Raymond's Events!: 2008

Background of the organizer(National Arts Council of Singapore)
The organizer of the event “Hydro Sapiens” by The Lunatics (The Netherlands) is the National Arts Council of Singapore, which is also the organizer of the series of events during the Singapore Arts Festival.

The National Arts Council (NAC) was set up as a Statutory Board in September 1991 to spearhead the development of the arts in Singapore. Its mission is to nurture the arts and make it an integral part of people’s lives in Singapore. Anchored on the twin strategies of excellence and engagement in the arts, the Council aims to build a vibrant arts sector by creating a conducive environment where the arts is accessible to all and artistic talents have the necessary resources and capabilities to excel and achieve sustainability in the long term.

The Stakeholders
The National Arts Council of Singapore has also tied down partnerships with several sponsors and partners, who are also part of the many stakeholders [refer to references]

Together with the above stakeholders are the residents nearby the bedok reservoir, who can be termed as the local community. Definitely, the businesses near the event site will form part of the stakeholders because their business will be affected by the participants in the event. For example, after the event, everyone could be hungry and will go look for food somewhere nearby. Then, the eateries will be positively impacted.

Role of events to organiser
The role of this series of events that I attended is place marketing and tourist attraction.
The organiser was trying to create positive images in the minds of the public, trying to improve the quality of life by offering entertainment in the Arts form, and attract residents and investors though Place Marketing. Through the series of events, the organiser was also trying to attract tourists, spread the demand for Arts, and to increase visitor spending and their length of stay.

There is also a chance that the Arts Festival might evolve to become an Image Maker and Animator after it becomes more well-known.

Target Market
Based on the research done, the events held during the Festival are targeted at mainly adults and children, including students, while a few other events like the Flipside also cater to the elderly.

More specifically, the parties interested in the Arts and those who just want to experience how it is like to attend an event organised by the National Arts Council – they would be the target markets of the events held during the Singapore Arts Festival.

Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategies cover product, services, and branding strategy, product life-cycle strategies, pricing considerations, supply chain management, and includes segmentation, targeting, and positioning of the product itself.

In this report I am going to explain the points of the famous 8-Ps.

Product – the events held during the Singapore Arts Festival are the products by themselves, and the participants of the events are the consumers of the products.

Price – while some events during the Singapore Arts Festival are free of charge they carry a certain level of risks including sending the wrong perception of the events themselves to the public; on the other hand, events organised cost a sum of money as entry fee. This actually has many advantages, including securing the participants’ attendance and earning a revenue from organising the events.

Place – many of the events held during the Singapore Arts Festival are conducted in the city area and is easily accessible. This factor is quite well considered by the organising committee of the Singapore Arts Festival in the sense that they are all quite well decorated. However, regarding the event I attended, I felt that it was not deeply thought through enough, hence the feeling that it is not a success.

Promotion – I felt that the organisers did not make this series of events loud and clear enough. And that is why a financial loss has been incurred in these events, according to the news reported by The Straits Times newspaper recently.

People – the interactions I had with the other audiences were much, but were not pleasant contacts, as I felt that when a play is going on, everybody should at least respect the effort by the casting crew by keeping silent. The on-site marshals were friendly though. When my friends and I approached her for a favour to take a photo of us, she agreed without hesitating.

Partnership – the partners the organiser made are listed in the “Sponsors” link at the the references section.

Programming – overall, the Festival is well organised in the sense that everything done was relevant to the objectives of the organiser.

Packaging – renowned brands are brought in to the Festival as sponsors. This is a packaging strategy by the organisers.

To me, the National Arts Council of Singapore has done this portion to the best it could possibly be.

Let’s rate the event!
I would rate the event by how successful it is in 1. Arousing awareness, 2. Creating interest, strong enough to cause the purchase decision.

Firstly, arousing the awareness – I feel that particularly for the Hydro Sapiens World Premiere, not much publicity has been going on for the ending ceremony of this Singapore Arts Festival. It is only through the news from few friends that I got to know about it.

Next, creating interest – although not very aware of what the event is all about, I was interested to know more about it after hearing from how my friend described the event. I went online to check out the event on the Singapore Arts Festival’s website and became more interested to attend the event.

It is inevitable for unplanned situations to happen in the events. Hydro Sapiens World Premiere, the closing ceremony of Singapore Arts Festival, did not seem to have a contingency plan for a wet weather. On top of that are the problems in the lack of seats for the overwhelming number of audiences, and the lack of respect for the event by some of the residents in the neighbourhood, who did not appreciate the free-of-charge event and discussed loudly about what is happening.

As this was a free-of-charge event, there were many spectators, with numbers exceeding the original planned seats, thus causing some disruptions at the very back of the audiences, where many nearby residents stood to watch the commotions. This is a negative impact on those who really wanted to concentrate on the play performed by the crew on stage. From this I feel that the crowd control team is not efficient enough.

Also, I felt that this particular event was not enough a hit to lay a mark in the audiences’ minds. The play itself did not pack a punch enough to move the participants. In addition, I thought there might be some event management mistakes the organisers might have made, because the event site was rather disappointing to my friends and me when we realised that the event did not take up the entire bedok reservoir. It just was not grand enough to be the closing ceremony of a series of event.

Potential of event to meet tourist demand
Firstly, we should determine the type of event of The Singapore Arts Festival. The Singapore Arts Festival is planned and perceived as a hallmark event, with high demand and high value. But, as mentioned before, there was a loss made at the end of the Festival, so, in fact this event is a partial failure – a different phenomenon from previous endeavours.

Until the image and reputation of the Singapore Arts Festival becomes loud and stabilises, there would not be much potential for coping with the tourists’ demands.

How can they align the value of the event to the tourism mission of Singapore?
The tourism mission of Singapore based on the Singapore Tourism Board is to develop and champion tourism, so as to build the sector into a key driver of economic growth for Singapore.

The National Arts Council of Singapore can raise the value of the event to reach this tourism mission by emphasizing on the benefits everyone is able to obtain through the events, such as: clearing up doubts and myths of Arts in Singapore, increasing awareness of Arts, increasing appreciation for the Arts etc.

The following are pictures taken from the event. Some are not very blurr.