I fully agree with Apple stopping tradeshows (Re: Macworld Expo). In the course of my work I managed million of dollars related to tradeshow fees and related marketing expenditure. My company loves tradeshows and the buzz they create. They love to host golfs and business poker tournaments in tradeshow times. Be it in Las Vegas Sandsexpo, NYC Jacob Javits, Basel Fair or Hong Kong Wanchai Convention Center. We spend thousands on booth setups, invitations, staff models, keynotes, breakfasts etc. Every single year we rely on tradeshows to fuel our employees motivation and our business partners excitement. Now that the times are hard we’re also cutting spending on this just like Apple.
Certainly today tradeshows are just too mainstream, too wide and too expensive. It’s just throwing money out of the windows (no pun intended). Many companies can spend less by hosting their own summits and inviting their target customers. Ebay started hosting their conventions in 2002, IBM does the same. Many smaller companies host their own events, have better ROI and create a stronger company culture yet prone to innovation.
Tradeshows are fun, but they just suck if you look at how expensive and bigger they became. It’s catch 22. You need to spend more to beat competition and it hurts everyone. Too big is not good. Too big attract the small and believe me if I encountered thousands of small booths every year struggling with ROI on the large sums they spent on exhibitions they thought would make magic in their business bottom line.
While customers used to stop by, now we’re hiring 2 full times and a handful part times just to take care of inviting and handling prospects at the show. Making sure they come. Making sure they buy in. Customers hate big shows, exhibitors as well, sales just as well… so who’s making money? Show organizers (VNU, Reed etc.) of course and they have trade magazines as well to dump in their multilevel schema. This is going to be the end of an era.
