The Dolphin and The Swan… anyone in the events business is familiar with these sister hotels joined at the hip by a long walkway full of topiary, statues and park benches . It’s Disney meets Versailles. Big swan, big dolphin, pastels, pink flamingos, you get it. It’s Orlando, Florida, one of America’s most popular corporate travel destinations, and just the place for some staging sleight of hand on a grand scale.
When it comes to corporate events, this acme of fantasy demands big ideas and bold new approaches, even if they sometimes feel like pop art gone mad. I was part of a team that produced a pharmaceutical product launch there with just this surreal feeling jangling in our heads.
The Assignment
Take 2000 or so pharma reps to one of said hotels, in this case The Dolphin, train them on a new product and motivate them to sell the heck out of it.
The Solution
Most of these reps sold into hospitals but getting a new drug on formulary in a hospital is very difficult. To give them a head start we came up with a powerful training piece designed to totally immerse them in their target environment. We decided to build them a hospital inside the hotel and staff it with doctors, nurses, administrators, pharmacists, support staff and more. The hotel allowed us to effectively take over an entire section of the convention center and literally build a hospital inside it. My favorite piece was the pharmacy where thousands of medicines were on display.
To maintain the illusion we converted one of the rear entrances of the hotel into an Emergency Room entrance and moved the reps from buses directly inside. Once the tour of the hospital was complete we sent them off into the main tent where they went into general session. This gave us the chance to run through a final rehearsal for the main training event, whereupon the reps would be sent back into the hospital in teams to hunt down the various personnel who could influence the all important formulary decision. As part of the pre-event routine they had each been given a custom video featuring actors playing key hospital roles whom they had to seek out when they got to Orlando. They received points for how they sought out and interacted with this same team of actors, who were now on site.
It was gratifying to see how the reps plunged into the challenge and how skillfully they adapted to the hospital and its personnel, making the right connections and influencing the right people in order to get a ‘yes’ and get their drug on formulary.
It was a massive undertaking statistically but the results were exceptional and it fit right in with the kitschy nature of the location. It’s been done many times since but we still like to think of it as the first of the virtual hospitals.
