Åre Wedding Village

I've started up a new project in Åre, called Bröllopsbyn (The Wedding Village). In, and around Åre, all suppliers needed to plan and have a beautiful and unique wedding, are present. Åre has photographers, hair dressers, flower shops, a wedding planner, hotels, restaurants, caterers, activities suppliers, jewelers, churches and gorgeous surroundings. Simply put; whatever you need to create your dream wedding.

I got an idea from Anna, at Hotel Diplomat Åregården, to try to gather all suppliers, and market Åre as the perfect Wedding Village. So I contacted a few of the suppliers, and we decided to try to apply for some fundings from the Leader program, which is a EU program. The plan is to create a marketing material for the village and all it's suppliers, and to go on different wedding fairs, marketing all the advantages of getting married in Åre.

I've just finished the work for the initial application, and will send it in Monday. But browsing the news today, I noticed that another region had the same idea. An article in GP tells about a few wedding suppliers in Sävelången area, who are starting up a wedding project, applying for money from the EU Leader program.

Well, hopefully Åre will still be able to get a positive response on our application. *keep your fingers crossed* :)

Swedish Guerrilla Marketing blog (My Quest)

Yay! I found this blog: Icke-traditionella medier (translates: non-traditional media) that has posts about, yes, you guessed; non-traditional media, such as guerrilla marketing and ambient media. The blog is in Swedish, but contains lot's of pictures and film clips. It's hosted by a communication agency in Malmö; Crowd, and from what I can read on their webpage, they do quite a lot of guerrilla marketing campaigns. Me like!

Well, Crowd did a mini campaign together with one of my favourite agencies; Miami. It was during Eventdagarna, a Swedish fair for, amongst others, event agencies. The fair had the subject of "Event Marketing", and neither Crowd nor Miami attended. They sprayed water logos on and around the fair area, stating "Guerrilla and ambient are not events", in order to make a statement that they would have liked to have representatives from guerrilla agencies there, and that maybe the fair should not have been called Eventdagarna (The Event Days). Read an article about the campaign, from Dagens Media here.

I do agree that guerrilla and ambient are not events, BUT I do firmly believe that you might need to incorporate many different parts of different media in order to get a campaign that reaches your target group to a full extent. It is normally not enought to just buy an ad in a magazine or newspaper, you need to follow up with TV, maybe radio, a few events and maybe som attention-creating guerrilla actions.

Event management tip of the day

Make sure you read the specifications and conditions in the order confirmation thoroughly (!) if you are going to participate in a fair/congress or similar... Otherwise you might end up spending money on things that don't give you any value (such as having someone come to spray flame resistant liquid on your paper poster wall, charging 3 dollars per square meter, due to the paper itself not being flame resistant...)


And before you ask; no, it didn't happen to me ;) but to one of my colleagues...