Trade Fair Participation

After having clear goals in mind, exhibitors need to plan the participation thoroughly in order to reach those goals. One of the main activities of participation in trade fairs is trade show selection. Only the right fairs will bring the desired results to the organisation. In order to minimise the company’s marketing expense, marketers need to select appropriate shows to participate in from the thousands taking place nowadays. Next, suitable strategies of exhibiting must be developed and executed properly. At the end of trade fairs, follow-up activities must be done to transfer leads into sales and to maximise a company’s benefits from the fairs. Another crucial step after the fair is the evaluation of the effectiveness of trade fairs participation,

Due to the objectives of exhibiting at trade shows mentioned earlier in the last chapter (see also 2.1.5), qualitative goals such as increasing product awareness, enhancing customer relationships, etc. can be difficult to evaluate. Nevertheless, trade fairs, as a communication instrument, have to compete with other marketing tools to win the company’s budget. If the effectiveness of trade fair participation cannot be measured, while other tools are measurable by some indicators, the exhibiting team may find it difficult to obtain the resources essential for participation and trade fairs can be defined as a low efficient instrument even though this may not be the case. Moreover, measuring success is not only necessary for gaining a marketing budget but also for the selection of multiple exhibitions. Among the great number of shows taking place nowadays, a company must decide for the ones it considers the best investment. Knowing efficiency of particular fairs helps exhibitors take the right decision for future participation. (Mruk and Kuca, 2006,

It is not because they are not willing to do so but instead because they do not know how to do it (Wahler, 1999, p.114). Several kinds of measurement are now available for exhibitors to choose regarding their own objectives. For instance, if the purpose of exhibiting is to increase sales, numbers of orders should be gathered to use as a measure. If it aims at exploring new market, extensive information about the market, its characteristics and available products should be collected in order to analyse the possibility of a company’s products to enter this market and what needs to be adapted (Thain, 1997, p.20; UFI, n.d., p.84). Table 3 shows different measures that are used to evaluate trade fair performance and their degree of usage. The most common way of evaluating participation results is by using the number of leads generated at the shows and this is employed by almost 72 percent of respondents. However, it is recommended that exhibitors should use several measures to identify the success of their participation. (Wahler, 1999,