approach to marketing.

1. What's been your most successful marketing activity to date?
GSE recently displayed at the RSVP Event in Darling Harbour.  Our concept was around a Pooch Pad, in which guests could come and play with our little eight week old puppies.  Since the target market of the show was 20 – 40 year old women we were a hit and had over 35% of the show visit our stand and give us their details.  In order to ensure they learnt more about us as a company, we took their photos and then had them available on our web-site for downloading.  Traffic spiked up by 1000% and we achieved media in the Sydney Morning Herald and MX magazine.  A huge success.

2. Do you use any marketing research tools/websites?
We track all traffic to our web-site through a Google service, we also use an email tracking device for all mass communications.  For our web-site we also use a Google enhancing facility.

3. Do you undertake any specific campaigns to generate word of mouth?
GSE do 3 main events for themselves each year and these generate a large word of mouth about us as a company.  The events are targeted at different segments of our industry and the delivery of these events are targeted to those audiences.

4. What is the best marketing campaign you've seen in the last 3 months (from any field)?
The ‘Name The Burger’ promotion by MacDonald’s is very clever and the first time we have seen them move from the defensive strategy leading from the obesity issue.  This campaign starts a conversation with consumers, appeals to people’s egos and has great talkability.  They have run this out on the internet, radio and TV ensure large coverage and huge numbers of blogs.  Clever as their target markets are telling them what the new product should be called.

5. Why did you choose PR to incorporate in your marketing mix?
GSE had reached a point within our industry of market saturation and needed to expand into other markets to keep growing, especially the marketing industry as we work so closely with marketing departments.  PR also has that ‘credible’ tangent to it as others are writing about you, an essential tool of a small business.  In the last 12 months GSE also achieved many milestones and Awards and we decided on using PR to maximise those achievements.

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