Last fall I received a fairly personalized invitation to a special topic conference. At first I thought, “Oh, mass email,” and I almost deleted it. But it seemed like a unique invitation, so I called the coordinators.

I was told that I was indeed part of a special group of invitees to this special event. Wow, I thought. I’ve been singled out. I even called my mom.

I registered for the conference with pride, feeling like I was part of something important and exclusive. When I registered, I even had to use my email address to login.

Here we are a few months later, and it turns out that the conference is open to everyone. And a couple of the confirmations I received recently encouraged me to bring everyone.

In truth, I feel like I fell prey to a very good marketing technique. All of a sudden, I don’t feel special. I just feel duped into signing on early to the conference.

When I was an education director, we never tried this technique to increase attendance. The only thing that we would have done perhaps was to expand promotions to other groups if the attendance looked smaller than we hoped. I also think this may be similar to techniques we tried when our expo numbers seemed small — we offered a last-minute free expo hall pass to different groups to encourage foot traffic, even though we had been selling passes before the promo.

Is this an actual technique, or is it something that a conference host may fall back on if the response is not what they hoped? If it’s a ploy, I’m not really impressed.