Assessment Details
Individual Essay – ‘Exploring the Role of Authenticity in Strategic Event Design’
In this module, we are focusing on the strategic design of business events to influence the cognitive, affective and behavioural impacts of attendees for optimal organisational outcomes. Cognitive impacts help attendees to better understand their organisation’s strategy, new initiative or product (internal) or to clarify and build brand awareness (external). Affective impacts are emotional impacts which will affect how attendees (both internal and external to the organisation) feel and identify with the brand or the company. Behavioural impacts change attendees’ behaviour towards a brand/company. For internal consumers/employees, behavioural impacts could be that they become more productive, more engaged and more loyal to the company. For consumers, behavioural impacts could be that they purchase more products from the brand and advocate or speak positively about the brand to others.
In both the experience design and strategic event design literature, authenticity is identified as a key influencing antecedent of positive event outcomes, both in terms of creating experience ‘intensity’ for the attendee and for the hosting organisation. In other words, if the event experience feels authentic to attendees, they are more likely to demonstrate positive cognitive, affective and behavioral impacts from the event, over time, thereby benefitting the host organisation in terms of event outcomes.
The essay will follow this structure:
Introduction:
Describe the structure, content and purpose of your essay. The purpose of your essay is to discuss and assess how the creation of authenticity is being used as a principle design aim in the creation of corporate events.
Provide a definition for authenticity, using the academic and industry literature to highlight key understandings of this objective.
Explain WHY it is important that event designers understand how to create authenticity.
Indicate that the key outcome of your synthesis of the available literature will be to form conclusions and make recommendations about how authenticity can be achieved in event design, across different types of corporate events.