Sandra O’Loughlin

Smart women have known for years that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Now it seems that marketers have awakened to that knowledge, too, and are incorporating sweet indulgences like wine, chocolate, gourmet dishes and even helpful tips into events that offer attendees a respite from their busy lives.

So you just held your company's biggest event of the year, a global meeting that attracted 20,000 attendees and 250-plus exhibitors and featured 300 informational sessions. How do you keep the momentum going? If you’re Salesforce.com, the answer is a b-to-b road show called the Cloudforce Tour, a rolling series of one-day events that for the past eight years has brought the excitement of its annual user conference, a mega gathering called Dreamforce held each December in San Francisco, to the local level.

Remember the extreme Diet Coke and Mentos experiments from 2007 in which two lab-coated science guys drop Mentos mints into two-liter bottles of Diet Coke? The video depicting the resulting geysers spewing across their backyard has been viewed no less than 10 million times on YouTube and became a cultural phenomenon as it spread digitally around the globe.

Music. It’s the universal language. What better way to connect with audiences than by playing tunes that energize, motivate or set a mood. And now, thanks to iTunes playlists, brand marketers can capitalize on the music they play at events and conferences to extend the life of the experience and sometimes even do a little good along the way.

As part of a strategy to personify its brand in a fun and realistic way on an important Mexican holiday, tequila brand el Jimador on Cinco de Mayo unleashed 100 brand ambassadors dressed as jimadores (those who harvest the agave plants needed to make tequila) through the streets of Manhattan. The number of jimadores is a reference to the el Jimadore’s tagline, “100% Agave, 100% Real.”