A Consumer Show Manager Powers Up

Keeping 13 popular consumer shows on the road each year is what's driving Daniel M. Phillips

Rachel Wimberly -- Tradeshow Week, 3/5/2007

Daniel M. Phillips loves the California sunshine. So much so, in fact, he just couldn't resist when Advanstar Communications asked him to join its team in 1996.

He started out focusing on technology, but by 2003 he had joined the Powersports Group and was an executive vice president responsible for products that serve the fast-growing vehicle industries — magazines like Dealernews, DIRTsports, Off-Road Business, Aftermarket Business, ABRN and Motor Age; shows like Cycle World Intl. Motorcycle Shows, Dealer Expo, Big Twin Expo, Off Road Expos and the Off-Road Impact Show.

The consumer shows, specifically the Cycle World events, keep Phillips and his team on the road and on their toes. They produce 13 shows in 13 cities nationwide every year, bumping into constant challenges: extreme weather conditions, struggles for dates, competing events — you name it.

His ultimate goal of making New York and Long Beach the series' flagship events for manufacturer product launches is well within sight, and there's even talk of adding another city in the future.

Despite the juggling act, Phillips keeps it all going, and growing, even though there are few real competitors with the series in the United States.

In the midst of the Cycle World series schedule, Phillips found a moment to speak with Tradeshow Week Senior Assistant Editor Rachel Wimberly about the ins and outs of running consumer shows in one of the hottest sectors going.

Question: How have your company's vehicle-related consumer shows changed since you took over in 2003?

Answer: One, we've added more events. Two, we've segmented the shows by lifestyle so now, if you visit one of our motorcycle shows and you just happen to be interested in Harley-Davidsons or custom bikes, we'll make it easy for you to get to the products you'll want to see.

We've also added more entertainment to the business, which means that at our shows, apart from providing a great look at a very big range of new bikes and products for bikes, we also set out to entertain our consumers who pay their ticket at the door.

Thirdly, we've taken a strong look at the history, the vintage nature of somebody who's been an enthusiast for a long period of time, by essentially having museum sections replicated on the showfloor.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face?

A: The decentralized nature of running consumer lifestyle events in the United States.

We've been working hard to establish our New York and Long Beach shows as flagship events, in the same way that Europe or Asia actually have a single flagship event. We've been working to make them flagships by encouraging vendors to make major new bike launches on site, in the same way you would see at auto shows.

Q: What is the biggest challenge any consumer show producer faces?

A: We are well aware that consumers don't have to come to our shows.

(For instance,) we have to run our motorcycle show tour in the last quarter and the first quarter, primarily because that's when the new bike models are released by the manufacturers. It has to happen in that time frame for us to take those bikes to market for them. The challenge obviously in the Midwest and the East, with mostly motorcycle enthusiasts coming to our shows who like to ride, is bad weather can impact their decision to come to a show, and really bad weather makes it hard.

It's different for a tradeshow, primarily because, if you're a business buyer attending a tradeshow and it's a calendar event, you've normally got it on the calendar. Weather doesn't affect too much whether you go or not.

Q: How hard do you have to fight for space?

A: It's a logistics issue fitting 13 shows into, on average, 16 or 17 available weekends between November and March. It means conflicts that are outside of our control, such as major sports events, or clashes with a venue that doesn't have availability on a certain weekend. The logistics planning of moving a show across the country requires us having a fairly narrow set of options per weekend.

We normally have one, two, sometimes three challenges where that mixture of venue conflict and our trying to fit in our date patterns just don't work, which means there are normally one, or two or sometimes three events that will change venue year on year.

Q: How much help do you get from convention centers with this?

A: We are aware of the fact that convention centers that are heavily involved with tourist and visitor bureaus are keen to bring hotel rooms into a city, and we are aware that most attendees of our shows are locals that don't need a hotel room that night.

Though, with a sizable long-term business like ours with a number of events that become the event in the market in a city (like in Chicago, it is the Chicago Motorcycle Show), that's your annual show. You don't care too much that there's one in Atlanta in a few weeks time or there was one in New York three weeks ago.

I think cities need to weigh a number of things: What is a potential fewer hotel rooms sold because a tradeshow could be in that space, versus providing a very regular flagship annual event that pulls a large community of the local population together?

Q: Once you do get the dates you want, what do you do to protect them?

A: It's a juggling act: juggling the security of long-term date options in a similar date pattern every year going a long way forward, with giving ourselves the flexibility to actually move things from one weekend to another weekend to try and make the logistics of that particular show tour work.

Q: How does the strategy to draw attendees to your shows differ from the one used to draw them to a tradeshow?

A: Normally we have a varied mix in our consumer campaign. We stretch everywhere from radio spots to local newspaper advertising to direct mail to e-mail blasts to TV, in some markets, to grassroots marketing through dealerships or through clubs.

It's varied market by market because, while we have a national campaign through national publications, a lot of the marketing prior to each consumer show is local to that particular city or within a 100-mile radius. We've got a much broader spectrum with a much larger target audience — there are 7 million people that ride motorcycles in the United States, for example — than a tradeshow, where we tend to have a much more targeted or focused group of attendees that we're pointing our campaigns to.

Q: What has changed in attendee promotion?

A: Local newspapers have been working much more with us than they have in the past. There's a more symbiotic relationship. A local newspaper can run a feature a week, prior to us coming to town, talking about the coming motorcycle show in the city.

They'll see an opportunity to generate advertising from that because the bigger our shows get, the bigger potential advertisers they've got; for example, local dealerships that might be participating in the show.

As they do that, they provide more column inches or more coverage on our shows. I think we've worked hard to kind of help that relationship, and that's been improving significantly in the last couple of years.

Q: What exactly is a lifestyle event, and what makes it different from a consumer show?

A: I can only tell you what that means for the shows that we are talking about. Motorcycle riders have specific lifestyles associated with their enthusiasm. There is a big difference between the lifestyle of a biker who wears leathers, has tattoos and rides a Harley-Davidson or a custom bike, and the person that buys a Japanese sport bike, for example, or an Italian scooter or a German touring bike.

For us to market to them and to provide them with a valuable, fun, entertaining on-site show experience, we have to reflect some of that lifestyle in the way in which we move the message to them and the experience we give them at the show.

Q: What role do sponsors play?

A: Often we have sponsors specifically for those segments where people want to align their brand alongside a lifestyle. For example, we've recently secured a major sponsorship from a big manufacturer of RVs who wanted to be associated specifically with V-Twin or the Harley-Davidson segment of the market. They had a luxury RV with a special expanding section so that, if someone really wanted to take care of their bike, that would fit.

That company sponsored a particular segment of the show so they could create an affiliation with that lifestyle, and therefore an affiliation with that demographic and therefore an affiliation particularly with those types of bikes.

Q: Do you own a motorcycle?

A: No. Our group serves a number of sectors, and the motorcycle business is just one of them. My entire management team is a blend of enthusiasts that come from parts of those different segments.

Some of us drive off-road vehicles, some of us drive cars, some of us drive bikes. I'm a car guy. I'm a Jaguar fanatic; I own a 1950 XK 120.