Exhibitors Speak Up About Challenges

Michael Hughes -- Tradeshow Week, 3/7/2005

We recently asked a large cross section of exhibitors to explain the biggest challenges they face this year. The most commonly listed challenge, not surprisingly, related to budgets and the corporate mandate to "do more with less."

Besides watching costs, the broad themes can be categorized into show selection and scheduling, booth staffing, reaching attendees and branding, booth design, and tracking ROI and lead management.

The good news is that, in general, based on our surveys and conversations with exhibitors and service providers, exhibitors are more confident than they have been in years about their programs and budgets. The bad news is, the challenges are still considerable and continue to impact show producers and service providers.

As markets and corporate strategies change rapidly, choosing the right events hasn't gotten any easier. This is especially true for exhibitors tasked with entering new markets. The big horizontals are easy to find and evaluate; it's the verticals and new shows that require more due diligence.

Some exhibitors are cutting existing shows from their schedules in order to try new ones. Others, because of mergers and downsizing, are taking on more shows and more internal brands and product lines. This sometimes translates into scheduling jams, when two important shows are held at the same time at opposite ends of the country, or the world. As one exhibitor put it, "overlapping dates for national, regional and distributor events drain resources in terms of finances, personnel and tools."

Related to busy event schedules, a number of exhibitors said they are having trouble, internally, finding enough qualified salespeople to staff booths at tradeshows. Finding and keeping quality salespeople is a challenge in most competitive industries. Getting them interested in staffing a tradeshow booth (and sticking to their booth duty schedules) can also be hard. The current wave of major corporate mergers and acquisitions will make staffing issues even more challenging for exhibit managers.

In past surveys, exhibitors haven't mentioned staffing issues as much as in this one. This suggests that they are focusing more on people issues, i.e., the need to put their best staff forward at shows, rather than focus on simply displaying products.

Too many exhibitors show up with expensive booths and leave the staffing to lower-level employees or temporary spokespeople. Our research suggests attendees go to tradeshows to see the people behind the brand, because they already know about new products via the Web, public relations campaigns and sales forces.

Today's design challenge, exhibitors said, is to keep the booth fresh and cutting-edge while sticking to the show budget. With this mandate, exhibitors increasingly view design and drayage costs as more controllable. Lighter metals and wood, fabric, and the use of lighting and sound are helping. This trend positively impacts firms that provide highly customizable modular and portable exhibits. There is little in our data to suggest that the high-end, custom side of the market will rebound strongly any time in the next year or so.

On the drayage front, 73 percent of all exhibitors said they "very closely" or "somewhat closely" track the weight of their exhibits and materials. This is not necessarily a negative for contractors, but some industry leaders quietly say the drayage pricing model will be modified somewhat over the next five to 10 years.

Not surprisingly, exhibitors still consider tracking ROI and managing leads big challenges. The issue is not so much how to do it, but who should do it. Effective ROI and lead tracking requires time and a system that must be adhered to by what can be a far-flung group at even midsized corporations.

Exhibitors also want more audience information and survey data from pre- and post-show surveys, as well as brand awareness and sales conversion studies. Few show producers provide these types of ROI-tracking studies and services.

Many event marketers described their key challenges as getting qualified attendees to visit the booth and connecting with customers.

We asked exhibitors who they consider to be the most important types of attendees they reach at exhibitions, and their answers revealed a tie between wanting to reach "prospects already aware of company" and "unknown potential prospects." In short, exhibitors are primarily looking to establish a new customer base at shows.

According to other research studies by Tradeshow Week, increasing brand awareness is today about equal with gathering leads as the key reason for exhibiting. And this shift has been happening for many years.

Yet in the current business climate, with changing strategies and shorter product life cycles, simply knowing what your company's new and improved brand stands for can be a challenge. As one exhibitor put it: The challenge is "internally gathering the information, and externally executing and bringing the objectives to life." Another said it is "bringing all our related companies under one brand."

Exhibitions are increasingly seen as the best place to do this. Web sites also unify various brands under one umbrella, but most people only review one Web page at a time, and only competitors tend to consider the bulk of a site. Events allow for a wider, more diverse and more personal brand interaction.

That's also why the stakes for exhibitors at conventions and exhibitions are higher than ever before. Exhibit managers know this; the risk is that their firm's senior executives and sales and marketing management may not.