Amid AI, political and policy volatility, and more disruptions, executives who struggle to find time for real connections with leaders in their marketplace are increasingly turning to a novel approach that cultivates networks and generates insights.
Workshop dinners, an event-based process that stresses the collaborative essence of good marketing and public relations, make sense in our industry.
Once a mainstay of American business, dinners have—perhaps ironically —become unorthodox venues for marketers and leaders to exchange ideas, discover new ways to connect marketing strategy to sales, create strategic networking opportunities, and extract actionable insights. For us, these meetups are a chance to demonstrate how we create value for current and potential clients in industries that thrive on innovation and adaptation. The feedback we received indicates that these dinners have made an impact.
Here are the major takeaways from our recent dinner series in Chicago and Connecticut, where we hosted small, invitation-only groups of legal and financial executives to discuss the biggest disruptions in the communications space today.
Crisis communication, AI, and intelligent operations
AI’s role in messaging, particularly crisis communications, was prominent in discussions.
AI-driven solutions are advancing fast. More firms are attempting to harness them for marketing, administrative tasks, and other operations. Yet an abundance of cautionary tales about AI hallucinations, privacy concerns, and spiraling technological complexity illustrate the importance of planning and understanding one’s workflows before adopting AI.
In marketing, AI helps conduct research and distribute marketing and PR materials. It is helping content teams produce more product quickly. But human editors are still necessary to ensure that content follows marketing leaders’ strategies, aligns with successful previous campaigns, and avoids counterproductive factual inaccuracies and stylistic glitches.
AI apps and agents, on the other hand, are reaching a broad network of contacts at unprecedented speed, sifting through large volumes of information and communications, and automating rote manual tasks to save money and time.
How one harnesses AI was the question that naturally arose after everyone shared their experiences experimenting with AI. In marketing, for instance, AI is only as useful as the humans shaping the messaging in the first place. The conversation then turned to crisis communications, or the moments when people are under the most stress and face the biggest hurdles to formulating the best messaging.
Experience shows that, when an emergency strikes, executives sometimes overlook broad strategies and forget key tactics, creating headaches even for the best communicators.
A few practical tips for navigating crises arose from our dinner conversations:
- Don’t get caught thinking a crisis is temporary. Transparent and focused communication, starting inside your team, is essential throughout an emergency.
- Don’t overstate your case. Acknowledge that you may face less-than-perfect tradeoffs.
- Don’t rush to closure. Instead, prepare to negotiate and re-examine the situation in light of new developments.
- Resist the temptation to move on. A crisis should push you to reevaluate your values and goals and improve. Perceiving crises as opportunities is an art and a science. It’s hard, but don’t miss valuable chances to emerge stronger.
The new normal: unpredictability
A key point emerged in our dinner conversation. During extraordinary times, all communications in a sense become crisis communications. When uncertainty becomes the new normal, building credibility and rapidly formulating adaptive strategies in the face of volatility becomes a strategic imperative rather than a fail-safe feature.
Laying the foundations of actionable intelligence processes starts within your own team. Make sure internal communications are transparent and robust information loops are in place so that everybody has a chance to be heard. These feedback mechanisms can develop later to break the silos between marketing and sales as well as other operations.
Technologies like AI can help enormously to scale outreach and leverage human effort, but only if it is anchored in a work culture that reinforces trust and accountability. We plan to share more on this thought soon.
Our (dinner) recipe
Traditional marketing programs are structured in a fairly limiting way. We take up an executive’s valuable time to present an abstract demonstration of tried-and-tested ways we deliver value. The dinners, in contrast, are casual and dynamic. They generate value in real time for everyone involved.
For the evening, we followed a few specific principles described in more detail here in one of our newsletters. In sum, we simply aimed to enjoy our food while asking consistent but evolving questions to trigger discussions and strong feedback loops among the guests.
The feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive. These gatherings reinforced our view that while many firms are cutting marketing budgets and axing external communications, the value of in-person meetups is going up. Collaborations that began around those tables have led to actionable insights and better messaging that directly impact sales.
When can you join us for dinner?
