January 2005
The Science of Shopping

What show organizers can learn from retailers to create memorable experiences to keep attendees coming back

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor


What if companies made sales in a theme park? In this Wal-Mart meets Disney scenario, customers pay a premium to enter a themed environment for sensory-rich encounters with attentive sales people who staff engaging displays of diverse products. The immersive experience is so satisfying that they come back year after year — and buy a lot.

That’s the ultimate trade show experience, as envisioned by Jim Gilmore, co-author of The Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) and co-founder of the Aurora, OH-based think tank, Strategic Horizons LLP (www.strategichorizons.com). Since he and Joseph Pine first put forth the notion that experiences are an economic output, just like goods and services, Gilmore has tracked the success of companies that generate new sources of revenue by creating satisfying and memorable paid-for experiences.

Show managers can learn much from retailers like The Pleasant Co., which produced American Girl Place in Chicago not to display the American Girl collection of dolls but to give mothers and daughters a place to spend time together. Not surprisingly, time is money spent on admission, theater tickets, dining experiences and memorabilia, which often include dolls and accessories.

If trade shows applied the same principles, not only would they charge admission to the exhibition hall, they’d require companies to charge admission to the exhibits. “It forces them to create a more compelling experience. The buzz would happen on the show floor, when attendees say, ‘Here’s what’s worth paying for,’” Gilmore posits. “Instead of spending two hours getting free stuff, they’re more deliberate about how to get value out of the show.”

Getting value is the goal. In a market where many trade events are commodities, a valuable experience is a rarity that can be a competitive differentiator. But how do you achieve such an intangible? Enter six sigma engineer Marty Smith of MCG Corp. (www.mcgcorporation.com), a St. Joseph, MI-based consulting firm that measures the purchase experience using a disciplined, data-driven methodology aimed at achieving near perfection. Inspired by Gilmore’s theories, as well as those of Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Smith quantifies the factors that influence experience.

“These things are measurable,” Smith says. “That’s how we coined this concept of ethnometrics. We take the things that these guys had observed, put numbers to it, build a mathematical model, then optimize it.”

By using the metrics that work for “big box” retailers, Smith helps make the purchase experience on the show floor more satisfying. “If I love the purchase experience, then I’m a return shopper for life,” he says. “The people who go to trade shows also shop in stores. So they behave the same way at shows — how they interact are the buying behaviors we measure.”

These theories are all well and good, but do they work? Here are three compelling examples of trade events that have fine-tuned the show experience: Coverings, Accent on Design and Car Care World Expo.

Making memories
A memorable and satisfying experience engages people on an emotional, physical, intellectual and/or spiritual level. In “Welcome to the Experience Economy” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 1998), Gilmore and Pine suggest five experience-design principles: theme the experience, harmonize the impressions, eliminate negative cues, offer memorabilia and engage all five senses.

The most memorable trade shows have a theme that unifies the experience in a captivating story line. Take Coverings, for example. Held March 23–26, 2004, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL, the 500,000-square-foot expo for ceramic tile and natural stone floor coverings is a veritable world market, representing 1,000 exhibitors, 80 countries and 10 international pavilions comparable to Epcot’s World Showcase.

Aside from adhering to a country theme, pavilions have nearly complete creative freedom. Last year, the Turks built a 20,000-square-foot village with cobblestone streets, two-story buildings and wrought-iron fences. Each pavilion hosts a restaurant with its own chefs. Visitors touch the textured coverings, drink the wine and taste the food — paella from Spain, pasta from Italy, gyros from Turkey — all at no charge. In a nod to tradition, registration for both the exhibition hall and the conference is free.

“I don’t think we’d ever charge for it,” says Brandon Hensley, Director of Sales for National Trade Productions (NTP, www.ntpshow.com), the Alexandria, VA-based show management company. “We see it as something that’s taken on by the companies in the pavilions. It’s their pleasure to do it. They love sharing the experience of their country with the attendees.”

A tramway winds around the perimeter of the exhibit hall and down a 20-foot center aisle. Attendees who take the ride see the international banners, hear the foreign languages and smell the native dishes. The impression, or takeaway, is that of returning from a trip where you’ve been immersed in another culture. Negative cues, such as the poor service that could result from language barriers, are removed with the presence of up to 10 translators working the floor.

For the domestic audience that attends, the international experience is a huge selling point. “In our promotions, we try to articulate the sensory experience,” says Paige Cardwell, Vice President, Marketing, and Managing Director, NTP Creative Solutions Group. “We’re trying to sell the unique experience in the marketplace.” Perhaps not coincidentally, NTP grew attendance 10 percent in one year, to 29,453.

Despite show management’s best efforts to theme an event, exhibitors at most shows do their own thing, creating a hodgepodge of sights and sounds.
To counter that trend, Gilmore suggests requiring exhibits to conform to the show theme.

“Show management imposes physical construction constraints when they ought to be liberal with those things and be more constraining with their theme,” he says. “I’d allow individual exhibitors more flexibility in terms of their creative output and simultaneously have greater restrictions on how exhibits have to be themed.”

Layering experiences
Making experiences exclusive is another way to make them memorable. “Use the trade show offered to everyone as the platform that you layer on exclusive experiences for smaller audiences,” Gilmore says.

One such limited-access experience is Accent on Design, a juried division of the New York International Gift Fair, Jan. 31–Feb. 5, 2004, at Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where 184 exhibiting companies are selected based on the quality, creativity, originality and use of contemporary design as a marketing tool.

Celebrating the show-within-a-show’s 20th anniversary last year, White Plains, NY-based George Little Management LLC (GLM, www.glmshows.com) redrafted the floor plan and redecorated the hall, which features decorative accessories, lighting and home furnishings. The experience they wanted to create was one of change.

GLM hired world-renowned designer Karim Rashid, who started with reinventing the entrance to Accent on Design by converting the escalators into fabric-encased “In” and “Out” tubes. When visitors emerged upstairs, they saw a shocking green-and-pink swirl that carpeted an all-new shopping environment.

Up front, a double-decker booth featured a 20-year retrospective display on the first floor and a second-floor seating area with cocktail tables and flexible chairs, which Rashid calls plodules, creating a space for rest and meetings. Looking over the 44,000-square-foot show floor from this 12-foot perch, visitors saw exhibits that demonstrated how the eclectic merchandise could be displayed in retail stores, and in the contemporary homes of their buyers.

The new look was key to the anniversary promotions. Six months out, GLM introduced Rashid to industry media and presented his vision for the show to create buzz. Exhibitors responded to the advance notice by redesigning their booths. So, in effect, the theme of “change” carried through the entire event. 

 “The key challenge in redesigning the floor plan and the look was having every exhibitor tell you they want you to do it, but not in a way that affects them,” says Alan Steel, Executive Vice President of GLM and creator of Accent on Design. “We had to tell them, you’ll have to move, and you’ll have a different booth size and shape.”

Without exception, every exhibitor was inconvenienced to some degree. “We wanted to make attendees walk away with the sense that we had reinvented the floor plan,” Steel says. “The impression created was that we have far more new products and exhibitors than we had before. That wasn’t the case, but by moving them around, we managed to create the illusion that things were actually very different, when they were probably only just different.”

The floor plan had one less aisle than in the past, creating about 5 percent more saleable floor space, which helped underwrite the cost of the redesign. The double-decker booth occupied previously saleable space but is reusable and will be amortized over three years.

As the show’s creator, Steel believes the look recaptured the show’s original vitality. Exhibitors he spoke with felt it was well worth the investment. Though loathe to disclose Rashid’s fee, he confides, “Whatever the cost, it was worth it.”

Measuring satisfaction
No matter how great an experience show management creates, if attendees or exhibitors are dissatisfied, the takeaway will be, “Let’s not go back.”

Post-show surveys are a tried-and-true measure of success, and the International Carwash Association (ICA, www.carcarecentral.com) has used Red Bank, NJ-based Exhibit Surveys (www.exhibitsurveys.com) to that end with good results for Car Care World Expo, where 10,000 attendees and 393 exhibiting companies converged April 28–May 1, 2004, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Now ICA has teamed Exhibit Surveys with Marty Smith’s consultancy to take measurement to a whole new level.

“We wanted to work with both Exhibit Surveys and MCG on qualitative and quantitative research, to see if what people say and their behavior are in line,” says Dave Weil, Senior Director for Chicago-based Smith Bucklin (www.smithbucklin.com), which manages ICA and its show. “Then you can pick off what’s not working and allocate resources to the things that are working.”

They identified specific areas that contribute to the purchase experience, such as registration, signage, product locators, pavilions, boothmanship, show hours, networking, and food and rest areas. What they learned was unnerving.

“We have historically viewed attendance as the show’s success barometer,” says Mark Thorsby, ICA Executive Director. “I’m not certain now, based on this research, that increasing exhibitor ROI requires increasing attendance. It requires increasing their conversion rate from prospect to customer.”

Recording buyer-seller interactions on 8–10 video cameras placed throughout the exhibit hall, Smith caught booth staff guarding entrances like sentries and chatting among themselves, attendees passing by exhibits with different color carpet or fortress-like product displays and, once together, both groups studiously avoiding interaction for periods of up to 20 minutes.

“It’s shocking the extent to which this occurs,” Thorsby says.

But Smith didn’t just measure the purchasing experience, he changed it by consulting with exhibitors about their goals, then experimenting with ways to achieve them. To the exhibitor who wanted to be remembered as the biggest company there, he suggested carpeting the company’s cluster of contiguous booths in the same color and clothing the salespeople in the same color shirts. As a result, they had the most memorable exhibit.

From an attendee’s perspective, the show experiences starts with registration, where Smith’s cameras detected 48 percent of would-be registrants asking for help, and 32 percent bouncing from one line to another, because attendee and exhibitor lines were segregated. Five stations labeled “Attendee Self Registration” in show-color signage were underutilized, until, over the course of an eight-hour day, Smith converted each one to “Do It Yourself” in contrasting colors. Then 50 percent of registrants went to the stations without assistance. Next year, ICA will allow everyone to register in any line, eliminating at least one frustration from the show experience.

The research also found that self-help information kiosks were underutilized, product demonstrations were unattended, and prime real estate at the front of the exhibit hall was routinely passed by.

“The traditional school of thought on exhibit location is, if I’m the first exhibitor to select space, I choose in front of the door. Smith’s research proved beyond doubt that that’s a bad strategy,” Thorsby says. “The best space is not inside the front door, it’s about one third of the way into the hall, equally distributed to the left, right and center.”

By communicating the lessons learned from these observations, ICA hopes to improve the purchase experience for buyers and sellers alike.

“We’ve got to do more work to better understand the attitudes and behaviors of the buyers and communicate it to the exhibitors so they can be in synch,” Thorsby says. “When attendees walk into a booth, what do they want from you?”

At a total cost of just under $65,000, including hanging and wiring the cameras, Smith’s research produced actionable outcome for ICA. “I want our attendees to not skip this show because the experience is so positive. For us, that’s a huge ROI,” Thorsby says. “Then the buzz is, ‘It’s a great show, and you have to be there.’”