TRADE SHOWS - PART 2

Our products have pretty broad appeal. When we first started thinking about trade shows, we were quite excited about the prospect of selling our wares to the public at such a venue. The public would love our products! We would sell out of stock! It would be great! What’s not to like?

So, we manufactured lots of stock, rented a truck to hold it all, reserved three hotel rooms for ourselves, and spent five days selling, uh, enough to make back about one-third of what it cost us to attend the show. Needless to say, we were not sold on public trade shows after this experience.

Using the analysis points mentioned in the previous posting, the analysis went something like this:

1. The “price per hour” was $23. That was sales approximately one unit per hour or so to try to cover costs, which sounds doable. The show hours were good—morning and evening hours, weekday and weekend dates.

2. The “attendance per dollar” was good. We had been told that approximately 30,000 people usually attended the show and the booth fee was $1,200.

3. We did not ask for vendor return information from the show management.

4. Advertising for this show was via several main channels. Additionally, this show was a popular one that had been going for many years.

5. The show location was great—easy to drive to and park, but also reachable by light rail and bus.

So, we should have done better than we did, right? Our Bin Buddie product was very popular with campers. This was a Sportsmen’s show. The analysis was pretty good. So where did we go wrong? The following:

1. We had a good grasp of our target audience, but we learned it was more narrowly defined than we thought. This show was in Portland, Oregon, and drew from southwest Washington, Portland and northwest Oregon. We have learned that this audience’s income and education level was not our ideal demographic, regardless of the fact that they all participate in outdoor activities. Our other efforts to date have borne this out.

2. Wrong gender. Our product is an “organizational” product. Most, but not all, men run from it at the first sniff. This was a show where men were the major purchasers. Women were present, but women shopping with men usually means that men will make the decisions, and it won’t be to look at Bin Buddies. We encounter this dynamic with all public venues at which we sell our products.

3. People come to these shows to look and score freebies, not necessarily to buy. If they do buy, intuitive, impulse-buy products do best.

We limped home from this show, licked our wounds, and reviewed our lessons learned. We resolved to do no more public shows—we could not afford any more major financial losses like this. There were, however, several positives that came out of this show:

1. As time passed, the information gleaned from this experience was most valuable when refining our sales and marketing efforts.

2. Approximately 30,000 people were exposed to our products. We got some into the hands of the general public, which is always good.

3. We made some price adjustments based on feedback we received. The adjustments have proven to be a good move.

4. We got a lot smarter about attending public shows, smarts we would not have developed had we not attended this show.

I will discuss our next effort in the next installment of my Trade Show series.

Our resolve to do no more public shows lasted until July, when I participated in the West Seattle Summerfest, part of our local community festival. It sounded fun, it would be downright economical for the exposure we got, and wanted to get out and do something other than what I was dealing with in the office. The idea was met with heightened skepticism, but I smiled sweetly and got permission to go despite misgivings.