Event Design

Field-Testing Marriott’s Meetings Imagined

We kick the tires of Marriott International's comprehensive Meetings Imagined program.

meetings imaginedConsider the fact that Pinterest has 70 million users (80 percent of whom are women), and that as of April 24, those users had pinned more than 30 billion pins. So it’s no surprise that the popular site served as a big inspiration for Marriott Hotels’ new Meetings Imagined website.

Part of Marriott International’s comprehensive Meetings Imagined program, which seeks to revamp how meeting planners plan their events at Marriott properties through more flexible, intuitive options, meetingsimagined.com makes it super-easy for planners to search for visuals of specific ideas — everything from dessert stations to meeting layouts — that their chosen property can execute. So often do I find ideas on Pinterest that, when clicked on, reveal no source or way of recreating them in real life, and Marriott has keenly eliminated this frustration by including only ideas that its hotels have experience in creating. Users can search by individual property or seven meeting purposes — celebrate, decide, educate, ideate, network, produce, and promote — to find ideas, as well as easily share them via email, Pinterest, Facebook, and more with one click.

IMG_4752Meetings Imagined is currently in beta-test phase at four hotels in Europe and five in the United States: Chicago Marriott O’Hare, Tysons Corner Marriott, Gaithersburg Marriott Washingtonian Center, Orlando World Center Marriott, and the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, where I spent two days testing it out on two real-life events. With the help of the Marriott team and a few talented experts, we designed an invigorating space for an educational session on crowdfunding attended by local entrepreneurs from Atlanta, followed by a networking reception for the attendees that showcased the hotel’s creative culinary acumen, including a farmer’s-market-style salad bar, rustic garden-inspired décor, and frozen caramel popcorn (made using liquid nitrogen!).

Visit meetingsimagined.com for more information and inspiration, and check out a future issue of Convene for the full recap on how we helped conceptualize these two events at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis using the Meetings Imagined program.

Jennifer N. Dienst

Contributing Editor Jennifer N. Dienst is a freelance writer based in Charleston, South Carolina.