Everyone has heard this statement. It’s relevant for the recent economic crisis and certainly also relates to our professional lives. With much talk of late about lasting effects of the recession on the tradeshow industry and its current model, these words may never ring more true.
In the January 2010 issue of EXPO Magazine, Dan Cole, Vice President of Sales and Business Development for the Consumer Electronic Association, said in his Sales Q & A column that if an exhibitor is “not sufficiently disturbed by a problem” they will not “act in order to solve their pain.” He went on to say that not only does there need to be “enough pain,” there also needs to be a solution to that pain. Read more here.
The same thing can be said of show organizers. If they are not “sufficiently disturbed” by exhibitors, they will not “act in order to solve their pain.” Exhibitors are starting to voice the need for show organizers to be more accountable. We see this from industry surveys, at conference sessions and industry blogs. Most organizers continue to say that until exhibitors demand accountability, they will not be proactive in providing it; with little to no disturbance from something they do not consider a problem.
In an article entitled “Who’s Counting?” in the February 2010 issue of Exhibition World, Murve Patterson states “Attendance claims that aren’t backed by credible research aren’t worth the paper they’re written on…the question of event auditing continues to be one many organizers choose to ignore”. He points out that show organizers’ reputations for exaggerating their attendance figures has marred the industry’s reputation and “created an atmosphere of doubt”. Read more here.
Exhibitors who have been participating at the same show for several years have a distinct feel for the quality and quantity of the attendance. No matter what an organizer tells them, they know what leads they have gathered and how many people have walked the floor. They talk to each other, compare notes and are now asking the hard question of why organizers are not proactively providing them with independent, third-party-validated tradeshow attendance and demographic data to prove the quality of their shows.
Currently, association, for-profit and independent show organizers are talking about the quality of their attendance because overall attendance is down. We last saw this phenomenon between 2001 and 2004 when the dot.com bubble burst and the 9/11 tragedy took their toll on the economy and the tradeshow industry. Show attendance dropped and organizers talked “quality.” Yet as recently as 2008, that same conversation was highlighting record attendance and robust exhibition space growth. And as attendance begins to grow again over the year, the “quality” conversation will quietly fade.
In an article called “Building Towards the Bounceback” from the same February 2010 issue of Exhibition World, the President of the IAEE, Stephen Hacker, made the point that “delivering quality, not quantity, is the key to managing these (exhibitors) expectations.” He also suggests that organizers need to install “new and aggressive strategies in the hopes of retaining their clients”. Read more here.
In a previous EXPO Magazine article, Mr. Hacker, when asked about what could be done to raise the profile of the industry responded, “If you’re really concerned about raising the value of your show, you should be presenting unbiased, third-party attendance audit information…It may be sobering the first year, but bite the bullet and do it. It’s a level of sophistication we need. And there’s no better time to do it than right now.”
Exhibitions offer the opportunity to see, hear and feel the vitality of a specific industry. Since face-to-face events are the most expensive among all media platforms, companies need better and more solid information to make strategic and tactical decisions. They need a solution to their pain and behind exhibiting costs, measurement or metrics is the second biggest pain issue they face.
One of the solutions to that pain is for organizers to proactively provide independently validated tradeshow attendance and demographic data. If the industry is to continue making gains, some amount of pain must be felt.
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