Consider the following, and ask yourself a simple question: Why should trade show organizers be concerned?
• Old Spice deodorant was the presenting sponsor this past fall of a nationwide tour, with displays and giveaways, at the high school football games of top inter-school rivals. The message: Even in nervous situations, Old Spice keeps you cool.
• Hewlett-Packard is constantly on the road with its HP Impressions Road Show, using massive trailers to demonstrate the firm's high-end commercial printing presses. Instead of having potential customers trek to a massive trade show once a year to see the newest technology, the company brings that technology directly, and more frequently, to its customers.
• Levi Strauss is conducting a 12-market tour of its new electronic body-measurement system, claiming it takes only 10 seconds to find jeans that fit. The clothing manufacturer plans to install its body-screening devices in all its stores; in the meantime, it's not waiting for jeans-hungry customers to wander down to the mall.
All are current examples of proprietary corporate events-singularly sponsored, private “trade shows,” whether mobile and in a big trailer or static and conducted in, say, a hotel hospitality room-where there's only one exhibitor: namely, the sponsoring company, intent on showcasing only its services, products, and messages.
A large portion of marketing officers are coming to the conclusion that private corporate events offer an edge, perhaps one not available within the traditional trade show environment. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen; there are different opinions and statistics supporting the efficacy of both private events and trade shows.
Nevertheless, private events have become the fair-haired child of the corporate marketing suite, and some see them as a threat to the traditional trade show in the array of favored marketing tools.
“We definitely see that corporate events are becoming a preferred venue for face-to-face marketing,” says Andrew Dudek, trade show manager with Telcordia Technologies, a major telecommunications software and consulting company in Piscataway, NJ. “We do both, and it's a tricky balance. We go to trade shows to see our competitors' customers. But when we hold proprietary events, we're able to see our own customers in a controlled environment.”
Private corporate events are nothing new, and have coexisted with trade shows for a long time. This is particularly so with technology companies, whose products often are so complex that they require multiple-day seminars so customers can learn how to use them. Proprietary events also have formed the core of client-appreciation programs, where the vendor offers terrific speakers, fabulous dinners, sparkling entertainment, and lots of recreation.
Now, however, these proprietary events have gone mainstream with a vengeance, going far beyond mere educational seminars or relationship marketing events. In a recent survey conducted by Successful Meetings' sister publication, MeetingNews, two-thirds of executives feel private events are effective in realizing a company's marketing goals. Moreover, among corporate meeting planners, nearly 58 percent said their executives believe private marketing events are more powerful than exhibiting at trade shows.
“Obviously, trade shows have had a rough couple of years,” says Dan Hanover, editor of Event Marketer magazine, in Norwalk, CT. “Yes, there is some money coming back to trade shows. But overall, companies can no longer wait a year for their next trade show booth to generate business. They need to make money now, and private events can help drive that.”
More worrisome for trade show organizers, Hanover feels, is that the budget pie is being sliced in favor of private events, and at the expense of trade shows.
“Private events are having an impact in taking away from trade show spend. People are spending smarter and going to fewer trade shows as exhibitors. They're moving money around and doing more private events.”
The MeetingNews survey does highlight a shifting of funds. When asked where the money comes from to fund private events, 12 percent of corporate meeting buyers indicate it came from trade show exhibiting budgets. And considering that total direct spending on trade shows amounted to about $68 billion in the United States in 2004 (according to a new analysis by the Convention Industry Council), even a small draw-down can have a sizeable impact.
All this may sound like a “for whom the bell tolls” moment for trade show organizers, just as the industry is gamely pulling itself back to even. But it is important to keep in mind that proprietary corporate events are a recent addition to the marketing mix-at least as far as b-to-b lead generation is concerned. Marketers always want an edge, and tend to latch on to new techniques because they are new, not because they are proven. In fact, waiting for a marketing tool to become proven may be waiting too long.
“What I have observed, and what is frightening, is that chief marketing officers have gotten so enamored of corporate events that they think they can use them for customer acquisition, whereas the time-honored use of corporate events has been for customer retention, client relations, and the like,” says Ruth P. Stevens, a New York City-based consultant and author on event and business marketing, who also teaches at Columbia University. “Marketers are in effect moving toward the trade show model, and recruiting attendees to these events, attendees with whom they don't have a good prior relationship. And that's a recipe for disaster.”
Stevens notes that using corporate events for customer acquisition tends to be useful primarily in business-to-consumer marketing, similar to what Levi Strauss and Old Spice deodorant are trying to do with their current mobile marketing tours.
“I have a friend who has been in event marketing for many years, and a high point of his career was arranging for condoms to be handed out at rock concerts,” Stevens remembers. “It was enormously successful. That's the sort of buzzy, hip, glamorous side of event marketing that can work.”
Stevens feels that consumer-oriented event marketing may have the greatest upside when it creates major publicity. The “coolness” factor tends to offset the otherwise high cost of the campaign.
“I think ultimately we're going to see a balancing act among all the various marketing tools, and that includes trade shows,” notes Skip Cox, president of Exhibit Surveys, a trade show consulting firm in Red Bank, NJ. “There's a lot of talk about private events and trade shows competing for their slice of the budget. But they also compete for attendees, and that's
something people don't think about. My personal feeling is, value will drive anything eventually, and when I talk to attendees-those who attend both trade shows and private corporate events-trade shows come out higher in the kind of face-to-face interaction they're looking for.”
Thus, convincing an attendee to devote days to the exclusivity of a corporate event, where there are no other products to see, may be a hard sell. It may also be an inherent advantage that trade shows will always be able to enjoy.
The rise of corporate events doesn't seem to be a threat to the job security of meeting planners. In the MeetingNews survey of the impact of proprietary events on trade shows, fully 73 percent of planners are involved, either in managing logistics or in assisting in devising the delivery of content, with proprietary events.
In other words, it's just one more task to accomplish, and all in a day's work.