Michael Hart

Go Take a Flying Paradigm Shift

At an industry meeting I attended not too long ago, a session panelist said, “Don’t let a good recession go to waste.”

Like most business publications these days, Tradeshow Week has its share of discouraging news to report – don’t think I haven’t heard reactions to our “Q1 a Downer” headline in the May 25 issue – but there also are plenty of occasions to report on developments that may end up being positive paradigm shifters.

Some of those potential paradigm shifters are either going to stretch the limits of what show managers considered their prerecession job descriptions or they’re going to stir concerns that arose in the last economic downturn that tradeshows are somehow on their way out.

I prefer to go with the first characterization.

For our June 8 issue, Senior Editor Rachel Wimberly is working on a story designed to get you up to date on the status of virtual tradeshows. If you remember, several years ago, many TSW readers were concerned this was an innovation that was going to render physical shows obsolete. As most of us have seen, that was far from the truth.

Although Rachel still is working on the story, I think you’ll be reading that more and more conventional tradeshow managers are adapting elements of the virtual show because they want to, first, extend the experience for their attendees and exhibitors beyond the two or three days they have them on the showfloor each year and, second, find a way to accommodate all those whose bosses are telling them to cut back on their travel expenses and can’t make it to the showfloor.

Also in that issue, you’ll get an update on how health care exhibitors and show organizers are adopting to newly revised guidelines and regulations, coming at them from multiple directions, on how exactly pharmaceutical and medical device companies can market their products and services.

Although there are plenty of confused and even unhappy exhibitors in the health care sector as a result of this, some of them are taking advantage of the situation to transform the way they do business. The challenge for show managers and medical societies, of course, will be to keep them on the showfloor.

That leads me to a third potential paradigm shifter that you can read about in the issue of TSW you should be getting in the mail sometime around now. We’ve written a lot during the past couple of years about something called a medical mart.

Various cities – most notably until now, Cleveland – have proposed some combination of a merchandise mart-like setting for medical device makers and a tradeshow-convention facility that caters to the health care industry.

While the idea is to have some meeting space for the medical society that wants to do something similar to its annual meeting, it’s also possibly a way for exhibitors to bypass the societies – with their church-and-state issues concerning industry funding – and reach the end users of their products and services directly.

Some of these developments are still in the realm of real estate deals. However, once more, there’s either a chance for enterprising show managers to stretch their job definitions – or lose some revenue generators they’ve had for decades.

Posted by Michael Hart on May 28, 2009 | Comments (1)