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Guest at a DLISH client appreciation dinner smelling from a handmade brass vessel, one of the designed experiences that replace the steakhouse and the wine tasting
By Mona Bavar, Founder, DLISH
The Brief
The clients who matter most have been to everything. The steakhouse, the box at the game, the golf day, the holiday party, the wine tasting. This is why each of those stopped working, what replaced them in the programs we design, and how to plan one for Q4 before the calendar closes.
Every year, firms spend real money thanking the clients who matter most. And those same clients receive the same five invitations from everyone else trying to keep their attention. A client appreciation event competes with every other client appreciation event that person was invited to that month. The steakhouse is not competing with a bad evening. It is competing with the same evening, hosted by your competitor, the week before.
I design client experiences for private equity firms, law firms and technology companies whose clients own everything and have been everywhere. Here is what those clients are tired of, and what we send them to instead.
1. The steakhouse dinner.It stopped working the year the guest could have booked it himself. A private room at a restaurant everyone knows is a good meal, and a good meal is not an event. The conversation is the same conversation as the office, moved to a table with better lighting.
What replaced it: a dinner written around the guests. Before the evening, each guest answers four questions. The menu, the seating and the card at each place are built from the answers. We ran this in London as the Culinary Archetypes dinner, and the guests talked about the cards for longer than they talked about the food. Nobody has ever been served a menu that was about them.
2. The box at the game.A suite is a room with a view of something the guest could watch at home. The host spends the night managing catering and the guests spend it watching the game, which is what they came for, and which has nothing to do with you.
What replaced it: access to a place that is closed. A gallery after the public leaves, a maker's studio with the maker in it, an archive with the person who keeps it. What they remember is access they would not have arranged for themselves: the closed door opened, the maker in the room, the archive with the person who keeps it.
3. The golf day.Half the room doesn't play. The half that does spends five hours with three people, one of whom is the host, and the other guests never meet. Golf is a wonderful way to deepen one relationship and a poor way to hold twenty.
What replaced it: a day of shared work. Our Grove to Table program in Tuscany puts a leadership team or a client group in the olive grove at harvest in the morning and at a long table at noon with the oil they picked. A box of the harvest reaches each home in December. People who have carried a crate together talk differently at dinner. The same is true of a cooking class inside a starred kitchen, which we run in Naples: twelve aprons, one chef, and the hierarchy disappears when the CFO can't plate.
4. The holiday party.December is the month every client is over-invited. A December party is a room full of people who have been to three that week and are calculating how early they can leave. The gesture is real; the timing kills it.
What replaced it: the same budget spent in a month when nobody else is spending it. A private table in February. A workshop in the spring. If the evening has to be in Q4, make it the one that does not look like the others: a mystery dinner where every course is a card and nobody knows the menu, which is how our Tarot & Taste dinner ran in Los Angeles. Surprise makes people talk to each other instead of checking their phones.
5. The wine tasting.Everyone has done one. Most of your guests have a cellar. A sommelier pouring six glasses in a private room is pleasant and forgettable, and the guest learns nothing they will repeat.
What replaced it: a tasting the guest could not have arranged, led by the person who made the thing. Our Flavors of Memory workshop in Marrakesh had guests building a blend from raw spice under a maker's direction and then eating a meal cooked with it. They did not simply taste something. They made part of the experience themselves, which gave them a reason to remember it.
Before we accept a client appreciation brief, the idea has to pass three questions. If it fails one, we go back to the drawing board.
Could the guest have booked it?If the guest could have booked exactly the same experience themselves, we keep looking. Appreciation is access: a person who does not usually give evenings, a place that is not on any platform.
Is it about them?A room full of your logo is a marketing event with guests in it. The evening should be built from what the guests care about, which means someone has to ask them first.
Can they retell it in one sentence?Write the sentence you want a guest to say to a colleague on Monday. If the sentence is "we went to a nice dinner," change the plan. If it is "we picked the olives for the oil we drank," you have an event.
If people remember the venue, something went wrong.
There is no standard price for a DLISH experience because there is no standard experience. Group size, destination, access, talent, production, personalization and logistics all change the scope. The most useful starting point is the budget you already have. Send us the city, guest count, occasion and budget per person, and we can tell you what is possible. How companies set and defend the wider number is in our corporate gift budget guide.
A single evening needs four to six weeks. Harvest-tied, multi-day or cross-border programs need eight to twelve, and harvest dates are set by the crop. For December programs, we recommend making the key decisions by mid-October; harvest-tied, multi-day and cross-border experiences may need considerably more. That is the same wall we describe in the holiday timeline. Five programs we have designed, with what each one involved, are on the case studies page; how we think about the dinner itself is in designing a client appreciation dinner.
Send us the city, guest count, occasion and budget per head. We'll show you what the experience could be, with three directions back within two days.
Planning something for Q4?
Send us the city, guest count, occasion and budget per head. We'll send back three directions within two days.
Send a BriefWhat are good client appreciation event ideas for executives who have been to everything?Access the guest could not arrange: a gallery after hours, a maker's studio with the maker present, an archive with its keeper, a harvest day at an estate, or a dinner designed around the guests themselves. The test is whether the guest could have booked it. If yes, it is a meal, not an event.
Why don't steakhouse dinners and sports suites work for client appreciation anymore?Because the guest receives the same invitation from every firm that wants the same renewal. A private room or a suite is hospitality the guest could buy; it produces a pleasant evening and no story to retell.
When should a client appreciation event be held?December is the hardest month to stand out. If you have flexibility, consider January, February or spring. If it needs to happen in Q4, make it an invitation that does not look like the other five already on the calendar.
What is the difference between a client appreciation event and client entertainment?Entertainment is something the guest enjoys; appreciation is something the guest could not have had without you. Access, attention and a story they can retell are what separate the two.
Your best clients have been everywhere. Send them somewhere that's closed.
