© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Recently I participated in the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) annual conference 2020 as a presenter. The ACR conference is a large and prestigious academic conference on research related to consumer behavior. The conference was held virtually in Paris. Participating virtually meant that one could not get the “feel” of a typical conference (which I will call a “venue” conference going forward). But it struck me that once I let go of my expectations of a venue conference, the virtual format was probably – no, definitely – more effective, at least for me. The virtual conference starkly revealed how costly venue conferences had been, when I counted the nonobvious costs of venue compared to virtual.

In this write-up, I have attempted to explain why, and hence make a case for all conferences considering going partially virtual even after the pandemic lifts. Towards the end I have given a set of options that conference organizers can consider when the pandemic has been managed and virtual conferences are no longer essential.

Note: this post is long, but is structured with numbered and titled lists for easier reading.

1. High inclusivity. The most attractive aspect of a virtual conference is its inclusivity. For a venue conference, any participant outside a narrow time zone window (local time plus or minus two hours) must travel to the venue. This entails loss of time, monetary expense, safety concerns, and mental hassle. For doctoral students, especially in emerging markets, money is a major concern and flight tickets are expensive deterrent to attending conferences. For all participants, travel and jetlag lead to loss of time beyond the 2-3 days of the conference. I have detailed each of these points separately later.
2. No compromise between talks. Because the talks in the conference were recorded, I could watch any talk I wanted to and then reach out to the presenter for questions and comments. In a venue conference, several sessions are held in parallel, leading to the inevitable compromise of having to choose between multiple simultaneous talks that one is interested in.
3. Comfortable pacing. Given that the talks were recorded and uploaded, they were made available for viewing for about a month. This meant that I could use four weekends to watch all interesting talks at leisure, noting down topics and authors who interested me, and then reach out to authors.
4. No break from regular work. Besides attending a few live networking sessions and workshops, I was free to continue my regular work and watched interesting talks during weekends. This was a better fit with my work schedule compared to devoting 2-3 days to a conference, with nonstop sessions of 2-3 hours.
5. Unlimited networking. Often, the biggest plus of a conference is the ability to meet and discuss ideas with like-minded researchers. Usually, the time constraint of a venue conference makes arranging even short meetings difficult. In the virtual conference, the associated app allowed any participant to connect with any other participant and take conversation forward.
6. Larger audience. Recorded talks also meant that the entire set of registered participants, and not just the 10-odd attendees of my session, could view and give feedback on my talk.
7. Wider sharing. Interactions were through the conference app, implying that both private and public conversations were possible, and could be made use of as appropriate. There were far more discussion groups and idea sharing than would have been possible in a venue conference.
8. No uncomfortable interactions. In a venue conference, there are times when one is stuck with no one to talk to and yet not wanting to be seen as unsociable, resulting in a compulsion to talk to somebody while sipping tea or eating lunch. These interactions, completely couched in conference niceties, are unproductive at best and stressful at worst. The virtual conference allowed for planned and productive interactions with selected participants.
9. No guilt of multitasking. I attended (virtually) only sessions I wanted to. This allowed me to attend with full focus, sparing me the guilt of pretending to listen while texting or browsing.
10. No expense. There were no flight costs, no pricey hotel expenses, no visa fees, no jolts associated with the translation of euros to rupees. No expensive clothes that I couldn’t use later. The sheer absence of winters in Kerala, where I work now, meant that winter clothes are always in a suitcase under the bed, awaiting their annual airing and new naphthalene balls. This year there were no new additions to the suitcase.
11. No travel hassles. There was no need to book taxis, compare prices and book tickets, book accommodation, get a visa, learn the map of the location, and so on. No need of travel checklists or worries of losing my passport or cash. Here is a typical example. In May 2019, I was in Germany for the European Marketing Academy (EMAC) annual conference. During my flight to Germany, I had a big shock when I casually checked my international power outlet connector, only to find that my laptop connector wasn’t fitting. It took me all of ten minutes and a lot of prayers to get them to fit. With a wise old lady watching from the next seat. The sigh of relief was short-lived. Imagine my horror when I took out my laptop and found that it was wet. After I wiped it with tissue, I realized I could not put it back because my bag was wet too. Apparently, one shouldn’t carry water bottles on international flights because the difference in air pressure makes them leak. I knew this. And the wise old lady watched and smiled. There were four more hours to go and, finally, it was the dry air of the flight and the empty seat between the wise lady and me that saved my laptop.
12. No climate shock. Approximate maximum/minimum temperatures that May were: Ahmedabad 43/30˚C, Hamburg: 20/10˚C. Three sweaters (which was all I had packed for the summer) couldn’t stop me from shivering as I returned after a walk at 7:00 pm my second day in Germany. When I complained that the heating in my hotel room wasn’t working, I was told that 20˚C was the norm for heating.
13. No jetlag. Despite all textbook precautions, my jetlag after the flight to Hamburg took two weeks to wear off, hampering productivity and sparking irritation throughout the duration. I was disoriented the first day of the conference. Here is my approximate itinerary the day I landed at the conference venue. (Feel free to skip this long, tiresome, and currently irrelevant description and move to the next point.) All times are given in Indian Standard Time to indicate the passage of time.
    • Wake up to a usual day of work – 7:00 am
    • Leave house in Ahmedabad – 11:30 pm
    • Reach the airport and begin waiting without falling asleep – 12 midnight
    • Board the flight – 4:30 am (bleary eyes unbearable)
    • Reach Dubai international airport – 7:30 am (time zone confusion begins)
    • Start waiting at another terminal for the next flight without sleeping – 8:00 am (by now I need sleep more than I need the conference)
    • Board the next flight – 10:30 am
    • Eat breakfast – 11:30 am (am I hungry? My brain and stomach are now disconnected so I can’t decide, but it’s 14 hours since I ate anything, so I must be hungry)
    • Eat lunch – 4:30 pm (I have never eaten at this time)
    • Land at Hamburg – 6:00 pm
    • Gather luggage and board a train – 7:30 pm
    • Get down from the train and locate the hotel – 8:30 pm
    • Throw my luggage down, yank my shoes off, and fall asleep – 9:00 pm (being horizontal after a lapse of 38 hours is a relief indeed).

That said, I did miss a few good things associated with a venue conference.

1. No live sessions. Obviously, watching a computer screen does not fully convey the vibes of a live presentation or meeting. But this lacking seemed miniscule in comparison with the advantages of virtual sessions. Also even in the virtual conference, there were live networking sessions and workshops which allowed for synchronous meetings.
2. No serendipitous connections. In a venue conference, there is always the possibility that the stranger whom you sit next to during a talk or whom you have tea with is a like-minded researcher, and a conversation could spark a collaboration. But such instances are rare.
3. No sightseeing. We usually combine a conference with a few days of sightseeing and last year I got a chance to polish my basic German language skills as well. This year I had to be content with reviewing last year’s photographs.

Here are some suggestions for conference organizers to gain the best of both worlds, virtual and venue.

1. Virtual and venue. Conference organizers could consider dividing activity into virtual and venue segments and treat these segments differently. The venue segment could be a “plus” and could be conducted locally whereas the recorded or virtual segments could be held at the international level.
2. Virtual plus venue. In a venue conference, participants could be provided the option of presenting their talk virtually, and this presentation could be synchronous (live) or asynchronous (recorded). This is already taking place in other domains, but I am not aware of conferences in marketing that allow virtual talks in a venue conference. Synchronous has the advantage of immediate feedback and live conversation, but requires participants to overcome time zone constraints.
3. Venue to virtual. One way to reduce the compromise of having to choose between talks is to record talks and allow participants to watch any talk of their choice for a period of, say, one month following the venue conference.
4. Virtual to venue. A large virtual conference could pave the way for a smaller and focused venue conference by allowing for crowdsourcing and audience-powered selection of talks.

In future, when virtual reality and augmented reality become powerful enough to make venue immersion possible on a daily basis, conferences and other meetings could be held completely virtually without losing the advantages of venue!