Sometimes it feels like nothing
short of a little abracadabra could actually produce the
perfect trade show. Balancing the conflicting interests of
exhibitors, attendees and sponsors, what trade show manager would
refuse a dash of magic if -- poof! -- a floor plan sketch suddenly
appeared that would distribute traffic evenly, keep attendees
engaged for hours on end and maximize revenue for the organizer,
all at the same time?
When it comes to drawing up the ideal
floor or the next innovations that will yield more effective trade
shows, “we’re all sitting here with our crystal balls trying to
figure it out,” says Pat Dwyer, senior manager of convention and
trade show services for Chicago-based SmithBucklin, a trade show
management company.
Martin Smith and Steve Miller are two
trade show consultants who have long since ditched their crystal
balls. And yet, they continue to inspire their clients to
innovate.
Consultant Martin Smith
of ethnoMETRICS says once
he evenchanged the carpet color
on the show floor overnight
to see what effects it would have.
Smith, founder of ethnoMETRICS Corp., a
Benton Harbor, Mich.-based company that analyzes retail and
trade-show environments, and Miller, a self-described “strategic
handyman” and founder of The Adventure, a consultancy that has
worked with some of the biggest trade shows in the country, help
their clients identify what to improve on a show floor and how to
do it. Each takes a different approach, but both agree clues to
more successful shows are already out there in plain view. The key
to success is just knowing where to look.
Dispelling myths
Smith believes in hard data above all
else. “Most shows I work with don’t know what’s helping them or
hurting them,” he says. “It’s dangerous when you don’t measure
anything.” Show managers typically keep track of the number of
registered attendees and exhibitors at their shows, but, Smith
notes, “you can’t manage to that.”
Smith says organizers who change the
decoration and organization of trade shows in subtle ways from year
to year simply to avoid stagnation are wasting opportunities to
analyze exactly what works and what doesn’t. “They don’t consider
it to be an experiment,” he says. “But it’s a huge experiment, and
they just don’t realize it.”
Smith has been analyzing buying
behavior and retail environments for eight years, and his client
list includes giants such as Best Buy and Macy’s. In 2002, he
started to turn his attention to trade shows. He began videotaping
attendees and exhibitors, and he gathered raw data about attendee
and exhibitor behavior, registration efficiency, lead generation
and other facets of trade shows. Smith estimates he’s now collected
information on 45 to 60 shows -- including International CES (the
consumer electronics show), The Motivation Show, the National
Restaurant Association Show and the American Dental Association
Annual Session -- at 15 convention centers across the country.
To figure out what factors actually are
driving certain behaviors, and thus, what can be manipulated to
produce a more effective design, Smith conducts mini-experiments
using a Six Sigma method that systematically tests variables in
order to yield more precise results. He will alter, for instance,
the color, size and placement of signage throughout the course of a
show and observe resulting changes in attendee behavior, rather
than wait to test out different signs at subsequent shows, when too
many variables are uncontrolled: The show might feature different
exhibitors, be held in different exhibit halls or even in entirely
different cities. Smith says once he even changed the carpet color
on the show floor overnight to see what effects it would have.
Smith’s findings have proven wrong some
widely held -- or, at least, oft-spouted -- beliefs about trade
shows.
“What we didn’t see,” Smith begins, “is
80 percent of people go to the right” when they enter the trade
show. “We saw something more like 34 percent. Now, at certain
convention centers or in certain areas, 80 percent may go right,
but you can manipulate it.” Placing entrances, attractions,
“anchor” exhibitors or other features at strategic places on the
floor will alter how attendees flow throughout the space, he
says.
Another myth is that the best booth
location is front and center. “Fewer than 2 percent of people stop
at the first booth,” Smith says. Front-and-center booths do enjoy
high visibility, he allows, but exhibitors looking to engage with
attendees are better off somewhere in the middle of the floor,
where greater than 70 percent of attendees tend to stop to talk
with them. Thus, the optimal location depends on the exhibitor’s
goals.
A third myth is that seating areas on
the floor discourage attendees from interacting with exhibitors or
send them searching for a premature exit once they’ve had a chance
to realize how tired they are.
“What we found was the opposite,” says
David A. Weil, Chicago-based senior director of convention and
trade show services for SmithBucklin, who worked with Smith to
analyze the International Carwash Association’s Car Care World Expo
in 2005. By adding seating and networking areas, organizers were
able to extend the average length of stay on the show floor by an
hour. And attendees didn’t just spend that hour sitting or
networking -- they actually interacted with more exhibitors.
Smith’s research also confirms other
hunches trade show managers hold but never before have had evidence
to prove. For instance, once attendees leave the show floor, they
tend not to return. During one show last year at McCormick Place in
Chicago, Smith observed the entrance to the convention center and
measured a spike of attendees leaving around lunchtime and never
recorded those people returning. “Having a restaurant can be very
critical to having people on the floor,” Smith concludes.
Having the restaurant in the right
place is important, too. At the same show, when a restaurant was
planted in the middle of the trade show floor, 71 percent of
attendees who walked into the space took a look around and walked
out without staying to eat. Yet, when the organizers moved the
restaurant to a front corner, the number who left without eating
fell to 51 percent. While Smith admits the level of food service is
clearly a factor in keeping attendees in the building, he notes
that pure setup and design issues also can have a major effect.
Further, at the Car Care World Expo,
Weil and Smith measured the number of leads generated by exhibitors
who displayed uniform “new product” icons, provided by the show’s
organizers, on their booths. Those exhibitors generated 59 percent
more leads than their non-icon-displaying peers. While this can be
attributed to the fact that the exhibitors actually had new
products to show and the others didn’t, Weil says surveys show the
icons themselves contributed to a sense that the show featured new
products, and that feeling closely correlated to overall
satisfaction ratings for the event.
Smith has numbers and video footage to
back up other conclusions:
* Latitudinal rows (which force
attendees to turn right or left upon entering the hall) are better
for balancing traffic than longitudinal rows (which would allow
attendees to enter the hall and walk straight up one of the
aisles).
* Very long aisles, without escape
hatches or variation, tire out attendees.
* A stark contrast in carpet colors
creates a “force-field effect” that discourages attendees from
moving across the color change.
* Exhibit booths encourage more
traffic when they allow attendees to flow in from the aisles like
an off-ramp on a highway, rather than those with small, fixed
entrances at 90 degrees to the flow of traffic.
Last fall, RSNA tried a
hub-and-spoke design
for its educational exhibits.
For the most part, attendees
raved about the layout.
Hub and spoke
One dramatic experiment conducted on
Smith’s watch was an innovative hub-and-spoke layout for the
educational exhibit hall of the 2006 annual meeting for the Oak
Brook, Ill.-based Radiological Society of North America, held at
McCormick Place.
In years past, the educational hall was
organized by the format, and not the subject matter, of the
information. If a doctor was interested in musculoskeletal
research, for example, she would have to locate that topic first in
the scientific poster section, then again in the educational
exhibit section and a third time in the informatics area. RSNA
committees decided to reorganize the hall by subject. At first, the
committees considered a more traditional segmented floor plan, but
“they thought that was not really as user-friendly,” as a
hub-and-spoke layout, explains RSNA’s Steve Drew, who helped
oversee the transformation. Drew says the new design actually
enabled doctors to walk shorter distances to find their
specialty.
Smith says doctors spent 35 more
minutes per day in the hall, compared with the old design, and “had
a tendency to consume more” because everything was in front of
them. “People thought there would be so much congestion in the hubs
that it wouldn’t work, you wouldn’t be able to move around, it
would be inefficient, you wouldn’t be able to find the right
spoke,” Smith recalls. “We didn’t have anything like that. We
didn’t have congestion.” Nor did it take very long for the doctors
to orient themselves on the floor, he adds.
Smith doesn’t expect the hub-and-spoke
design to become a fad in the industry. “I’d be nervous to use it
for a regular exhibit floor,” he says. For one thing, convention
centers, which have electrical and plumbing access spaced out
evenly in a grid formation, aren’t designed for nontraditional
layouts. Additionally, the hub and spoke isn’t an efficient use of
space; trade shows looking to maximize the number of booths, and,
thus, revenue, would be limiting themselves.
Thomas Shimala, RSNA’s director of
technical exhibits, says he’s not even
considering using the hub-and-spoke plan for the association’s
commercial exhibits because he’d have to exclude exhibitors, and
that would decrease revenue. “We’d be shooting ourselves in the
foot,” he says.
Building a golf
course
Steve Miller is an idea man.
Measurement and analysis of design experiments are essential, he
says, but he starts with the big picture and works his way down to
the details.
“You hear people talk and say a trade
show is a trade show is a trade show,” Miller says. “Our objective
is never to say that.”
If a show looks and feels like any
other, Miller adds, “the customer, whether it’s the attendee or the
exhibitor, automatically forms a perception of what the value is.”
One of Miller’s goals for his show clients is to create a strong
brand identity that will inspire pride from the attendees, who, he
likes to remind his clients, dedicate their lives to these
industries.
To enhance the
Golf Industry Show,
Caroline Gollier added
diagonal aisles that
converged in the
middle of the floor.
Where the aisles
intersected,
exhibitors were asked to build
a functional green from scratch.
As the green took shape,
the attendees --
golf course superintendents --
“could not stay away.”
Gollier says the feature
created a huge buzz,
set a positive tone for the show
and kept attendees on the show floor.
This was the thought process that led
Miller and a client, Lawrence, Kan.-based Golf Course
Superintendents Association of America, to devise a
proto-hub-and-spoke design for the Golf Industry Show held in
Orlando in 2005. The goal was not to organize information in a more
efficient way, but to focus attention on the show floor’s main
attraction, placed smack-dab in the center: the building of a
green.
“We thought, what can we do that would
instill pride in the attendees?” Miller explains. “The attendees
are superintendents. Superintendents love to play in the dirt.”
Caroline Gollier, trade show manager
for the GCSAA, carved out space on the floor for an area where,
over the course of the three-day event, engineers would construct a
full-size green from scratch. Diagonal aisles radiated out from the
green, requiring some exhibitors to construct booths with a
diagonal edge.
The upshot? “The superintendents
absolutely could not stay away,” Miller recalls. “It was like a
magnet that kept sucking them back.”
Gollier says feedback was hugely
positive, and the diagonal aisles, while rendering booths
challenging to number in a logical way, also worked well. The main
problem (aside from occasional noise and stray dirt) was that the
design “ate up a lot of sellable space.” Gollier says she’s
planning a similar design for 2008, when the show returns to
Orlando, but as the show maxed out convention centers in Atlanta
and Anaheim during the past two years, she didn’t have the luxury
to add extra aisles.
To enhance the Golf Industry Show,
Caroline Gollier added diagonal aisles that converged in the middle
of the floor.
Where the aisles intersected,
exhibitors were asked to build a functional green from scratch.
As the green took shape, the
attendees -- golf course superintendents -- “could not stay
away.”
Gollier says the feature created a huge
buzz, set a positive tone for the show and kept attendees on the
show floor.
WORKING WITH THE GRID
Trade shows don’t need wholesale design or layout makeovers to be improved. Christopher Gribbs, right, senior director, conventions, for the Washington, D.C.-based American Institute of Architects, says traffic flow can always be more balanced, and he repositions features on the floor “like Tinkertoys” to help drive traffic in the right directions.
Other show organizers enhance their events by grouping exhibitors by general category, a method known as segmentation, which generally pleases attendees because they don’t have to hunt all over a show floor to find like exhibitors. The key, according to Martin Smith, founder of ethnoMETRICS in Benton Harbor, Mich., is to have only broad categories for segmentation. That way, direct competitors don’t have to be lined up across the aisle from each other, and enough diversity remains so attendees aren’t tempted to skip large areas of the floor altogether.
Still others focus on enhancing member services booths, or, in the words of David A. Weil, senior director of convention and trade show services for SmithBucklin in Chicago, eliminating the “pain points” for attendees and exhibitors, such as long registration lines. Weil says he cut six minutes off the average wait time at the Car Care World Expo by placing signs and staff members in better spots and by reorganizing the computer system so that any attendee could register at any open spot at the desk.
For shows that already sell out packed exhibit halls and depend heavily on exhibit booth revenue, this kind of experimentation is all that’s typically feasible. “As designers and an association of architects, we want to be more progressive,” says Gribbs. “Have we been successful? No, not lately, because the show has been rocking.” Gribbs says the question boils down to whether he’s willing to forgo revenue from booth space for the sake of design. “I can’t really justify it,” he admits.
Cathy Mahoney, director of sales administration of exposition sales for Dallas-based Freeman Co., says show directors suggest creative design concepts, but “most never really pan out” due to cost and logistical concerns related to fire codes, electricity and plumbing.
Alien encounters
In Miller’s experience, the best place
to look for inspiration is anywhere that has nothing directly to do
with the problem you’re trying to solve. That’s why he has formed a
“club” for about 15 clients who organize trade shows. Three times a
year, he plans trips to various cities to expose the group to what
he calls “alien experiences,” examples of attractions or businesses
that are doing innovative things that could be applied to trade
shows. These experiences have ranged from observing major Las Vegas
hotels, to see how they process thousands of people in short
amounts of time, to visiting a bustling FedEx hub in the middle of
the night.
One stop on a recent club outing was
the American Girl Place in Chicago, which is a doll store, but “the
fact is that they’ve turned a doll store into a very real
experience,” Miller says. When he asked an American Girl executive
to describe the experience in one sentence, the executive told
Miller, “We put vitamins in the cake.”
“I like that,” Miller continues. “I
think it’s a great concept. It’s fun for the kid but of value to
the parent. That’s what we want to do when creating trade
shows.”
Michelle Sanford, director of
exhibitions operations for Milwaukee-based Association of Equipment
Manufacturers, says American Girl Place taught her that although
her trade show, CONEXPO-CON/AGG, is primarily a marketplace, there
were other amenities she could add to improve the overall
experience. Whereas the doll store has a restaurant geared for
mothers and their daughters, the trade show could have VIP lounges
and restaurants to enhance networking. Whereas the doll store
features short, entertaining theatrical plays, CONEXPO could
package demonstrations and seminars in a more dramatic fashion.
Studying the
options
Stuart Aizenberg, director of trade
shows and allied membership for the National Automatic
Merchandising Association, based in Chicago, is one of the regular
instructors for the course on floor plans and layouts offered by
the International Association of Exhibits and Events as part of the
CEM (Certified in Event Management) program. He teaches that “the
tradition of straight aisles, uninterrupted as much as possible, is
still a very good model for a very good layout.”
Aizenberg notes that the CEM course is
open to trade show professionals regardless of whether they’re
pursuing their CEM, and that it can be a valuable way to spend a
day. IAEE’s discussion groups or executive roundtables, other trade
shows, focus groups and outside innovative businesses are all good
resources for organizers looking to learn from others how they can
improve their trade shows.
There’s nothing magical about it. The
innovators are the ones who realize the simplest ideas are usually
the best, and, quite often, those ideas already are staring them in
the face.