With marketing events becoming ever more important to companies’ customer-acquisition and -relationship efforts, Liz Lathan, CMP saw a need for focused, substantive conversations among the professionals who create those events—not just brief encounters during the big conventions for the wider meeting-planning industry.

So, the former global events manager for Dell and IBM teamed up with meeting-design veteran Nicole Osibodu to create Club Ichi, which they market as “a refreshing new way to expand your network and advance your career in B2B event marketing.”

With an official kickoff in December 2023, Club Ichi struck a rich vein. Lathan says the group now has more than 6,000 in-house, agency, and freelance event marketers who receive weekly educational content, plus several hundred “premium insider” members who can converse via a dedicated Slack channel, engage in live online discussions with forward-thinking industry players, and attend the group’s in-person retreats held a few times a year.

The most recent retreat happened in Croatia in October, using back-to-back three-day itineraries aboard an 18-cabin yacht on the Adriatic Sea (see photo below). One of the most memorable parts of the event itinerary: small-group breakouts held on inflatable unicorn-shaped rafts, which were tethered to the yacht with short lines. “We really aim for more intimate, meaningful, and memorable conversations and relationships,” Latham says about the retreats, those water-borne breakouts, and the other opportunities offered to Club Ichi members.

MeetingsNet recently asked Lathan to share more about her and Osibodu’s nearly one-year-old venture.

Where did the name Club Ichi come from?

It comes from the Japanese phrase “ichi-go, ichi-e” which means “one moment, one time.” Because that’s what we’re all trying to create with our events: those fleeting moments where we have the right people in the right place at the right time.

Also, we put “Club” in front of the term because we’re going for an informal-lounge atmosphere for event marketers to be in their comfort zone with people who understand the role. We believe we are not in competition with industry associations; we are a supplement to the professional development and learning planners can get there. We fill a gap because we can have a more relaxed peer-to-peer-focused environment that does not need financial support from bringing in sponsors, which could affect the topics of conversation.

What is the overarching goal for the group?

It’s to have strategic conversations related to events that drive business rather than having logistics-focused conversations. The content that’s coming from us and from members is around business development, account-based marketing, pipeline revenue, and what it takes to build out experiences that drive more revenue to the organization.

What have members been talking about the most lately?

There’s a lot of, “How do I elevate my role within the organization?” It’s very common to have reorganizations happening where the event teams are positioned inside corporations, and chief marketing officers are going away in favor of chief relationship officers or chief growth officers. So, there's a lot of questions about where does the event role fit now: Should it be part of the sales group because we're focused on demand generation and short-term sales? Or is the role seen more as part of a branding approach?

Also, in-house event marketers are trying to learn the words and the messaging they should use with leadership in order to be a strategic part of the marketing organization—not viewed as something that can be outsourced. Basically, how do we make sure that this function is layoff-proof?

What are some of your more unique offerings?

Every month, we do a web TV show called THAT Show, which is an acronym for “the hub for amazing things.” It’s a news desk-style show where we share stuff that’s going on in the community and then we pull in some industry expertise to elaborate. For example, we recently brought on three CMOs to talk about how they’re thinking of events as they develop their 2025 budgets.

Also, each month we do something called Sounding Board, where members can submit a challenge that they're having, and members will jump on a Zoom session and try to solve that challenge.

We have Ichi Academy, which is members teaching members—they are so eager to share their knowledge. We’ve focused on topics ranging from networking for introverts, to how to build out your 12-month event portfolio to align with a larger strategy, to how to create an investment plan to fund your retirement. We do those about twice a month.

And in January, we’re conducting an online career-accelerator program for event pros who want to learn more about marketing and the terms and phrases connected to that discipline.

Are all the in-person events as small as your recent one in Croatia with 36 attendees? And what else do these events focus on?

We try to keep the in-person events at about 100 people, to make sure that people can have deeper conversations and build relationships.

Right now, we are working on a mid-December event for brand-side professionals. It will be in Austin; we’re looking to go behind the scenes with the folks at South by Southwest and talk about what it takes to create a standout activation. And for January we’re looking to put together a behind-the-scenes tour at CES in Las Vegas with our agency partner, MC2.

We also do sidecar gatherings at some big industry events. We were just at IMEX, where we held a 2:30 a.m. “exploding pajama party” to watch the implosion of the Tropicana.

One of our mottos is “think outside the ballroom” because we’re using shared experiences that allow for a lot of conversation.

Main image: Liz Lathan, CMP (right) and Nicole Osibodu (left), co-founders of event-marketing community Club Ichi.

This article was originally published in our sister publication, MeetingsNet.

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