Often, marketing and sales people tear out their hair trying to figure out what customers and prospects are thinking.

• Are they coming to a show?
• Are they thinking about purchasing at the show?
• Did they like last year’s show? How far did they travel?
• What do they look for in a booth?

So here’s a radical idea: Ask them.

Survey tools today are cheap, simple to implement, and sophisticated enough to gather some incredibly helpful information. There’s a really helpful article at idealware.org that outlines some of tools available to you that are free or cheap. The article also outlines a few features to look for:

Pretty much any good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then send your constituents a link to answer the survey online. But some offer more sophisticated functionality that can be very handy when you’re planning anything more than the simplest survey. What types of features might be useful?

• Flexible survey look and feel. A survey that has prominent branding for a survey tool rather than for your organization can be off-putting to your constituents and decrease response rate. A package that allows you to update colors, and font, and header graphics can help you match a survey to your website or organizational branding.
• Skip logic. As you design more complex surveys, it’s often useful to let respondents skip a whole section of questions that don’t apply to them. Survey skip logic allows you to define, for instance, that those who answer “no” to question 10 should skip to question 15.
• Piping. Piping allows you to pull answers from one part of a survey into another. For instance, if someone says in one question that they live in New York City, you can then ask them in a follow-up, “What’s the best thing about living in New York City” – filling in the name of the city from the previous question. More sophisticated packages allow you to combine skip logic and piping to customize surveys even further.
• Randomization. The order of a set of questions, or the set of answers to a given question, can often affect survey responses and thus the quality of your data. Features that automatically randomize the order of particular questions or answers will help avoid this issue.
• Website integration. While many of these packages create surveys in their own web page, some allow you to embed them into your existing website. This can be a particularly useful way to do quick, one-question surveys (called polls), or to gather opinions from web visitors in a longer survey.
• Data analysis. One of the primary differentiators between inexpensive packages and their more expensive brethren is their ability to help you to analyze the data and understand the meaning behind the results. Most packages provide simple reports summarizing the answers to each question, and many will let you download them into Excel or another tool for futher analysis. More advanced packages allow you to cross-tabulation to see the data relationships between different sets of questions, or to do complex statistical analysis.

Keep in mind that no software package can do the design work to ensure your survey will collect effective, high quality data. While it’s easy to slap together a set of questions, designing a survey that will capture the data you need in a rigorous way is complicated, and you’ll likely benefit from consulting someone who has experience with survey design.

The article goes on to give an overview of some of todays more popular free and cheap survey sites.  You can (and should) read it here: Link

For tradeshows, it would be good to survey before and after a show with the before coming far enough ahead that you can still plan toward the results.  While this kind of survey may not give you a totally clear picture, it can be effective in making decisions about booth design, position and even which tradeshows to attend.

The process of going to a tradeshow is never easy — for an individual or a company.  Whether it’s travel, organizing staff or setting up a booth, just the shear logistics of getting there can be a distraction from why you went in the first place.   The Rogers Company has tried to alleviate this just a little bit by providing a guide to streamlining the design, build and delivery process for tradeshow booths.  We’re not all designers, but if we think like one when we’re working with one it could make life a whole lot easier.

From the book:

Good booth design, even with a professional team, doesn’t just happen. Like everything from product development to marketing, success is in the process and everything starts with design. Finding a good design team and trusted trade show expert is a good first step, but contributing positively to the design process is a close second.

This guide offers advice from the designer’s perspective that will ultimately improve the design process and result in a better, more profitable show experience.

Allison Devlin from MimVista was the winner of a $100 gift card this month and she selected HOME DEPOT. Congratulations Allison!

From the book:

Trade show exhibit design is undergoing a revolution bringing new materials and design techniques that are lighter, easier to ship, easier to assemble and are reusable. Moreover, environmental consciousness has become a positive and marketable attribute that touts the cutting edge efficiency of many companies.

In other words, going green at your next trade show may be healthy for the planet, but it may also be healthy for your company’s bottom line.

Let’s face it…new technology comes and goes and separating real trends from the latest gizmo can be difficult. The Rogers Company put together a brief overview of some of the important technological drivers for tradeshows. Keep in mind, these trends are driven as much by what the industry needs as what it offers. It’s important for exhibitors to recognize what they can get from technology and not be driven by the ‘latest and greatest’ thing out there. From the book:

When it comes to technology, yesterday’s new toy is tomorrow’s indispensable business tool. We’ve seen this happen with everything from desktop computers to cell phones to GPS systems. Keeping this in mind when approaching technology for tradeshows is a good idea. A fancy booth toy could just be a waste of money, but the right investment in technology could help attract attention, achieve business goals at a show, or help create an unforgettable branded environment.

Looking at some overall trends in event marketing can reveal where new technologies can be most effective. We examined some of the prevailing trends in event marketing and compared them to new evolutions in technology to help you choose which might help build business at your company’s next tradeshow or event.

Let’s face it…new technology comes and goes and separating real trends from the latest gizmo can be difficult.  The Rogers Company put together a brief overview of some of the important technological drivers for tradeshows.  Keep in mind, these trends are driven as much by what the industry needs as what it offers.  It’s important for exhibitors to recognize what they can get from technology and not be driven by the ‘latest and greatest’ thing out there.  From the book:

When it comes to technology, yesterday’s new toy is tomorrow’s indispensable business tool.  We’ve seen this happen with everything from desktop computers to cell phones to GPS systems.  Keeping this in mind when approaching technology for tradeshows is a good idea.  A fancy booth toy could just be a waste of money, but the right investment in technology could help attract attention, achieve business goals at a show, or help create an unforgettable branded environment.

Looking at some overall trends in event marketing can reveal where new technologies can be most effective.  We examined some of the prevailing trends in event marketing and compared them to new evolutions in technology to help you choose which might help build business at your company’s next tradeshow or event.

Life Science Leader recently ran an article on Franklin & Seidelmann’s work with The Rogers Company to design an effective booth for its tradeshows — the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) show in particular. The article focuses on the F&S need to create a space to build relationships. Since the company’s main business is teleradiology, it doesn’t have the chance for face to face branding or even to build relationships with its own physicians. The article outlines how the need to build relationships was built into the design.

As more and more companies, once traditional, move to online services, it’s possible that the need for face-to-face relationship building will become more important. In the past, meeting the people you already know at a tradeshow was a secondary goal. It may become or may already be a primary goal if it’s the only chance to connect a human being to your brand.

You can read the article here: Link

You can view more videos at our YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/tradeshowfeed

“Partnership” has become a throw-away word these days. Years ago, before working in the exhibit industry,  I worked for a consumer products company. In my position I worked with a lot of plastic injection molders since our products were largely made of various types of molded plastics. A number of our vendors were also big suppliers to the automotive industry, in particular the US automotive manufacturers. The owners of those companies would talk to me about their “partnerships” with the “Big Three”. How they were invited to participate in “Vendor Days” and quality symposiums. Some of them were considered “tier-one” suppliers; others won vendor-of-the-year awards or were given plaques for superior quality. They were called “partners”, so in theory these business owners really thought they were partners with these huge corporations.

What most of them unfortunately learned later-on, was that this partnership was really a one-way street. Yes they got the business and yes they got their plaques and certificates, but in the end what they really got was dictated to. Many of them told me that they would be given a three year contract and that each year after the initial year they were REQUIRED to lower their price, regardless of material increases, regardless of labor increases, regardless of energy cost increases. They were basically told that in order to remain a “partner” they had to improve efficiencies each year and pass those savings (real or not) on to the customer. So the partnership was really not a partnership at all but rather a typical old-fashioned vendor-customer relationship where no matter how much circumstances had changed for the vendor the customer was really calling all the shots.

Eventually the pricing pressure and the lack of a real partnership drove a lot of these injection molders literally out of business. Others simply decided to stop selling to the car-makers because they were basically shipping dollars out the door with every truckload of parts. This isn’t a partnership. This is a dictatorship. True partnerships are win-win, and this was “win” (for the customer) and “lose” (for the vendor).

A true partnership starts with the understanding that both sides have needs. A true partnership allows one party to share those needs with the other and to have those needs understood and incorporated into an agreement that very simply allows both parties to make money. There is this misguided sentiment that even if a company loses money on every order, they can “make it up in volume”. All this philosophy does is allow a company to go out of business faster – but with a nice résumé – to serve as its epitaph.

I still believe in partnerships, but in this world I wonder how many other people actually embrace this concept? True partnerships require a level of transparency and an even deeper level of trust.

A great vendor partner looks for ways to save their clients money. They provide free stuff – advice, ideas, samples, and prototypes. They don’t take advantage of last minute orders by tacking on rush charges when they themselves aren’t incurring any extra cost.

Meanwhile, a great client partner recognizes the value a great vendor adds to their business. They have a sense of loyalty, share sensitive information and demonstrate their trust by living up to their end of the bargain. I wish we lived in a world where the term “fair profit” was more clearly defined and agreed upon. But since we don’t, we have to rely on partnerships that live up to the real meaning of the word. In the end, in a true partnership, both parties share the risk and both parties share the reward.

And as Henry Ford once said, “The reward for a job well done is the opportunity… for more work.”

That’s JB’s space for now. Thanks for visiting.