Corporate · Issue 8 · 5 min read
The incentive trip people remember
You are not buying a holiday for your top performers. You are buying a story they tell colleagues for three years.
An incentive programme has a measurable job: make the people who did not qualify this year want to qualify next year. That job is done almost entirely by photographs and by the stories attached to them.
Which means the imagery is not a record of the trip. It is the product.
Photograph the people, not the itinerary
The most common mistake is a gallery full of beautiful empty islands. Nobody at head office is motivated by an empty island — they are motivated by their colleague, recognisable, visibly having the best week of their year.
Faces first. Scenery as the setting those faces are in.
Build in one thing nobody has done before
The trip needs a single anchor experience that people describe out loud when they get home.
- A sandbank dinner — tables set on a strip of sand in the middle of the ocean, lit after dark
- A sunset dhoni cruise with the whole group on one boat
- A dive or snorkel with manta rays, in season and with a guide who knows where they are
- An awards dinner held on the beach rather than in the ballroom you flew everyone past
- A morning fishing trip, which produces more laughing photographs than any other activity I shoot
Get permission on day one
People relax enormously once they know how images will be used, and they tense up permanently if they find out afterwards. A single line at the welcome briefing, and a quiet way to opt out, is worth more than any amount of careful editing later.
Deliver it to them, not just to marketing
Give every delegate their own photographs. They will post them, which is distribution you did not pay for, and they will keep them, which is the part that makes next year's target feel worth chasing.
Written on an island, usually before breakfast.
Ibrahim Asad · Ask me about your week
