Robbie Thain
Founder, CEO
AI-generated illustrative image. Not an official campaign image.
Read Amex GBT’s 2027 forecast through a CPG lens, connecting attendee relevance with field staffing, booth flow and clearly defined interactions.
On October 22, 2026, Demand Gen Report published coverage of American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT)’s 2027 Global Meetings and Events Forecast. Its account identified improving attendee experience as the leading priority, cited by 42% of respondents and ranked first for the third consecutive year.
For CPG and beverage marketing leaders, the practical issue is how that priority reaches the event floor. A more relevant experience needs a clear purpose beyond attracting attention. The operating brief should connect what someone experiences with the interaction the brand intends to measure.
According to Amex GBT, the forecast draws on a YouGov survey of 500 meetings professionals across 11 countries. Respondents reported that attendees increasingly expect:
These findings concern experience design and planning priorities. They give event teams a reason to examine whether their format makes room for relevant conversations and participation.
The spending outlook adds another planning consideration. Amex GBT reports that 91% of respondents expect overall meetings and events spending to increase in 2027. That is the share expecting an increase, not the size of a projected budget increase.
The evidence has a defined boundary. This international survey measures planners’ expectations rather than U.S.-only results or observed consumer behavior. The forecast coverage supplies no booth-traffic totals, qualified-lead counts, conversion rates, sales lift or measured Return on Investment. Demand Gen Report’s “generic booth traffic won’t cut it” framing is editorial interpretation, not a tested finding that personalized interactions convert better.
The useful response is to treat attendee relevance as a design priority and define the intended business outcome separately. That keeps the forecast useful without asking it to answer a booth-level performance question it never studied.
Our stance is straightforward: welcome people warmly and be precise about what the encounter is meant to achieve. That is where aloha and operational discipline belong together. For a food or beverage brand, an inviting product moment and a useful commercial conversation should be part of the same planning discussion.
Makai creates face-to-face experiences designed to capture attention and generate measurable sales pipeline. Our services span consumer events and retail demonstrations alongside trade show activations. Across those formats, we believe the experience deserves both an emotional purpose and a business purpose.
A consumer event might center on participation and product trial. A trade show activation might prioritize retailer interest or a target-buyer conversation. The practical implications accompanying the forecast support defining that useful interaction before committing spend, rather than deciding afterward that every visitor represented the same value.
We design festival zones, premieres and pop-ups that bring brands and people together through interaction and engagement. Our crews manage execution and track reach and response metrics. The lesson we draw for this forecast is to connect the experience concept with the measurement objective while both are still being shaped.
This does not make reach irrelevant. We provide reporting on reach, trials, leads and sales because each describes a different part of campaign performance. Our view is that a busy activation becomes easier to evaluate when its reporting distinguishes exposure from participation and qualified interest.
The forecast does not change an event’s physical footprint by itself. The operational implications follow from the choices a brand makes in response. Below is our practical interpretation of what experience-focused planning should mean for staffing, floor flow and lead capture.
Start with the useful interaction identified in the research’s practical implications: a target-buyer conversation, a product trial with permission-based follow-up or a retailer meeting. Those are different objectives. Treating them as interchangeable makes the staffing conversation less precise.
Makai’s retail demonstrations use trained brand ambassadors to lead product trials and real conversations. Our trade show services focus on spaces that attract attention and start conversations. We believe the staffing brief should reflect which of those functions matters for the activation, rather than asking a general engagement goal to stand in for a defined outcome.
For leaders reviewing a plan, the practical test is whether the staffing approach supports the experience being promised. Hands-on participation and buyer qualification deserve explicit attention in that review. The forecast gives no staffing ratio, so the judgment should stay tied to the activation’s purpose.
Personalization is not only a messaging consideration. In our view, it also belongs in the discussion about how people move through an activation and where conversations happen.
We designed and managed a 40 by 20 foot trade show environment for Glanbia at Natural Products Expo West 2025. The activation brought think!, Isopure, Optimum Nutrition and Amazing Grass into one coordinated space. Our team handled concept, operations, staffing and breakdown, with more than 14,000 recorded product samples distributed across the activation stations.
For this discussion, the useful detail is the coordinated footprint. Multiple activation stations shared one environment and one operational scope. We see that as a concrete reason to discuss product engagement and space planning together.
Applied to the forecast, our recommendation is to assess the footprint against the intended interaction. Product trial and a qualified buyer conversation have different purposes. A design review centered on making room for qualified meetings can keep that distinction visible before the build is approved.
The research’s practical implications distinguish activity measures from outcome measures. Footfall and samples handed out describe activity. Qualified conversations, opted-in follow-up, retailer interest and attributable sales address different business questions.
Our measurement approach tracks awareness, engagement and conversion. That provides a useful basis for keeping the reporting categories separate rather than presenting every interaction as a lead.
For this forecast’s relevance theme, we favor defining what counts as a useful interaction before the event. That definition should also state what follow-up the interaction warrants. Otherwise, the experience brief and the reporting brief can describe different versions of success.
A product trial can be valuable without automatically becoming qualified pipeline. Likewise, a retailer conversation deserves a record that reflects the interest expressed. These are measurement judgments for the brand to establish and track consistently, not labels to apply simply because the booth was crowded.
The same distinction belongs in the event planning checklist: what the experience invites people to do should connect with what the team plans to record.
More expected spending does not settle the resource question. Demand Gen Report says 91% of respondents anticipate higher per-attendee costs for product launches. Skift Meetings reports that 84% expect higher costs for conferences with trade shows.
Skift Meetings interprets that combination of rising budgets and costs as greater pressure to justify event spending and connect decisions to measurable results. For Makai, the sensible planning response is to compare proposed experiences on both their intended engagement and the outcomes the brand will track.
That does not mean selecting the smallest footprint or stripping away the experience. It means giving the cost discussion a clear objective. A plan centered on broad product trial should be evaluated against that purpose, while a buyer-meeting plan should make its qualification objective visible.
After execution, the same definitions can inform an operational debrief focused on the next activation. The goal is to connect what the team intended with what it recorded, then identify which execution decisions deserve another look.
The strongest planning implication is not a mandate for a particular booth feature or technology. It is a clearer connection between attendee relevance and the interaction the brand values. Experience design, staffing and measurement should be evaluated against that shared purpose.
As a CMO or VP of marketing, will you bring field and sales leads together today to define the useful buyer interaction your next activation will measure?
Buyer-relevant consumer events sit on brand managers’ and trade show coordinators’ desks; Makai designs them around interaction, emotion and engagement. When low-quality leads make a crowded trade show hard to justify, Makai’s experiential campaigns focus on turning brief consumer encounters into qualified leads for premium CPG brands.
30 Years Experiential & Retail Activation Partner for CPG & Beverage Brands | Multi-Market Demos, Roadshows & Costco/Club Programs That Actually Sell
