by Pádraic Gilligan, Research & Consultancy, SITE | Founder, SoolNua Consulting

Thanks to the partnership with MPI, SITE has the opportunity to include a question or two in ongoing surveys that MPI conducts amongst its extensive community of meetings and events planners.

As this latest MPI survey was fielding contemporaneously with SITE and the IRF’s annual Incentive Travel Index, two questions were submitted unrelated to any of the more traditional or conventional lines of inquiry, motivated only by a kind of idle curiosity and a “let’s-see-what-happens-here” attitude.

So what was asked and why?

The question posed to both sides of the great divide was around the intrinsic, quintessential originality of proposal or RFP responses. Originality and uniqueness are clear differentiation factors for suppliers and certainly core attributes that most suppliers would lay claim to. It’s the equivalent of the infamous Coke versus Pepsi blind tasting, where brand, packaging and positioning are stripped away and only the product itself remains, judged on its own merits. In this case, the logo, colour palette and familiar branding cues are removed and the question becomes very simple: is what remains still recognisably, distinctively yours?

Suppliers were asked:

As a supplier to the incentive travel marketplace (i.e., DMC, hotel, venue, DMO), if your name and branding were stripped off the proposal, would anyone be able to tell it was yours?

Planners were asked the equal and opposite question:

Thinking about your business with incentive travel suppliers, if their company name and branding were stripped off of their proposal, would you be able to tell it was their proposal?

The results are flabbergasting both for their raw, unbridled honesty and for their implications.

What the numbers say

Most buyers – a staggering 87 percent of them in actual fact – would struggle to identify a response from their partner-supplier if that supplier’s company name and branding were stripped off of the proposal. Only 13 percent of planners said yes, 72 percent said maybe, and 15 percent said definitely not.

And almost one in five of the suppliers themselves, (and God bless their candor!), admit that their response would be indistinguishable from a competitor. This is countered, somewhat, by the almost half of suppliers who are totally convinced of their uniqueness: the only trouble here is that this confidence and conviction is not matched by the people who purchase their services. Among 192 supplier respondents, 43 percent said they were 100 percent convinced they offer services and experiences that are totally unique, 41 percent were really not sure, and 17 percent admitted that no, their proposals would not stand out.

Implications: the tyranny of the template

What does all of this mean? First, it suggests that the industry may have collectively surrendered a large part of its creative territory to the tyranny of the template. In the quest for efficiency, compliance and speed, many proposals have become generic containers into which near-identical content is poured: the same destination descriptors, the same “wow” words, the same bulleted lists of inclusions and exclusions. When brand is stripped away, buyers are left with a homogenous mass of look-alike, sound-alike offers that blur into one another.

Second, there is a clear perception gap between suppliers and buyers. Almost half of suppliers believe they are radically differentiated in terms of services and experiences, yet buyers, who live with the reality of crowded inboxes and overlapping pitches, largely do not experience this differentiation. That disconnect matters because incentive travel is, by definition, about extraordinary, memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, not standardised packages delivered in standardised prose.

Third, this raises uncomfortable questions about relationship depth and shared language. If long-standing partners cannot recognise each other once branding is removed, perhaps proposals are not reflecting the intimacy of the relationship. Too often the market at large is being addressed rather than the specific humans and organisations the supplier claims to know well.

Remedies: how to become recognisable again

The good news is that the simplicity of the question points to equally simple and practical remedies. Here’s what to do:

• Lead with a point of view, not a product. A recognisable proposal should read like a conversation with a distinctive organisational mind, not a brochure. Suppliers should articulate what they believe about incentive travel, motivation and human behaviour that not everyone else believes, then let the suggested programme emerge as the natural expression of that belief.
• Write for the buyer you actually know. If there is history with the client, reference it explicitly: previous trips, shared successes, lessons learned and the context that makes the relationship real. That lived context should make a proposal feel less like a stranger and more like a trusted partner speaking directly to the client.
• Make the content as bespoke as the logistics. Many suppliers invest huge energy into tailoring operations and experiences, but send them to market wrapped in generic, interchangeable language. Recognisable signatures can be built into how venues are described, how itineraries are narrated and how value is framed.
• Involve the creatives and storytellers. Proposal writing is often delegated purely to sales or operations, where the emphasis is understandably on accuracy and deliverability. Bringing in strong storytellers from marketing, design or leadership can help ensure the narrative, tone and structure sound like the organisation and nobody else.
• Run a blind tasting of your own. Before sending a major RFP response, anonymise a sample of past proposals and circulate them internally. If colleagues cannot reliably identify which one is yours, the market probably cannot either.

None of this is about abandoning templates or ignoring compliance. It is about re-humanising the proposal within those structures so that, even when the logo and branding are stripped away, what remains still tastes unmistakably like you.

Why this matters for incentive travel

Incentive travel is one of the few business tools that trades explicitly in emotion: anticipation, delight, recognition and belonging. If proposals are indistinguishable, the sector risks commoditising the very experiences that are meant to feel singular and special. Differentiated, recognisable proposals do not just help win business; they set expectations, signal seriousness of intent and become the first chapter in the story of the trip itself.

For SITE members and the wider incentive community, these findings are both a warning and an invitation. They are a warning that the sector may be drifting towards sameness at exactly the moment when buyers and participants crave distinctiveness, and an invitation to reclaim narrative, voice and originality in the documents that start every incentive journey.