On The Road Again

June 4, 2004

On trade shows.
This amused, to no end, several people who tramped with me through trade shows in a variety of industries and memorized hotel locations on International Drive. After calling one fellow writer for the third time in a six-week span a few years ago from the Orange County Convention Center, he asked if I planned to vote in the Florida primary.
All of those attendee badges and shuttle rides on the Bee Line Expressway made me enough of an expert for a write-up. One question that I found particularly interesting dealt with trade shows making, after the impact of the Internet, a comeback. I replied, in all honesty, that I thought they never went away.
Trade shows – for those of us who attend more than one a year – can easily be reviled. For some, it’s the sheer number they need to attend or set up an exhibit. There’s also the cost, the time out of office, the hassle of travel, the ugly road food and the uglier pile of dirty laundry.
In all of that, however, trade shows have one large benefit. They work.
Trade shows work well enough that, in the stone industry, there’s a rush to join the club. New shows are announced almost every other month, causing public and behind-the-scenes tussles. And I don’t just see it in the United States: I see England, I see France, I see China, Turkey, Spain, Russia and other countries with a horde of new shows. (If you think I saw anything else, you’re not thinking hard enough about stone.)
The reason for all the new shows, of course, is the growth in the stone market worldwide. It’s a hot product in a somewhat dull global economy, and people see opportunity.
An opportunity for some, however, is a headache for exhibitors and the kindly folks expected to troop through the aisles of more stone events. And, it begs the question: How many shows are too many?
I’ve always been consistent with my answer: The market will decide. My personal experience in several areas of trade shows is that the bad events fail and the good ones continue, and it’s all a matter of delivery.
Even as I might groan about packing the luggage for another trade-show excursion, I don’t argue against current conditions.
With magazines, trade shows can be tricky business. Sure, you’ll see plenty of promotion in our pages, and a show is an ideal place to meet our customers and do business. We don’t get in the way of the other attendees – “the paying customers,” I say time and again on a show floor – but we write up orders and search out news and trends. For us (as well as everyone else on the floor) trade shows are efficient.
All those exhibitors, though, are our advertisers as well, and more shows mean stretching out marketing dollars a bit thinner. Trade shows can also be, for us, very real competitors.
And, for us, it’s not just the U.S. market. We need to consider international shows that require 10+ hours on an airliner and dealing with trade-show tribulations in a foreign language. One look at our Calendar section reveals that you could go months on end from show to show and never return home. My spouse once defined eternal damnation as a choice between trade shows and property management, and crazy renters and broken pipes sometime look more appealing than another airliner and the in-flight Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle dubbed in Swedish.
Complaining about too much is less than ideal, but it’s a lot better than complaining about too little. In the hubbub about the surfeit of stone shows, it’s one thing to note that the pie is being sliced thinner with more events. The reason for that, however, is market expansion; that pie is getting bigger and bigger.
That growth is more than just sheer volume of stone tonnage. More fabricators and stone suppliers are appearing on the scene, and established companies now find a need to expand inventory and production capacity. That crowd of attendees is also growing with new faces and older customers making more-frequent appearances.
It won’t take long for those attendees to settle down and make choices on which shows are right for them. The market’s fast growth also means that loyalties haven’t formed; when the stone-show scene stabilizes, there may be fewer shows. Or, events may have more focus, with sensible (and profitable) choices for all involved.
Meanwhile, I’ll be hitting the road again and again this year, so keep an eye out for me on the trade-show circuit. With all the events out there in 2004, there’s no excuse not to go to at least event.
I don’t make a habit of re-reading my own work, but I’ll also clip a copy of this column and tape it to the inside lid of my roll-about suiter. When you’re packing up a week of laundry, you need all the inspiration you can get.
.