trade show Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Otis Regrets... or not

How to work a weak trade show

My Yelp friend Sandor has a habit of only reviewing closed or failing restaurants… after an analysis he always concludes with “and so it goes”. When I walked into the once-proud New York DM Days yesterday, I felt like I should start doing the same thing for trade shows. Attendance was sparse, far down from peaks of a few years back, a problem made more noticeable by the cavernous reaches of the Javits Convention Center.

Empty seats at Wednesday's DM Days keynote

There wasn’t a lot of business to do, so I started asking exhibitors what they thought of the show and how they were coping. Many predict better times when it moves back to the NY Hilton next year. This is a hard-core direct mail show (vs web) and the Hilton is close enough to 6th Ave. that publishers can stroll over on their lunch hour.

My colleague Dick Goldsmith points out that with fewer attendees, he has a better opportunity to work each one of them. His company now has a service called Per-Keys that allows mobile text messages to be personalized for higher response rates. The Per-Key is a unique code used to access the system, so he sent a Per-Key to every preregistered attendee so they can check it out. With slow traffic, he also has the opportunity to issue codes at the booth and do a more elaborate demo.

Other exhibitors abandoned their booths at lunchtime to man a “lunch with the experts” area where they and attendees could discuss topics of mutual interest. Better than staring off into space or just folding the tent and leaving, as several of the exhibitors had done.

Since the show was slow, I strolled over to the wonderful ad hoc "park" in Tmes Square.

In other news, I did not see any “suitcasing” at the show—a relief, I guess, but also sort of a disappointment. I had a side project to find cheap eats in the garment district which was unsuccessful because most of my recommended places were closed (“and so it goes”) but did stumble into Lunch Box, a clean and brightly lit spot right around the corner from Penn Station. Five Chinese dishes for $5, or an assortment of sweet and savory pastries from 95 cents to a couple of bucks. Better than $10 sandwiches at Javits.

“Suitcasing” your way to a viral trade show.

My first DM Days in NYC is coming up since I moved to NY, and I’m debating whether to attend. (Crikey, it’s expensive, and I missed the early bird deadline!) I find that I am at least as fascinated by the sponsors’ warning against “suitcasing” as by the program itself.

Now, if you have young children in the house, please do NOT look that term up on Google. Stay here with me while we read on the DM Days registration page that “Anyone observed to be soliciting in the aisles, lunch tables or other public areas, or in an exhibitor’s booth will be asked to leave immediately.”

Now I guess it’s fair enough that a vendor who decides to stand in the aisle and distribute their brochures from a suitcase (I’d actually recommend an open carton on a luggage carrier, so you don’t have to constantly zip it open and shut as you would with a suitcase, but I digress) is stealing good money from this show which like others is probably financially strapped. But I’m worried that I, a freelance copywriter, might pull an article out of my pocket or use my iPhone to show a colleague a web page I’ve written—and be 86ed as a “suitcaser” who not only gets ejected, but is publicly branded in a very embarrassing way. (You did look it up, didn’t you? Then you know what I mean.)

I also think there’s a place for think-outside-the-booth trade show marketing of the type that Foodzie did at the recent South by Southwest Interactive conference. Foodzie is an up and coming mail order company “like Etsy, but food”—they find farmers and artisanal makers who are too small to have their own ecommerce site and they sell their food on the web. Their four partners were everywhere there was a line at the show, handing out samples of their vendors’ wares. Maybe they should have paid something for a both at the trade show at SXSW (which was extremely lame) but this is where they belonged, making their pitch to a captive audience of slightly buzzed developers and venture capitalists standing in line for free booze at some party.

Suitcasing? Perhaps. But also effective marketing.

P.S. After the colorful definitions at the top of my “suitcasing” Google results, I scrolled down and found that the International Association of Events and Events offering various anti-suitcasing tools including this poster which you can download here.

How to build traffic for your trade show booth

Want to get more people into your trade show booth? Yes, you do, because a crowded booth creates buzz and attracts still more people, and a certain number of those will end up being qualified prospects.

People images making eye contact draw visitors into your booth.

You can do a lot to influence traffic with the design of the booth itself. Do: allow for a seamless flow of traffic from the show floor into your booth… so people can find themselves inside your booth without expecting it. This means minimizing the use of registration kiosks that throw up a barrier. Do: use people imagery in your booth signage, especially people who make eye contact with passers by.

Kiosks at the corners create a "desert island" effect and make your booth look empty.

Don’t: put kiosks in the far corners of a large booth. They create a desert island effect, making your booth look empty even when it isn’t. And especially don’t: put up walls or barricades of any kind that people have to pass through to get into the booth. They simply won’t do it and your trade show will be an unsuccessful and lonely experience.

Double bad: a gatekeeper plus a fabric wall ensures this booth will stay empty.

You can also build traffic prior to the event by inviting customers, prospects whose contact information you have collected, and possibly registered attendees (depending on how much it costs you to use the list, it could be a good deal or not) to come to the booth and get something specific with solid perceived value: a new research report on trends in your industry, for example. Don’t invite them just to check out your new product line, that’s not a strong enough call to action. A drawing or bring-this-postcard-for-a-free-gift will also work, though as with other soft offers this means more response but less quality.

Heat Pump washer/dryer at CES

When air is compressed it gets hot. When it expands, it cools off. Add some kind of fan to circulate the hot and cold air and you have a heat pump—the technology behind refrigerators, air conditioners, home heating systems for some environments (where there is a considerable difference between the ambient temperature in two different places, e.g. the ground and the air)…. and now, washer/dryers.

Panasonic demonstrated this unit at the 2009 CES. I took a movie of it which is here, on YouTube. (sorry for all the noise… it’s CES!) Unfortunately, there are no plans to import this device to the US because the capacity is too small.

CES 2009: down, but not out

Advance registrations at the Consumer Electronics Show were down 5-7%, but the real question, since most industry folks get in free, was how many would actually show up. Good news. Floor traffic is fine and it’s too packed to move in many places, just like regular years.

Environmentally-sensitive kelp speakers, from Panasonic

Most interesting for me from a marketing perspective were the home monitoring systems, including one from client Schlage locks. Via a low-power wireless mesh network you can lock and unlock your doors, turn lights on and off, and regulate your home entertainment system. With an extra subscription you can log on remotely and see if your kids got home on time (because each family member has their own code to unlock the front door), if you remembered to close the garage door, or preheat the oven. And because every product has to have an environmental angle this year, these systems also have energy components that can dim your lights when you leave the room or turn off the power if you forget.

A few other items of interest:

Finally, a flat screen TV that actually is as thin as a sheet of glass, from LG.
3D televisions, complete with 3D goggles, were everywhere. My favorite was LG again, maybe because they had the best movie playing (a scary Korean animation about a kid, a robot, and a nuclear winter).
Minoru, The world’s first 3D webcam and Sergio iSpin, a sophisticated DJ remix station for your iPod, both not prototypes but selling right now for under $100 on Amazon.
Minoru, the 3d webcam
Beatbot, a puffy robot containing a webcam which can be made to react to stimuli. This is used not for play but as therapy for children; they can interact with the robot directly and make it do things and the webcam can watch what they are doing and track improvements over time.

And this year’s favorite tcotchke: from Cirago, a solar powered LED keychain!

Trade Show Tactics

We’re coming up on January, which has become my big trade show month since the demise of Comdex. I’ll go to the Consumer Electronics Show first, followed by a quick stop at Macworld, and then the Fancy Food Show at the end of the month. What am I looking for, other than schwag and free food?

First, I want to see how companies I work with—or their competitors—get the attention of the audience through elevator pitches or booth design. And second, I want to watch other show-goers who may well be my audience at some point to see what questions they ask and what “hot buttons” cause their faces to light up. It’s also nice to put a face with abstract stats so I can have a mental image of my reader, next time I write to Dear IT Manager or whatever.

In my copywriting class we talk a little about trade show booth design for smaller companies—something that increasingly seems to be the responsibility of the marketing folks who are my students. It’s not easy to create a visual “home” out of nothing that can be erected and disassembled quickly. One thing I’ve noticed is that faces help—big photos of people who look like your users, making eye contact with the show traffic. Not enough companies do this so it’s very easy to make yourself stand out.

Also, too little attention is paid to booth traffic patterns. If you stand behind a high counter, you’re creating the metaphor of a store checkout—people will not approach unless they’re already committed to doing business, which eliminates most potential booth visitors. If you put up registration kiosks at the outside corners, or entry points framed by signs, you’ve created a boundary that may keep people out.

As a show floor troller, I tend to be wary of a big and empty booth—I assume that they don’t have much to offer and that if I go in I’m guaranteed to be hit with a sales pitch. But I find a booth with higher traffic irresistible, because I want to see what the buzz is all about. You can do this with good visual design and a seamless traffic pattern. Oh, and free samples of artisanal cheese will help.