Focus On Your Target

When I have the opportunity to walk the show floor, especially at shows I’m very familiar with, I usually hear this same question from exhibitors and attendees alike: “What’s the show’s attendance like this year?”

I’m usually very polite with my answer, but I’m always tempted to say: “Why? What does it matter what the overall show attendance is?”

If there was ever a statistic that carried little weight (except to those show-related services based entirely on the “gross crowd size” — cab companies, restaurants, hotels, restroom attendant staffing, etc) — this is it. Yet this is the number most people care about.

The more I exhibit, the more I come to realize that the majority of our industry is focused on the wrong things. We hope for huge crowds, with people pushing to get into our exhibit, like shoppers on Black Friday. This just doesn’t happen (except in very rare cases).

Shows do draw crowds, no doubt about it. But unless we focus on our target, we’ll expend a lot of resources and energy to do things that distract us from achieving the best results possible.

Case in point: When I served as the exhibit manager for Kerry Ingredients, we were one of the “anchor” exhibitors at the IFT Food Expo (where food technologists and food scientists go to hone their skills). Each year, we subscribed to a report from Exhibit Surveys Inc. that broke down the overall attendance into numerous categories. One category that served to be a great predictor of our expected busy-ness was “product interest.” This category measured what attendees were interested to see when they came to the show.

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