Europe Poised for New Growth: Finding Niche Is Key to Fair Opportunities

By Margo McCall -- Tradeshow Week, 6/14/2004

The exhibition industry in Europe, where trade fairs date back nearly a millennium, is known for being well-established and highly competitive. Even so, there's always room for one more show if organizers can manage to find the right niche.

Action Sports Retailer, a U.S.-based division of Dutch media giant VNU, found its niche when it launched ASR Europe last July in the south of France. The show, which caters to the surfing, skating and board sports crowd, will return this July 11–13 with a 40-percent increase in exhibitors, expecting twice the number of attendees as last year.

Show director Kevin Flanagan said ASR decided in December 2002 to launch the European event after researching the market and talking to key customers. "It was a terrific success the first year," he said.

"It was a pretty tall order considering we planned, staged and launched the show in six months," Flanagan said.

Diversified Business Communications, meanwhile, has found its niche with seafood. Of the Maine-based company's five European tradeshows, three cover seafood and two cover natural products. The 12-year-old European Seafood Exposition, held in Brussels each spring, draws about 1,400 exhibitors to a 26,000 square meter showfloor. The expo is now Diversified's largest, both in terms of revenue and total exhibit space.

Before Diversified launched the exposition in 1993 with 200 exhibitors, seafood industry buyers had to wade through large general food shows to find booths that satisfied their particular interest. "We recognized that buyers have unique interests. We focused on seafood, rather than having them wander though halls full of meat and cheese," recalled Diversified COO Brian Perkins.

Finding a niche is essential to compete in Europe's well-established exhibition industry, agreed Cherif Moujabber, whose company, Creative Expos and Conferences, conducts much international business. Foreign organizers hoping to break into Europe should also be aware that industry dynamics are different in each country. "The biggest mistake we make is we assume there's a European market. There's no such thing as a European market," he said.

Flanagan attributes ASR Europe's success to several factors. First, ASR hired local experts and used the experience and partner contacts of VNU Exhibitions Europe, a division VNU formed late last year from three events subsidiaries. Some of the action sports industry's top exhibitors also gave the venture a vote of confidence, based on their experience with ASR's three U.S.-based tradeshows.

Knowing Europeans' penchant for fine cuisine, ASR served sushi, tapas and sausage baguettes instead of the hot dogs dished up at the U.S. events.

Still, the European version of ASR featured a more casual environment, due as much to its beachside venue as Continental customs. "It was completely different from our shows in the U.S. People were walking through the show with bare feet, and they had their dogs on a leash," he said.

Perkins recognizes that Diversified, by running a European show from U.S. offices, is a rarity. Diversified initially employed European-based sales and clerical personnel, but eventually found it made more sense for its sales staff to work out of the Portland, Maine office and make occasional sales trips to Europe.

ASR and Diversified both have success stories to tell, but U.S. organizers venturing into Europe shouldn't expect the transition to be completely painless. Besides developing the ability to move quickly back and forth between square meters and square feet, euros and dollars and English and French, Italian or German, organizers will need to adapt to life without general service contractors.

Perkins said show producers have a choice of training someone to be a general service contractor or hiring different entities to handle the myriad tasks associated with putting on a trade fair.

Set-up in Europe is less controlled than in the United States. In fact, "it's rather terrifying for a U.S. show manager the first time you see it," Perkins said. "But it all seems to work; at the end of the day it all comes together."

Flanagan noticed a heightened level of bureaucracy. But balancing that, he said, was a less litigious business climate.

Neither ASR nor Diversified reported ill effects from Europe's slower-growing economies. In a May report on the global economy, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development noted that the recovery occurring elsewhere is bypassing much of Europe, where demand and household spending remain weak. Germany and Italy face the largest challenges, the report said.

In a presentation at the Society of Independent Show Organizers' recent CEO Summit, Union des Foires Internationales President Ruud van Ingen acknowledged that countries in the region have rigid bureaucracies, high labor costs and lower growth rates.

Still, according to van Ingen, the region has many advantages, including a single currency, stable economic and political systems, a well-educated consumer market, a tradition of producing high-quality goods and the world's third-largest population base.

With a history that Messe Frankfurt can trace back to 1150, Europe's trade fair industry is well-established. Van Ingen advises exhibition organizers interested in entering the European market to thoroughly learn about countries' cultural differences and not assume that doing business will be the same throughout the region.

Virtually all of Europe's 700 venues are owned or financially supported by governments. More than 1.4 million exhibitors participate in 11,000 exhibitions per year. Not only are trade fairs viewed as an important marketing tool in Europe, but an important part of consumer entertainment and education, van Ingen said.