Public Trade exhibitions are simply unique. Appealing to our basic trading instincts, a trade exhibition brings the entire market together under one roof for a concentrated period of time.
A trade exhibition is a superb snapshot of the market itself. Some players can be seen to have grown and others will have faded away. Everyone will have changed. Here we get the true feel of an industry – the noise, smell, the whites of eyes which can never be replicated in a million mouse clicks. Exhibitions remind us that business is about people, people and more people.
Buyers do business with sellers they know and like. This means meeting and weighing them up against the rest of the industry. Only then will the customer listen to the more objective elements of product and prices. That is why the serious buyer will go where the industry gathers.
In-house ‘exhibitions’ have a valuable role for larger players but, if they are a captive buyer, customers can’t compare, contrast or negotiate. Open exhibitions are such a marvellous use of time because they can do all these things.
Measuring trade exhibitions on visitor numbers is too crude. In a B2B environment the only useful scorecard is the amount of business generated. We can easily see that travel, time and resource restrictions will mean companies sending fewer people for less time to visit an exhibition. Despite this trend, orders taken continue to rise.
Of course exhibitions should still be open to change in order to continue to add value for the visitor. If they do this they will thrive alongside the other items in the promotional toolkit.
A good trade exhibition shows products, certainly. But uniquely it also expresses the life, energy and personalities which form the industry.
