Branding Company news South Africa

The 2020 Brand Summit South Africa set to boost business tourism

Following a content rich and diverse local and international influencer speaker program in 2019, then representation on the prestigious program of the 2019 MICE DAY in Yekaterinburg, Russia, at the end of June, organisers of the annual Brand Summit South Africa are already in discussions with various partners to stretch the event into a week-long one, starting in 2020.

“The reasons for this are clear”, explains Solly Moeng, brand summit convenor, “South Africa remains a long-haul destination for most business tourists from the developed world. It is unreasonable to expect people to travel all the way, including from various African countries, just to attend a two-day event with nothing else arranged for them on the side lines. We also want our host city for each subsequent event to feel the benefits.”

Like in 2019, the core Brand Summit South Africa event will be hosted on the first Thursday and Friday of June. But, from 2020 onwards, the entire first week of June will be dubbed “Brand Summit SA Week”, starting on Monday, 1 June, in the case of next year. Such a program will have delegates, especially international ones, arriving in the host city the weekend before and being hosted on a number of excursions in the city and host region. Such excursions will be hosted in partnership with participating companies and destinations and in line with the themes of the summit, whose aims remain to remind South Africans and to show foreigners things that work and that should be supported.

The summit also discusses things that do not work, of course, and proposes ways to get them to work better. For South Africa to regain its country brand leadership it still needs to do specific things that will help it reclaim the innocence lost during the state capture period.

One-on-one business meetings will also be arranged ahead of the month of June, enabling delegates to be hosted by and to network with potential business partners or clients, locally, to see a lot more of the host city and region, and to spend more money in the area. In addition, a special Women Influence Forum will be hosted alongside the brand summit involving influential SA women and Yanina Dubeykovskaya, founder of the Davos, Switzerland, based World Communication Forum Association, and Founder of Women Influence Community, based in Paris.

“Also, in 2020, we aim to expand the thematic reach of the summit through a soft launch of the ‘Africa Brand Summit’, that will look at things that shape and feed perceptions about Africa and being African, around the continent and internationally. The role of education will be central to our 2020 discussions”, concluded Solly Moeng.

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