Blogstar Memoirs

Tradeshow experiences

Hello to the staff from schools we met at the School Resources Expo (SRE), at Rosehill Racecourse. It was lovely meeting so many enthusiastic staff on Friday!

I thought I would write a post from the perspective of an exhibitor – half way through the event, with one more day (tomorrow) to come.

While I’ve been involved in organising stands for expos and shows before, the SRE was Rockstar’s first ever show. We have been really excited about the event, as it gave us an opportunity to showcase who we are (fun + open + happy), as well as provide a productive non-negotiable deadline to get our many marketing materials together.

We had a total of 9 Rockstar staff attend at various points. It sounds like a lot for a 3×3 metre stand – but we had planned big things – namely putting on a musical in one of the seminar rooms. More on this later.

I had been warned on many occasions prior to the show, that the type of people visiting these shows aren’t often the exact target market you are seeking. The organisers of the SRE promised plenty of representatives from both government and private schools.

The reality was; the staff we met on Friday were lovely and fantastic, but they were few and far between. With over 250 exhibitor booths with an average of say 2.5 staff per booth (approx 600 exhibitor staff), I’d estimate a total of no more than 100 visitors walked through the door on Friday. Best case – that’s a 6 exhibitor:1 visitor ratio THE WRONG WAY!!

It felt extremely empty all day, and from an exhibitor’s business point of view – very disappointing. The ratio from the ground felt like 20:1.

Nevertheless, I think our team made the most of it. Thanks to awesome training provided at my old job at Student Marketing, we organised a fantastic plan to have our best foot forward.

Rockstar is a business lucky enough to display personality, have some fun, and enjoy the happier lighter side of life. To reflect this, our “uniform” comprised of custom designed bright yellow T-Shirts with “CHAT WITH ME” written on the back.

A key strategy was to have staff roam around the Expo with a specially made “Spongebob Yearbook” suit made of cardboard. We proactively approach visitors, and invited them to attend our seminar musical, with custom tickets handed out, advising of the time.

This tactic of roaming around with intersting outfit worked extremely well. We had fun mingling with the (few) visitors as well as other friendly exhibitors! We also had Happy Lion make an afternoon appearance with Spongebob Yearbook, which was fun too.

Spongebob Yearbook

Back at our stand (which was fortunate enough to be in the smaller Hall on the ground floor), we took on a proactive approach, careful to always display OPEN and friendly body language. We were also careful to greet with eye contact, a smile, and proactively say hello.

In my opinion, at a trade show where there are hundreds of booths, there’s nothing less appealing or inviting from a visitor’s point of view, than seeing a “bland” person in a shirt + pants, looking disinterested with tired body language, while manning their stall. In my opinion, every business has an opportunity to stand out, if it really wants to. Yes business is serious – but behind every business are people. Staff at expos have an opportunity to be creative and make a difference. Surely, this positive difference shown to visitors greatly helps towards increasing your sales leads? Why be mediocre when you can make a difference with a little effort?

Our experience today culminated at 2:15pm when our musical was scheduled to run. After last minute tech delays, the show went ahead to a massive audience of 12!!!

I’m not being sarcastic with this happiness, as 12 people in the audience was a huge number compared to other seminars. Unfortunately, many others seminars were cancelled as no visitors even turned up. I felt really bad for everyone in this situation, as everyone had most probably put a lot of effort into it.

We had heaps of fun during our musical, and we even filmed it!

Gripes

First and foremost – the ridiculously low small number of visitors on Friday. Their marketing to visitors did not hit the mark on Friday.

Secondly, the public address voiceover was dead monotone and sounded half asleep. Give people a bit of encouragement to go to the seminars! If you don’t sound interested about them, neither will they!

Competitors

Trade shows and expos bring together competitors together under the same roof. I haven’t had much experience with this scenario, and I’m sure my perspective will change as time goes on.

Personally I’m very competitive by nature. When it comes to certain things like sport or business, I’ll be in overdrive by default, and be switched on 100% to make sure my team wins. When it comes to business, it can get a little personal. You may understand this concept a little better if you’ve ever started up your own business from scratch before. After risking it all and investing blood sweat and tears, your business becomes a major part of your life. As a “standard employee”, it’s different – it doesn’t get personal.

Regardless, I believe it’s important to be professional to your competitors at all times. This is a similar concept to respecting your enemies.

At the same time however, if a competitor is not being professional to us, for example: copying everything we do word-for-word (ie: breaking copyright), stealing IP, and doing dodgy things (like getting their mother called Mary to call and pretend to be a client), it makes it very difficult to be nice. There’s a boundary as to what constitutes fair competition, and what constitutes being an idiot (and breaking the law). Unfortunately not everyone understands this boundary.

Another competitor’s company director came right inside our stand, ignored our polite welcomes, and openly gawked at all our materials. It was awkward. If we say hello to you, could you perhaps say “hello” back? If you’re going to go and meet the competition inside their home, at least display common courtesy. It’s really quite rude otherwise.

I think this company soon worked out that he did that bit of recon all wrong, so they sent in a second rep. We said hello to him again, and when quizzed about his in-depth gawking, he justied with the response that “we’re all friends!!”….. hmmmm really? We haven’t met yet, and we’re friends?!?!… Anyway, we continued chatting and he ended up being a really nice guy, who was quite decent and nice about everything. It was nice to meet you Robert

In summary, I’ve so far concluded that yes, competitors may “all be friends” – but you’ve got to earn that friendship first. It doesn’t exist by default. Being a rude and not understanding professional boundaries doesn’t help either.

In general about being nice: I guess there are two schools of thought. We’ve all heard stories of World War II, where Allied and Axis soldiers stopped fighting each other in the trenchs during Christmas Day, to share coffee, a meal, and Christmas Carols. But is this really the right thing to do? Yes it is nice, but I don’t know.. is it right? You can see it both ways. It’s nice being friendly, but are you secretly being taken advantage of? I guess these are issues that business owners/army generals have more to gain and lose from.

Who knows though, I may change my mind in the future with more experience and maturity.

Quick Saturday round up. It was crap. Worse than Friday. Complaint letter to the SRE organisers to come. It wasn’t what we were sold.

Update to complaint letter: The onus and expertise of attracting visitors to the Expo was implied on us – the exhibitors. This was inappropriately done through a template e-mail response + inappropriately angled “survey”. It’s never fun working with organisations who don’t act appropriately to complaints.

Now that we’ve published these thoughts on our blog, I guess that means Rockstar are even more accountable to our clients. We have to practice what we preach! Something we’re happy to step up to the plate with again this year.