Episode 33: The Other Four-Letter Word: Corporate Events

Episode Summary

Corporate events are the four-letter word nobody in weddings seems to want to talk about, so let’s talk about it! In this little snack of an episode, I’m sharing why corporate work has always felt like a natural extension of what we do at Julian Leaver Events. We’ll get into the storytelling that connects corporate and social events, why I see corporate projects as a creative incubator, and how different brands make room for both. There’s also a little tease about some fun news we have coming. Friends, it’s time to stop hiding this part of our work.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. And today, we're going to talk a little bit about one of those four-letter words in the wedding planning space, and that is corporate events.

Now, who knew that that was a four-letter word in our space, but I think what's interesting is that people just don't talk about the fact that they are doing corporate events.

And here at Julian Leaver Events, we've been doing corporate events for a very long time. It's a natural extension of our business. We work with people in the corporate field all the time. And so it's natural that we've done your daughter's wedding, and then we're going to go and do an event for your corporation or your business or your brand.

For other brands, there's just social and corporate are actually very similar. And so they have very similar outcomes that people are looking for, right?

You're telling a story, right? A wedding is telling a story. A corporation is also trying to tell a story or the story of a brand or the story of a product. And you want to build awareness, right? It's the same in weddings. We would like everyone to be aware that we are getting married. And the people that we invite to that wedding ceremony are the people who are there to support us in that marriage.

The same is with a brand, right? The same is with a product. If I want to sell this coffee here today, I'm going to bring the people together who love coffee, who celebrate coffee, who want to promote coffee in the world. And so it works in the same way.

And what I find interesting is that we just, we hide the fact that we do this because we only want to show the very prettiest things, I think. And so we're guilty of almost hurting ourselves in a lot of ways from the wedding planning and social side by not talking about the fact that we do corporate events.

What I also love about corporate is that it's also going to the gym, right? It's building reps. It's doing the thing. It's saying, oh, this is a cool new thing that maybe I could bring over into the wedding space, but I don't want to try it on someone's once-in-a-lifetime day for the first time, right? I want to try it over here in this cool kind of corporate brand space. And let's go see if it works.

And there's—the stakes are different, right? They're not less, by any means. But they're just—it's a different set of stakes because there's not as much emotion tied to it. So it's almost like an incubator in a lot of ways, right? A corporate event is—is an incubator. You get to try out new, interesting, cool things and then go and see if they work also on the social side.

So I think we need to just break down the third wall that's holding everyone back from talking, at least openly, about the fact that they also do corporate, right? And I think it's not a lot of corporate that everyone does. They probably do one, two, three, four, or maybe standalone corporate events that are recurring. It allows you to build a different revenue stream and do something a little bit outside the box of what your normal is all the time.

Oh, and social. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true.

And I think also the other thing that we do all the time is anniversary parties, birthday parties, showers, all of those different types of things are things that we do at Julian Leaver Events. But maybe we just don't always put it out there in the world. It's not on our social all the time. It's not on our website, like our main wedding planning website.

And so I think that's just an interesting conversation to be had about how do those two live together and what are we doing to break this kind of stigma that's out there in the universe about doing both of these things. And every brand does it a little bit of a different way, right?

I think some brands, they just keep it in house. They don't really talk about it. They don't really advertise it. They don't push it out there in any way. And then other brands actually do that. And the way that they do it is they do it in almost like a siloed brand within the brand. And they handle all of those social and corporate pieces in this siloed brand within the brand.

And I would say here at Julian Leaver Events, we have some fun news coming and we'll share that with you when it comes. But we've been doing it really quietly over here and not talking about it, but we're about to start talking about it. So stay tuned. It's going to be so much fun. And we're just going to be talking a little bit about the work that we've been doing this whole time, but talking about it in a little bit of a different way.

And that's it. And it's just a little snack.

A The Media Socialites Production