May 2004

Best Practices: Speed dating

Meet the Market gives exhibitors 8 minutes to court buyers in one-on-one meetings

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

Enter a room full of people who want to meet you. You have eight minutes to make an impression.

Tick tock.

In a format borrowed from speed dating for singles, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Alexandria, VA, plays matchmaker in Meet the Market, an event that started as a business card exchange and is now a structured meet-and-greet for 540 people with 9,800 appointments in eight hours.

“Our retailers tell us they love it,” says Fitz Elder, Vice President, Member Programs and Services. “It cuts down on the banter, and they get right down to business.”

Since the late ’90s, consolidation of retail drug stores has reduced the number of buyers participating in the annual NACDS Marketplace for health and beauty aids and general merchandise. First-time exhibitors were having trouble getting attention on the 100-yard-wide, quarter-mile-long show. NACDS introduced the business card exchange in 2001 as a way for them to get some face time with retailers who wanted to meet new vendors. The free event gave manufacturers three minutes to introduce themselves and drop off tear sheets on their products.

For Marketplace 2003, June 7–9 at the San Diego Convention Center, NACDS revamped the format to give participants more time and named the program “Meet the Market.” Attendees could go online at www.nacds.org to see who was exhibiting, schedule appointments on the show floor, and designate the types of products they wanted to see in Meet the Market. First-time exhibitors signed up to introduce products in specific categories, such as baby care, cosmetics and fragrances, or home health care.

NACDS invested “five figures” and six months to develop a proprietary software application to “mix the dance cards” for participants. “You have to be able to exclude and pair people based on product category,” Elder says. “It maximized the opportunities.”

Each manufacturer got a schedule of 20–30 appointments with retailers, who were seated at numbered tables, plus a 2-by-3 tabletop display in the back of the 50,000-square-foot hall. At eight-minute intervals, manufacturers moved from one appointment to the next. Each retailer saw 30–40 mini-presentations. During breaks, they could browse the displays to see what else was new.

The 300 manufacturers and 240 retailers who participated in the first Meet the Market represented roughly 55 percent of the 591 exhibiting companies and 23 percent of the 210 retail companies attending Marketplace 2003. Post-con survey respondents declared the program a keeper, with 94 percent of manufacturers and 87 percent of retailers rating it as satisfactory or better.

“It works for us because we’re in a highly consolidated industry with a limited number of larger retailers trying to see as many manufacturers as they can,” Elder says. “You can get in-depth with senior management on the show floor and see the hip new products with style appeal in Meet the Market. It breaks up their buying responsibility between those two objectives.”

NACDS is expanding the program at Marketplace 2004, June 21–24 in San Diego, by opening it up to any manufacturer with a new product. It also split the event into two half days instead of one full day and ironed out glitches in the appointment schedule.

Last year there were some duplicate appointments and a few mismatches, where retailers didn’t have buying responsibility for products they saw. NACDS has refined the program to avoid matching people who are already scheduled to meet during regular exhibit hours and to further define products by subcategories. Participants can also exclude up to five companies they don’t need to meet because they’re already doing business.

If the expanded format introduces a retailer to just one new product to order, it can mean millions of dollars in sales for the manufacturer. That’s a match well made.

Cathy Chatfield-Taylor is a freelance writer/ editor. E-mail cathy@cc-tunlimited.com.