Aside from social media, the development of digital media divisions at the world’s great exhibition organisers is taking place on a long and winding road.
Ostensibly, it seems straightforward. Digital business may appear to work just like the trade show business. In the physical world you have a venue, the home for a trade show product. On the web the venue is not a hall, it is a web presence. Here, an exhibition is reduced to business-matching. Organisers are essentially doing the same thing online, connecting supply and demand, only this time in a digital space and venue, as opposed to the physical marketplace.
But pressing on into the digital realm with more advanced products than simple connection tools – which is where the industry is going – requires clever marketing.
“Nobody considers any trade show companies to be digital players,” says Kai Hattendorf. “We are trade show companies and show organisers. We operate venues. We are not automatically considered to be by any means competent when it comes to digital.”
He makes the point that even at Messe Frankfurt – a company with a progressive digital strategy – it is very difficult to build a connection between the brand and its digital expertise. The option, for example, of launching an independent digital brand for short-term gain is not there, because in Messe Frankfurt’s case, it took many years to build its brand on its name. What it can do, however, is build a separate digital brand for Messe Frankfurt, linked directly to its shows.
“We’ll build the branding over a couple of years, and see if this migrates over to the Messe Frankfurt identity,” says Hattendorf. “At the same time, it allows us to offer digital products that are not directly related to Messe Frankfurt shows.”
One of these uses a well-known online resource to achieve goals that specifically bring benefit to Messe Frankfurt’s customers. “Between two shows a buyer does not go to the show website for a supplier,” Hattendorf explains. “They use a search engine. And they probably go to the most frequently used search engine – Google. So if we provide our exhibitors with the opportunity to be present on the first page of Google’s search results, we are providing them with the exposure, helping them to be found. So one way to make our customers constantly visible online is Google AdWords.”
Something else in development is Messe Frankfurt’s Productpilot portal. This provides product matching opportunities and offers ever-more specialised products with which its exhibitors can present themselves; data and products are available all year round for buyers to search.
The company also provides an app for its shows, branded with each show’s name. It is available on Apple’s IOS and Android’s mobile operating systems. Show apps have become very popular, with 60 per cent of visitors at Messe Frankfurt’s Light + Building show using it. And when they download it, they are informed that the app is produced by Dexperty, Messe Frankfurt’s digital expertise division. In time, the company hopes its digital brand will become synonymous with the overarching Messe Frankfurt brand, and by association will develop its own reputation for professionalism and efficiency.
“Our trade show visitors perceive the digital face of Messe Frankfurt through the trade show website, they perceive us through the app, and through all the show-related digital services that provide information or further functionality,” says Hattendorf.
In truth, this digital conversion will take years to implement, a fact that trade show customers will experience themselves in their own industries. Even a company of the size of Messe Frankfurt will have to spend a great deal of time and money to promote its digital presence to its customers.
But it wants to incorporate the story of its digital business into everything it communicates. And key to this is the integration of digital in its day-to-day business; the online community development, marketing, connectivity, show content, apps, social media and much else besides must be readily apparent in everything the company does.
“We decided a year ago to migrate colleagues from the show teams to the digital division to run and maintain the web presences for our shows,” says Hattendorf. “These used to be run and maintained by the show teams, now they are run and maintained by the digital business division.”
The industry’s most progressive organisers have grown to believe in a designated digital strategy, working in tandem with management. As new ideas are drawn from this new spring, the show teams – key to the success of Messe Frankfurt, and all trade show organisers for that matter – must then put them into action.
The exhibition industry has entered a new era. What had at first appeared as a threat to the established order of things, a gauntlet thrown down before the world’s organisers, had in the space of a few years grown into an opportunity that nobody could afford to overlook.
Exhibitions move into the age of Big Data
The founder and namesake of specialist exhibition management consultancy JWC, Jochen Witt, once told me that a friend of his rather mockingly describes trade shows as ‘empty certificates of hope’. It’s an exaggeration, but it does indicate a curious phenomenon in the exhibition industry: show organisers own brands, concepts and data, but rarely tangible assets. The relevance of data for the trade show business has been clear for some time now, and as information and data on potential visitors and exhibitors at these events has become increasingly available online, so too has the need to manage it grown.
The exhibition industry, having largely accepted (if not demonstrated) the need to improve the digital component of its shows, now operates with unparalleled access to data. And for purposes of clarity, when I mention data, it is not only the addresses, telephone numbers and management position of organisers’ customers that I am talking about, but knowledge about the business and needs thereof.
The transition of data into information, and information into knowledge was something that was drummed into me while studying for my degree, and it has never made more sense than when applied to the exhibition industry. Data on its own is a meaningless commodity, tradeable – as with, say, wheat – only for what it can be used to produce. Collated effectively and passed through the appropriate filters, data becomes information, information that can be analysed in order to deliver knowledge for the person or company that possesses it. It is at this point that the true value of data is discovered, and it is the reason why companies do all that they can to harvest data at every opportunity.
In time, the exhibition industry began to talk about ‘customer information’ rather than data management. If trade shows are one of those rare products where the customer is part of the product – the exhibitors on display are both the paying customer for the organiser, and the reason that an exhibition does well or falls short – customer information is critical for success. However, the industry was not alone in starting to talk about customer information. In fact, the industry was, if anything, late to the game as far as turning data into usable information, and ultimately knowledge, is concerned. Other industries had clearly discovered the relevance of customer information for their success.
The McKinsey Global Institute, a business advisory and consultancy firm, reported that McDonald’s, for example, has equipped some stores with devices that gather operational data as they track customer interaction, traffic in store and ordering patterns. Researchers can then model the impact of variations in menus, restaurant designs and so on, on productivity and sales.
Supermarkets also monitor the movement of customers and their purchasing patterns, in order to find out where to place which products, and in which quantities. This results in significantly improved profitability as inventory management becomes more efficient – a move towards the ‘perfect capitalism’ model referenced earlier in this book by Dr Kaku – and sales of high-margin products improve, with deft product placement creating and directing additional revenue streams.
This has a multiplying effect in the trade fair industry, where organisers need to monitor all customer perspectives – exhibitors as well as visitors and their respective industries.
On the exhibitor side, the show organiser needs to have access to as much basic data as possible: key information about an exhibitor’s participation history in past and competing events; company turnover and profit; number of employees; management structure; business segments and key performance indicators (KPIs) – it is all invaluable if available and accessible.
Even more important is the need to understand the trends, products and services of the respective industry, as well as the strategies of each exhibitor and the specific goals they associate with the show. For example, IBM would only attend if the show concept is in line with the strategies of the corresponding IBM business unit.
Visitors are, fundamentally, the only reason for an exhibitor to attend a show. Organisers therefore have an equal need to reach a deep understanding of visitor needs, expectations, perceptions and goals. Knowledge of their habits, interests and the demands they place on an industry (which for a brief time every year an exhibition encapsulates), is crucial to an event’s success. And due to the availability of such visitor information online, this is no longer a pipedream: it is now an attainable goal. Visitors compel the attendance of exhibitors, and it is no longer enough for the organiser to know simply whether the visitor is satisfied, very satisfied or dissatisfied with the show; now, the organiser needs to know why, how and in what ways they are satisfied; only then can they fully understand how to create the greatest possible degree of satisfaction.
“Organisers need to collect, store and analyse a wide range of information about exhibitors, visitors and show performance. In an era where collecting data has never been so easy, where an abundance of data is available and where the amount of data available is growing ever more rapidly, this has the potential of generating tremendous benefits,” Witt explains. “But beware, it will also create many problems. Organisers will have to adjust their processes and organisation and develop concepts to secure data quality and security.”
The floor plan of any exhibition is one of the organiser’s most important considerations. Traditionally, floor planning was driven by market position, brand power, historic significance or the image of the exhibitors. Witt points out that as access to ever-greater amounts of information becomes possible, future floor planning should be driven by balancing customer needs and customer ROI with the highest possible return for the organiser.
This can all be put quite simply: organisers now need to know much more than the total visitor numbers.
There is a clear corollary here with the supermarket industry, Witt claims. Organisers should have a clear picture about the quality of the visitors. They should also know all about traffic in the aisles, attraction rates (i.e. how many visitors have been attracted to the booth of an exhibitor) and conversion rates (i.e. how many of the attracted visitors have been converted into leads and potentially into business):
“By gathering such data, organisers can more efficiently manage visitor flow, apply value-based differentiated pricing, increase their own profitability and enhance customer satisfaction and customer ROI at the same time.”
Most importantly, organisers will have to find the right data/information strategy. They need to find the right people to analyse and extract wisdom from the huge amount of data stockpiled. With so much available to so many, the trickiest task lies not in obtaining data but in taking what you accumulate and turning it into commercial acumen.
Perhaps management science pioneer Russell L. Ackoff explains it best: “Data is raw, it simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence… Wisdom beckons to give us understanding about which there has previously been no understanding, and in doing so goes far beyond understanding itself.”
Achieving the conversion of raw data into useful wisdom, or knowledge, became one of the biggest challenges for the exhibition industry. And this was a great deal more important than the relatively simple task of accumulating the stuff in the first place.
What JWC’s Anna Holzner began to observe was organisers and venue operators in possession of vast amounts of data that they did not know how to handle:
“It is not easy to structure work flows, systems, and business decision-making processes in such a way that something actually gets done with all this good data we have,” she explains. To Holzner at least it seemed that the gap between the value that data can bring to the running of trade fairs and what we seem to actually be doing with it was growing.
Companies outside of the exhibition industry were noticing that careful data handling and management was leading to improvements in customer service, market share, costs, speed-to-market and brand image. But while many organisers understood the apparent importance of data accumulation, the time-worn platitude that the exhibition businesses they run have done very well for long periods of time with only a minimal use of data still held sway. Instead, these organisers attributed their success to their teams’ imagination and ability to generate positive marketing and communities, or other such qualitative measures.
“And they make a very good point,” says Holzner. “Think about the business of creating and running a good exhibition versus, for example, the business of distribution and retail of the likes of Wal-Mart or Tesco. It is after all a very different business to be in.
“One should not make the mistake of assuming the potential competitive advantages gained by more and better data in one business environment will also hold true in another. On the face of it, there is probably little in common between, say, the volume and cost leadership play that a mass-market retailing giant is in, and the very unique (and different from show to show) exhibition business. Here, success is driven by anticipating and organising future markets. The opportunity to test ideas (change and innovate) typically comes in cycles of one year or more, and revenue models are mostly based on getting everything right in the course of three to six days by having created momentum during prior months that stimulated all the ‘buzz’.
“Even the words that define our business are a bit ‘touchy-feely’,” Holzner adds.
But as data becomes a greater consideration for exhibition organisers, this will need to change. Having the booking patterns over recent years will highlight the accounts that are growing or shrinking, paying later and later in the cycle or stopping altogether. But as Jochen Witt suggests, organisers could consider additional data points that might provide information on spending patterns at their shows and reveal what is really driving value for their exhibitors and visitors. “Are their customer satisfaction surveys designed in such a way that insights are easy to retrieve? Are they done in such a way that you can tell, easily and over time, how exhibitors and visitors are drawing value from the show? Can the data obtained easily translate into decisions and actions that will improve the yield [for which read: profit] and customer satisfaction at the same time?” he asks. After all, the means of extracting data from exhibitions has come a long way since journalists stood outside Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London taking handwritten notes of what was going on.
However, experience shows that to bring about change in data-driven decision making can be quite tricky. Many in the industry feared, and continue to fear, that time spent pumping resources into projects aimed at collecting and processing as much data as possible may not eventually yield remunerative fruit.
But they had better learn to channel those fears, for as Holzner says, “All these facets of getting individuals and teams to be comfortable with more data is not really an option anymore.” And just for good measure she adds, “The days of lots of data are behind us. Big data is here and the days of ‘mega data’ will surely be here before long.”
And by the time that you read this, those days will almost certainly be upon us.
Leave a Reply