A regular feature, inviting key individuals to comment on an aspect of scenario planning. Martin Robertson from the Centre for Festival and Event Management, School of Marketing and Tourism, Napier University Business School looks to the future of festivals and events.

Please note all Viewpoint...articles are not policies of VisitScotland but individual opinions of the authors. The material should not be regarded as specific advice and no action should be taken with reliance on it. Neither the authors nor VisitScotland accepts any liability whatsoever for any loss or damage in any way of reliance placed upon the material.

The future of festivals and events

Experience Management and Foresight

Of course negotiating the future of festival and events is not easy. It means:

• creating and managing a festival or event experience;
• working within clear financial, physical and marketing risk evaluations, while  also
• ensuring staff, volunteer, community and visitor satisfaction

This requires a level of foresight unbeknown to many other sectors.

Future forms and opinions

The spectacle of large or mega public events may wane despite an overall rise of interest and participation in festive events.  The interest in smaller and specialist festivals and events will rise to absorb this number. There are three prime reasons for this:

• first, an increasing sense of and desire for individualism - as demonstrated in other experiential and service products;
• second, a rising level of risk awareness by visitors and risk aversion by organisers, and,
• third, the improvement in the availability, quality and interactive nature of online media will, for many, change the nature of (for some but not all) their event consumption.

Moreover, effected both by the pristine nature of a television, PC or PDA enabled event experience, and faced with a rise in the number of events and festivals held, the defining factors for success in the mind of visitors will be quality and originality. The opportunities for specialist high quality sporting events are likely to grow exponentially in this environment whilst the defining attributes of cultural and arts events may take great energies to confirm. All forms of event and festival will need to demonstratively and more acutely evidence their sponsorship potential as well as be able to offer more predictive skills as to their outcome.  It is for this reason that a more inclusive and expansive evaluation of festivals and events will need to be made, both in respect of their positioning in the market and, more, pertinently, in fulfilling the needs of a necessarily wider group of stakeholders.

Forecasting and Sustaining Success

Forecasting for festivals and events brings with it, then, an expansive array of variables to be understood. Nowhere else does the word ‘competitive’ have so many meanings to so many different stakeholders.  Nonetheless measuring these and utilising and benefiting from the information provided is certainly possible. Sustainable development modelling for festivals is as structurally and logistically possible as it is for tourism. It means evaluation which includes but also goes beyond predicting market needs and economic outcome. This is to say that it should also appraise the social and the environmental and aid in precipitating the creative. Importantly it must do this both for the individuals and the organisations involved. Offering responses to both short and long-term objectives, thus, it does require long term commitment.  The framework for such a longitudinal study – with measurable and frequent outcomes is possible and, it is suggested here, essential.

Martin Robertson;
Centre for Festival & Event Management, Napier University Business School
November 2006