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Would you send out an invitation for a corporate event to 3,000 people, knowing that 2,700 would not be coming?

by: William Mazza

This was a very courageous, unconventional marketing concept. My creation was a high-end wine event for Luce della Vite owned by Marchesi de’ Frescobaldi wines from Florence, Italy. This was a corporate event to launch a new wine from the Luce wine gamut – Brunello di Luce. The event was hosted at a beautiful castle on top one of the surrounding hills of Florence. Launching and positioning a wine is not an easy endeavor as there are many exceptional wines in the world. Our mission was to position this wine as one of the world’s most important wines. How did we do it? 

I was tasked with creating an event to host 300 people. The guests were wine critics, media professionals, wine publication publishing houses, journalists, famous sommeliers, special guests, actors/actresses, famous Italian entrepreneurs and just about anyone associated with the high-end wine world. No expense was spared to create facets of glamour and elegance along with exquisite, unique gifts for those who attended.

An emerging Jazz singer, Amana Melome’ backed up by a gospel choir from Florence, sang the presentation/story of the wine. The evening’s events were captured by world famous photographer, Larry Fink.  From his photographs, I created a repercussion positioning book, which showcased the wine and was to be used as a gift for other future Luce wine promotions. All guests received a small black crystal box with a special Potpourri created by 2 agronomists and 2 Sommeliers with the Officina Profumo – Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, an extremely unique potpourri whose scent leads you to the wine. This event was spectacular!So how did we create such an amazing event and get notoriety for our wine? Simple – through an invitation.

My client requested to have 300 guests in attendance. Through our research, we learned the redemption statistic regarding attendance was 10% of the invitations sent, which meant that we had to send out 3,000 invitations to be 100% sure we would have 300 people.The management needed to make a decision on the spot but needed a guarantee that we would have our audience.  The reason for this major event was to convince the people to talk well about the wine. So, I said in the meeting Ok we will make 3,000 invitations and you will be sure that 2300 will be there. I then said, “What about the 2,700 people who won’t be coming?” Everybody was silent. At that point, I said, “Since there are more people who won’t be coming, we should make an amazing invitation so we could create a lasting impression on those 2,700 people that received these invitations and they would forever speak positively about this planned event that they would not be attending. I created an invitation that surprised my partners, including myself. We strategically focused on the people who would not be attending because we knew that the guests who attended would forever be enchanted!The invitation was so effective that we had over 700 people who wanted to attend. The castle would only seat 325, which we maxed out. So, by focusing on those who would not attend, we instated an amazing idea of the magnitude and dynamics of the wine through the invitation so that these journalists would speak well about something they never tasted, smelled, heard, saw or touched, and they did.In the creation of events, the invitation seems to be the least important on the checklist… However really thinking boy the real power and invitation can perform, its can change the dynamics of an event.

The event was a success and thanks to this unconventional marketing move, we were installing a powerful vision and impression  to the people that were not attending.

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