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August 16, 2005
Are You Experienced? (Part 3)
Last few thoughts from Jim Gilmore's presentation. As Shawn mentioned in an earlier post, he talked about "themes." If you're like me, you're big on slogans -- I love to try and come up with different and interesting slogans for our annual conference, for example. Associations have taglines for membership campaigns, publications, affinity programs, etc.
Gilmore pointed out, however, that a tagline is not a theme, it's just a cue. (He said this standing in front of a giant orange banner that said, "Association Performance to the Xtreme.") A theme is an "organizing principle for everything you're trying to stage."
In a way, I think what Gilmore is suggesting is that a theme is a way to organize your participant's (member's) perceptions. It makes things seem less confusing and yet somehow more profound (real?) when everything is organized around a common idea -- even if that idea is not stated outright (and Gilmore said you should not state it outright).
He gave a lot of examples -- such as W hotels, which have such a simple and obvious theme it's actually hard to guess. Their theme is -- the letter W! From the parking garage ("Wheels") to their famous phone greeting ("Whatever, Whenever"), to the bar (XYZ) to the stylized W signs. Kinda weird, but it works. (Not as weird as the Phoenix Hotel, which chose as its theme -- Rolling Stone magazine. It's not stated, but they took the "feel" of Rolling Stone and turned it into a hotel.)
Posted by Kevin Holland at August 16, 2005 07:05 PM
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