Review

Rating: 9

A complete guide to successful trade shows and exhibitions

Trade shows, consumer shows, product launches, sporting events, and other opportunities to interact face-to-face with customers have become an important part of the marketing mix. Recent studies show that the percentage of the total marketing communications budget spent on event marketing ranged from over 9% to a staggering 29%. In 2003, North America alone hosted over 13,000 trade and consumer shows, each one with hundreds of exhibitors, and thousands of visitors. Beyond traditional trade shows, there are countless other opportunities for exhibitors to interact with their customers directly and improve the bottom line, such as mall displays, corporate events, road shows, and permanent displays.

Well chosen and executed events can shorten the sales cycle significantly and put you miles ahead of the competition, but you need to have an exhibit plan that’s well thought out, organized, and executed. While some large organizations have a dedicated exhibit staff, often the role of exhibit management lands on the desk of an unsuspecting, overworked, or unwilling sales or marketing person who needs to get results from their exhibit investment, but doesn’t know where to start. The Power of Exhibit provides the step-by-step advice you need to exhibit successfully. This definitive guide to trade shows and other event marketing shows how to set objectives, budget for your event and measure its success in ROI, choose the right show and find the right audience, turn leads into business, design booths, work the show, gather information and intelligence, and much more.

I find this book an excellent guide to exhibition and exhibit marketing. The book gives an in-depth review on exhibit marketing, which is quite a unique area in marketing that you do not usually find on regular marketing textbooks. It also provide an A-to-Z guide and tips to participate an exhibition. One thing that is very interesting about this book is that it was written based on factual figures and statistics from the field. On each important “quote”, it usually comes with backup figures. So it does looks somewhat like reading an academic thesis or research article, but with an relaxing written style, still the reader can feel as if the author were casually discussing the issue in front of him/her. The author seems to want the reader to know that he is not making those issues up, but he has taken them from the real world. It is a must for experienced exhibitors, who wishes to seek new advices or ideas on how to continue improving their success at the fairground.