Nobody Circles the Doll That’s $2 Off
What your RFP response looks like on the decision maker’s desk
You might be a Kool-Aid kid if you remember the week the Christmas catalogs showed up. Halloween candy was barely gone, and there they were in the mailbox: the Sears Wish Book, the Toys"R"Us toy book, and my favorite, the JCPenney catalog, because it was thicker than any of the others. I would spend hours on the living room floor with that thing, turning every page, circling everything I wanted with a marker. And if you looked closely, you’d notice something. Half the toys were the same. Same doll, same box, same smile, in three different catalogs. The only real difference was that one of them was two dollars cheaper, and that’s the one your mom circled.
This week I zoomed out and pictured what it looks like on the other side of an RFP. A company sends out a request for proposals, and the responses start coming in, my own included. Now picture the decision maker’s inbox full of them. Maybe she prints them out and stacks them on her desk. Maybe she reads them on a Sunday night with a glass of wine. Either way, she’s doing exactly what we did on that living room floor. She’s flipping through a catalog. Every response is a page, and she’s looking for the one worth circling. Here’s the factual part: according to Northstar’s 2026 survey of independent planners, 95% deal with RFPs every year. This is how our industry gets bought.
We are all selling the same toy
Every response in that stack is selling the same product, and that product is event execution. Venue sourcing, vendor management, timelines, budgets, on-site coordination. We execute events. Many of us execute them beautifully, and none of that matters if it looks identical on paper.
So what do we do? We repackage. We stop calling ourselves event planners and start calling ourselves event producers and event designers. We stop saying “events” and start saying “activations.” We add a glossier mood board and put a nicer font on the cover. None of it changes what’s in the box. A new title on the same service is a new box on the same doll, and the decision maker sees through it the same way your mom did. She flips to the last page and compares the price.
That’s the Planner Plateau™ from the decision maker’s chair. Your skills keep growing, but on her desk you look like every other page in the catalog. And when every page looks the same, price makes the decision. If you’re in-house, you have a catalog too. It’s your budget deck. Leadership flips through it line by line with a pen in hand, circling what to cut instead of what to keep.
Nobody fought over the doll that was $2 off
Now think about Christmas 1983. Dolls had been in every catalog in America for decades. That year, parents were shoving each other in store aisles over one particular doll, the Cabbage Patch Kid. Stores sold out, and the fights made the national news. I had one. I still have it, in my parents’ basement.
It wasn’t the cheapest doll. It wasn’t the prettiest. It wasn’t even a new category. What made it different was that nobody bought a Cabbage Patch Kid. You adopted one. Each doll came with its own name, a birth certificate and adoption papers, and no two looked exactly alike. Someone decided what a child should feel when they opened that box and what they should do next: name it, love it, keep it for forty years in a basement because they loved it so much they couldn't just dop it at Goodwill. The product was a doll. The experience was designed on purpose, for a specific audience, to drive a specific behavior. That’s experiential strategy with yarn hair, and it made one doll out of thousands the one every kid in America circled.
The same thing is happening in our industry right now. Skift reported this year that planners stuck in logistics roles earn around $50,000, while planners who run strategy earn $116,000 and up. Same industry. Same events. More than double the pay. Packaging didn’t do that. Strategy did.
What the Cabbage Patch Kid of RFP responses looks like
It doesn’t open with your services. It opens with the client. The first page names their business goal in their own language. It names who needs to be in the room and what you’re designing those people to do when they leave. It tells the decision maker how you’ll both know it worked, before a single vendor is booked. Then come the logistics. They still matter, and they always will. They just aren’t the first thing she sees anymore.
When your response opens that way, she’s not comparing five pages selling the same doll. She’s reading the only one that answers the question she sent the RFP to ask. Nobody puts that toy on sale, because there’s nothing to compare it to.
If you’ve spent years in weddings, catering or corporate meetings and you’re wondering whether this is too big a leap, your experience isn’t the problem. It’s your inventory. You already know how to deliver. What you add is the ability to design for an outcome and put that thinking on the first page where the decision maker can see it. That’s a skill set, not a budget, and it can be learned.
That’s what we teach at The Edgucation Institute. If you want to see where you stand right now, start with the free guide, From Event Executor to Experiential Strategist. It walks you through what changes when you stop selling the doll and start designing the adoption.
More revenue, less stress: it starts with proving event success.
Jenny Howard-Maxwell, CPES
