Amidst the constant fluctuation of content trends and personal priorities, it can be difficult for brands to dial into exactly what their audience expects from their branded experiences.
Kerry Saxby, head of operations at First Event, has examined recurring audience behaviours and shares some of the key indicators of growing attendee preferences from across her client accounts, highlighting the essential components of brand experiences that are set to dominate 2025.
Across all of our client accounts, we often get asked how we can create an experience that aligns with the latest audience expectations of event experiences. But in reality, we know they’re asking an altogether different question: how can we keep our brand offering refreshed, innovative, and relevant to our audience?
Inspired by conversations with our partners, the behaviours we’ve noticed across our clients’ target audiences, and backed up by extensive research, we believe that successful brand events in 2025 will be defined by one headline: putting the attendee first. Our insights and experiences with client delegates suggests that people are looking for brands to connect with them as individuals, meeting their unique desires in order to feel seen and understood.
Brands looking to maintain their focus on the individuals that make up their audiences should be starting to explore how they can incorporate these five trends across their event offering in 2025.
- Advanced hybrid events driven by AI
As the richness of digital interactions begins to achieve parity with IRL ones, people are starting to feel less confident in their ability to succeed in social situations. To mitigate this, particularly across hybrid events, brands should be pushing the boundary with how they build platforms and opportunities for genuine connections.
A really exciting component of this will be how we use AI-powered tools to measure even more elements of branded experiences, for a truly in-depth understanding of how your audience interacts with your product or service, and with each other. Part of this depends on how well brands can harness AI to create a completely inconvenience-free experience, allowing attendees to fully centre themselves in these new connections.
- Hyper-personalised attendee experiences
Personalisation has already been a cornerstone of how brands engage audiences in 2024. As this becomes the minimum expectation for many attendees, the pressure for brands to take this to the next level of hyper and preemptive personalisation will be on in 2025.
By using insightful attendee data, and expertly inputting this into the right AI-powered tools, businesses can add that extra layer of personalisation to their experiences, with elements such as personalised agendas, customised follow-ups and tailored event communications. All of this can be achieved without creating additional workloads for the teams responsible for executing these events.
- The emergence of immersive technologies such as VR and AR
Over the last few months, we’ve loved experimenting with immersive technology as a way to truly bring brands to life, adding extra depth and emotional investment to how people interact with businesses. With 2025 on the horizon, we’re predicting a huge rise in the use of immersive technology like VR and AR as an integral feature of event spaces, used to invite attendees to actively shape their own event experiences and participate in creating a brand culture.
But as more and more brands integrate this technology into their marketing strategy, the trend-setters of 2025 will be defined by who can use these tools in the most immersive and creative ways, with deeper and more data-informed levels of content curation that allows every attendee to feel seen and understood.
- Sustainability as a fundamental priority
According to research by the Edelman Trust Barometer (2024), 62% of people expect CEOs to manage societal changes, not just those that occur in their business. With more people looking to business leaders to address social instability, brands can cater to this demand by creating experiences that cause a cascade of positive change, triggered by attendee interaction.
On a practical level, this could be initiatives such as matching donations received throughout an event or crafting visual and interactive displays that track a brand’s sustainable impact in real time. In essence, businesses need to create opportunities for attendees to spread sustainable impact in partnership with the brands they support.
- The role of AI and robotics in event management
The conversation around using AI and robotics in the event space can often be fraught with caution, and leaves question marks over the long-term sustainability of integrations. Even though these technologies are set to revolutionise the organisation, management, and execution of events in 2025, they will be a powerful companion to a team’s existing creative skills. If adopted strategically, and in a way that mitigates AI burnout in teams, AI and robotics can enhance operational efficiency, creating the seamless and convenient consumption that audiences are expecting as a minimum in 2025.
The above trends are primed to redefine the event space and become the minimum expectation for brands looking to create and deepen relationships with individuals. However, making surface level, short-term adaptations to brand events won’t be the silver bullet a lot of businesses expect it to be.
What brands need to do instead is adapt their mindset and approach to connecting with their audiences, and how they keep their event offering refreshed, innovative, and most importantly, valuable. This is something that requires continuous research, interaction with your community, and rich data into your audiences.
But from our experience with our clients and their attendees, successful brand marketing strategies in 2025 will hinge on a business’ ability to answer this one question: how can we better cater to and connect with our target audience? Read and download the full, free report from First Event here.
