"There's a thin line you have to toe when planning corporate events," says Michael Mach, the senior program manager of global event marketing for Motorola Inc., who planned a conference for 350 suppliers from 14 countries last Tuesday and Wednesday. "You want to make your event nice and professional, but you don't need the gold lamé napkins. You have to be a good custodian of the budget you have." So at last week's event, Mach aimed to strike a balance between creating a "nice" event and portraying a responsible image of the company by taking advantage of Motorola's in-house facilities and serving locally sourced meals.
Mach describes the conference as "an opportunity for suppliers to meet C-level [Motorola] executives, ask questions, and discuss best-business practices amongst themselves." Wednesday's activities started up with a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the Westin Northwest Chicago—a hotel chosen for its proximity to O'Hare airport—and spanned the entire day with presentations, lunch, breakout sessions, an award ceremony, a Q&A, and a cocktail reception. But before guests headed to the hotel, Mach wanted to give them an opportunity to tour Motorola's Innovation Center, which is located within the company's Schaumburg headquarters and which hosted a welcome reception and dinner on Tuesday night.
Holding the dinner at company headquarters made sense from an economic standpoint—Mach said that Motorola's in-house food supplier, Foodworks, catered the event, and that rentals were basically limited to a small riser stage. The choice of venue also fed into the goal of the evening, which Mach described as "exposure to product." At the recently updated Innovation Center, he said, pods devoted to "product-centric experiences" provide visitors with a "hands-on demo situation, so they can touch and see some of our [gadgets] and become familiar with them as prequel to the next day's activities."
One of those next-day activities was a breakout session dubbed "Teaming for a Green Future." Although Mach said that last year's conference featured discussions devoted to environmentally friendly measures, the topic was much more prevalent this year. "Like most companies," he said, "Motorola is trying to come up with standard green procedures that we can apply to our manufacturing process. And that's very important to a lot of our suppliers who attend the conference."
Taking the environmental focus of this year's conference into account, Mach tasked the Foodworks and Westin catering staffs with creating seasonal and locally sourced menus for the welcome dinner and all hotel-based meals. Ultimately, the dinner involved buffets and action stations filled with items such as harvest salad and rosemary-and-sage turkey breast. Wednesday's lunch included farm-raised salmon with an organic tomato and mozzarella salad, and the closing cocktail reception featured a spread of local artisan cheeses and seasonal vegetables.
Mach said that relying on locally sourced foods increased typical menu expenses by about 10 percent, but for a "customer stakeholder event, and to enforce our initiatives, I believe it's worth it." He added that this year's menus appealed to international palates because they featured clean, recognizable flavors instead of some of the "heavy, greasy, hotel foods" that conference attendees sometimes endure.
