Figure 10: Fabian Blank. ca. 2016. Cute piggy bank
Week 5
Goody’s Burger House, is the biggest burger chain in Greece, and one of the brands that I work for. It is a Greek brand that made its appearance in the market in 1975. For more than 45 years it has managed to survive the competition of McDonald’s and other competitive brands that started gaining a growing market share in Greece over the years. For the last 20 years, Goody’s Burger House has been helping children with learning and moving disabilities all over Greece, through its CSR program called ArGOODaki, which traditionally holds a big activation every Christmas. The mechanism of the program is that during the Christmas period, customers are able to buy specially designed combos – which include a meal and a gift for children, at a higher price than normal, and contribute this way to raise money for a different non-profit, children-related organization every year (Goody’s Burger House 2022).
Last Christmas (December 2021), ArGOODaki was celebrating 20 years of action, a milestone in its course, so we, as the marketing department, decided to organize a PR event in order to spread the word and generate more sales. One of the major aspects that we had to decide on, was the event’s budget. As stated by O’Toole, ‘One of the important functions of event management is sourcing, monitoring and reporting on the event finance’ (O’Toole 2011: 190). In our case, the part of sourcing wouldn’t be a problem, as the budget was already set by the company.
After brainstorming on the event content, we had to make an estimation of the costs. In the initial list of the event’s expenses, we considered the main expenses, such as ‘staging, logistics, merchandising and human resources’ (Bowdin 2011: 300). However, while reading this week’s resources, I realized that PR events have some special characteristics in comparison to other kinds of events. For example, the model proposed by O’Toole for the budget process, could not be used in all its steps in our case.
The parts where revenue sources and breakeven point are discussed are not applicable in such an event, firstly because ‘corporate events are given a fixed amount’ (Bowdin 2011: 298), which means that the budget is already set by the company and there is no need to search for resources, and secondly because there is no evident income generated by the event. The event is a means in order to increase sales, but it is really difficult to measure which part of them was generated as a result of the event.
This is something that I would like to explore further during the MA, as it is true that in events like PR events and product launches – which are of great interest to me and would like to work in in the future – ‘all of the finance is generated post-event’ (Bowdin 2011: 298). At the same time, it is crucial that a post-event evaluation includes evidence on how the event has affected sales. As stated by Claire Eason Bussett, ‘the decision-making and the process by which you manage that money is a really important part of the financial management for the whole project as well as, most particularly, looking at what the financial and economic outcomes are for the project’ (Bassett no date). So, how is it possible to respond to these two conflicting areas and measure these financial and economic outcomes when it comes to PR events and product launches?
List of figures
Figure 13: O’Toole 2011. Budget Process. ‘Events Feasibility and Development’ (p. 197)
References
BASSETT, Claire. No date. ‘Creating a project budget’ [online lecture]. Falmouth University. Available at https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/977/pages/week-5-creating-project-budgets?module_item_id=59865 [accessed 12 March 2022]
BOWDIN, Glenn. 2011. Events Management. Burlington: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann
GOODY’S BURGER HOUSE. 2022. ‘ArGOODaki’. Available at: https://www.goodys.com/argoodaki/ [accessed 2 March 2022]
O’TOOLE, William. 2011. Events Feasibility and Development. Oxford: Elsevier