2027 PROGRAM
The topics are set. Speakers are being confirmed one by one, and every confirmed name goes straight onto this page.
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15.00 - 17.00 OPTIONAL: tour through Innsbruck
Before the official programme starts, we take you into the city in groups of maximum 20 persons per group, put together at random. You walk, you eat, you talk. By the time you’re back you’ve had two hours of conversation with people from other companies and other markets, and the opening reception later that evening feels like a continuation rather than a start.
The walk takes you through Innsbruck’s old town, along medieval alleys and painted townhouses, with a stop on the Inn Bridge where the Nordkette mountains rise straight up behind the river. Your guide will also open a few doors that most visitors walk straight past.
The route includes the Golden Roof and the Court Church, where the tomb of Emperor Maximilian I is surrounded by 28 bronze statues of imperial ancestors and heroic figures, all of them larger than life. Halfway through there is a tasting stop with Tyrolean specialities: a traditional speck platter, regional cheeses, a glass of local wine and a schnapps.
Two hours, entrance to the Court Church included, plenty of anecdotes along the way and a deep jump into the Tiroler environment. How could you start better?
Please note this is an optional tour, not included in your regular conference ticket. Ticket price is € 75,- including drinks and food. Transport to the tour start and end is not included.
18.30 - 23.00 Tiroler opening reception
Welcome to Tirol. For more than six decades the Gundolf family has run Tiroler Abend, a Brand Experience Center in its own right, built entirely around the brand “Tirol.” Expect yodeling, expect schnapps, expect a room that really will touch your five senses. This is exactly what we like to see in a brand home. Music, live performance, decor, food and drink all pull in the same direction: Tirol.
Pick up your conference badge here, meet the brand home community, and continue the conversations you left off in Dublin last year.
08.30-09.00 Badge handout and welcome coffee
We are ready to begin day one of the conference here at the Swarovski Kristallwelten. If you didn’t have a chance to attend last night’s opening event , you can pick up your badge here. Grab a coffee and get ready for a great day of sessions.
09.00-09.10 Opening
Welcome to the third edition of the Brand Experience Center Conference
Speaker: Bart Dohmen, Organisor
09.10-10.00 The world of Swarovski Kristallwelten
Swarovski Kristallwelten is delighted to host the Brand Experience Center Conference in Wattens, Tyrol, and to welcome participants into the fascinating world of crystal: a world designed to create moments of wonder.
Since opening in 1995, more than 18 million guests from around the globe have visited Swarovski Kristallwelten in Wattens, discovering an ever-evolving, multifaceted universe of art, creativity and crystal. Since opening in 1995, the Chambers of Wonder have been at the heart of this experience, bringing together artistic vision, immersive storytelling and the unique heritage of the Swarovski brand.
Together with Laura Engel, Head of Digital Marketing, and Thomas Steiner, Head of Operations, participants will gain a behind-the-scenes perspective on Swarovski Kristallwelten: from the evolution of the brand and its history to today’s marketing structure and the way this unique destination is positioned and communicated to audiences around the world.
The session will also explore what it takes to operate a destination of this scale and complexity. How do seasonality and changing visitor patterns influence daily operations? How are extraordinary artistic installations maintained while preserving the magic of the guest experience? And how does the team respond to evolving expectations, operational challenges and emerging trends in tourism, experience design and digital marketing?
The insights shared during the session, combined with the opportunity to experience Swarovski Kristallwelten and the Chambers of Wonder during the evening program, will provide participants with a glimpse into the world of crystal and its moments of wonder, while also offering a deeper understanding of the brand, marketing and operational thinking that brings this unique destination to life every day.
Speaker:
Laura Engel, Head of Digital Swarovski Kristallwelten
Thomas Steiner, Head of operations, Swarovski Kristallwelten
10.00-10.30 Financial Ownership and Accountability of Brand Homes
Every Brand Home sits somewhere between a marketing expense and a business of its own. Almost nobody says out loud where their own venue actually sits.
This session starts from one idea: a Brand Home exists to build the brand, so its financial result only makes sense next to what it does for that brand. From there, the questions get harder. If the venue loses money, is that a cost per impact, or the price of credibility? If it breaks even, is it a brand-building platform that costs nothing? And if it makes a profit, who has a claim on it: the experience itself, the marketing budget that sends visitors there, the brand, or the wider business?
Speaker: To be announced soon
10.30-11.00 Network Break
The opportunity to meet or catch up with others working in Brand Experience Centers and other places creating and sharing unique stories and that over a nice cup of coffee, tea and refreshments.
Break sponsors:
One break sponsor opportunity still available. Please check our sponsorpage for more information
11.00-11.30 The power of people!
What visitors quote afterwards is almost never the film in the second room. It is the guide who made time for a question, or the host at the entrance who did not. You can have a strong brand, a good building and the best exhibition in the sector, and none of it survives contact with a badly run shift.
In his previous role, Coen Bertens was Park Director with responsibility for a team of over 2,000. In 2019 Efteling was voted the most customer-friendly organisation in the Netherlands, an award decided by the public rather than by the industry.
He takes us through how that was done and what it took. Which decisions changed what actually happened on the floor, and which ones stayed in the folder. How you hold a standard when a large part of the team is young and in their first job.
He translates the lessons from Efteling’s large-scale operation into practical tips you can use in Brand Experience Centers with a team of twenty-five or slightly larger.
11.30-12.00 Nudging: The Art of (Digital) Influence
Many brands lack the expertise and resources needed to harness the potential of Behavioral Science to increase profitability. Yet brands that understand the psychological mechanisms behind purchasing decisions and systematically leverage behavioral signals can influence customer behavior in a targeted and effective way.
In this talk, you will learn how Nobel Prize-winning insights from Behavioral Science can be combined with AI in a self-learning platform to create hyper-personalized customer experiences—significantly increasing conversion rates and revenue.
Real-world use cases of behamics across the digital touchpoints of various brands will demonstrate how purchasing behavior can be intelligently influenced at scale, without requiring any technical effort.
12.00-12.45 Design session: Design essentials of a succesful Brand Experience Center
Designers hand over a venue and move on. The delegates in this room are the ones who live with the result. This session puts three design companies on stage to talk about what they have learned from the venues they built and, more usefully, from the ones that did not work as intended.
Expect the practical layer: how a concept survives contact with a real visitor flow, which choices lock a venue in for a decade, what the operator should insist on before a design is signed off, and where designers and operators consistently misunderstand each other. Bring the question you wished you had asked your own designer.
Speakers: Panel of designers to be announced soon
12.45-14.00Lunch
While enjoying a complimentary lunch you have time to learn more about the background of the other conference attendees.
Lunch Sponsors:
After our lunch break, the Swarovski Factory tour starts. To make this work, we need to split the group into two equal parts. One part goes to the factory, the other part follows the track below. Halfway through the afternoon, we switch around.
Please look at the content of the two tracks and let us know your preference during registration. We will do our best to place you in the track you prefer, but we cannot guarantee it, since the two groups need to end up the same size.
Breakout program Track 1
14.00-14.30 How to find the right ticketing partner?
The right ticketing partner makes a venue easier to run. Most venues make this choice only once in a long while, so few people get to do it often enough to know what to look for. This session is about what makes the difference during the selection, and what operators who went through it recently would do differently.
Speaker: To be announced soon
14.30 - 15.00 Designing for Gen Z: The Why, What and How of Brand Experiences
Gen Z is the future of the experience economy. Their spending power is growing faster than any other generation’s, but they’ve grown up highly digital, skeptical of brands, and hungry for the “real thing” in a way older cohorts aren’t. The experiences that work today may not be the ones that win them over.
15.00 - 15.30 Refreshment break
Break sponsors:
One break sponsor opportunity still available. Please check our sponsorpage for more information
15.30-17.00 Swarovski factory Tour
This track takes you by bus to the Swarovski factory, for a look inside the glass-cutting workshop where the crystals are actually made. Alongside the explanation of what you’re seeing, you’ll hear the story behind the VIP Factory Tour: how it became one of the site’s most successful commercial products, and what made that work.
Breakout program Track 2
14.00-15.30 Swarovski factory tour
This track takes you by bus to the Swarovski factory, for a look inside the glass-cutting workshop where the crystals are actually made. Alongside the explanation of what you’re seeing, you’ll hear the story behind the VIP Factory Tour: how it became one of the site’s most successful commercial products, and what made that work.
15.30-16.00 Refreshment break
Break sponsors:
One break sponsor opportunity still available. Please check our sponsorpage for more information
16.00-16.30 How to measure success? Which are the right KPI's?
A session going through the many KPI possibilities. But which ones are really important, measurable and creating value?
Speaker: To be announced soon
16.30-17.00 Experience Center as Enterprise Growth Catalyst: Microsoft's Experience Center One
When one of the world’s most powerful companies decides that its highest-value business conversations should happen inside a purpose-built brand destination and can connect that investment directly to billions in revenue, it sets a new benchmark for what a B2B experience center can be.
This session examines Microsoft Experience Center One (EC1) not only as an experience design story but as a business strategy: how a physical brand destination became an enterprise growth driver, with direct involvement from the company’s most senior commercial leadership. For an industry where discussing ROI is often the hardest internal conversation, this case study changes the conversation.
Presented by Microsoft Immersive Experience Leaders and Hyperquake
17.00-20.00 Program Break: Reflect & Recharge
Whether you choose to explore the surroundings, climb some Austrian mountains, catch up on notes, or simply unwind, this pause offers the perfect opportunity to digest your experience and prepare for an engaging evening at Kristallwelten
20.00-23.00 Networking Dinner at the Blue room, Swarovski Kristallwelten
End your second conference day with a networking dinner in the Blue Room at Swarovski Kristallwelten in Wattens, this year’s setting for an evening away from the conference room.
After a full day of sessions, it’s your chance to sit down with the people you’ve been talking to in the hallways, catch up on the conversations you didn’t finish, and meet a few you haven’t yet. Expect a menu built around Tyrolean and Austrian dishes, and an evening built for exactly one thing: good conversation with people who do the same work you do.
Dinner sponsors:
08.15-08.50 Welcome coffee
Welcome to the conference area in the Swarovski Kristallwelten Forum
08.50-09.00 Opening of Day 2
A warm welcome to the second day of the Brand Experience Center Conference
09.00-09.30 Outsider session
One slot in this year’s programme goes to a speaker from outside our own field. Someone who runs a different kind of business for a different audience, and who is judged on numbers we never use. The sector matters less than the comparison: what they do differently, and what of it survives the trip back to your own venue.
Speaker to be announced soo
09.30-10.00 Creating a Brand destination
Manchester City’s Stadium Tour gets a new home: an immersive museum, designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, of over 1,700 m² across ten spaces, built into Medlock Square, the £300 million entertainment district rising on the Etihad Campus.
The museum is one part of a larger move. Medlock Square adds a 401-room hotel, a renovated megastore, an office building for 300 people, and an adventure offer that includes a sky walk, zip-wiring and abseiling, on the same roughly 80-acre site as the Etihad Stadium and Co-op Live.
With Medlock Square, Manchester City takes an interesting step: it moves its Brand Home beyond the stadium walls. Jeremy Maxton, Director of Visitor Attractions, takes us through the strategy behind that move, what changes once a club’s story sits inside a shared destination, and what it takes to keep it recognisably Manchester City once it does.
Speakers:
Jeremy Maxton, Director of Visitor Attractions, Manchester City Football club
10.00-10.20 Brand Home Talk: Meyer Werft
- The centre stands on the shipyard’s site, but it is operated by Papenburg Marketing GmbH, the organisation that also runs the town’s tourism. That separates ownership of the story from responsibility for the visit, and it changes how decisions and budgets get made. This summer Papenburg Marketing invested in the exhibition itself for the first time.
- The second is that the main attraction is a production floor. What visitors get to see depends on which ship is in the dock hall that week, what the customer allows to be photographed, and what the safety rules permit.
10.20-10.50 Network Break
Reconnect over coffee or tea and pastries, pick up where we left off last night
10.50-11.10 Brand Home Talk: Balashi Beer Experience
Building a Brand Experience for a beer that leads the market on the Caribbean island of Aruba, but relatively unknown outside the island, with as main aim driving footfall to a larger entertainment destination. In January the Balashi beer Experience is opened for 3 months, what are the first results?
Speaker:
11.10-11.30 Brand Home Talk: BMW Welt
Session decription follows soon
Speaker:
11.30-12.15 CEO Talk
A panel of CEOs from Brand Experience Centers, interviewed on stage.
The questions are the ones that are relevant. What is working in their venues right now and what is not. Where the money goes and what it has to prove. How visitor expectations have shifted and what that costs to keep up with. Where sustainability has changed the operation rather than the story on the walls. And what a brand home is for inside a global business today, now that the answer is less obvious than it was ten years ago.
Panel members:
To be announced soon
12.15-13.30 Lunch Break
While enjoying a complimentary lunch, take some time to compare notes with fellow delegates on what you’ve heard so far.
Lunch Sponsors:
13.30-14.15 Interactive session
A big success every year and back at the 2027 edition: the interactive session designed to tap into the wealth of experience and knowledge within our audience. With so much Brand Experience Center expertise in the room, this is the opportunity to learn from each other, share insights and exchange ideas. While not everyone can be on stage, this session ensures that your voices are heard. Let’s come together for an engaging discussion to close out the event on a collaborative note!
14.15-15.00 KEYNOTE
As every year, the closing keynote will be a highlight. Finding the right one takes time.
Stay tuned!
15.00-15.10 Closing session
The published conference program is subject to change.