But when the insanity abates, retailers reliably return to the major tenets of retailing science to transform shoppers into buyers. Trade show organizers face the same challenge. They, in concert with exhibitors, must fashion an environment that’s welcoming to attendees and spurs their interest in walking the show floor, visiting booths and making purchases. Far too often, though, trade shows resemble a Walmart on the Friday after Thanksgiving. When the ribbon is cut, waves of pumped-up attendees, each armed with a long to-do list and a ticking clock, flood a show floor packed with exhibitors all vying for their attention. It’s a spectacle of unfocused energy that can persist not just for hours, but over the entire course of a two- or three-day show, frustrating attendees and exhibitors alike.

A better model, says Mike Cooke, former CEO of dmg world media, who’s still in a transition role at the company through the end of the year, is the modern supermarket or department store on an average day. The goal should be a finely calibrated shopping environment playing host to attendees who deliberately peruse the show floor, amble by as many booths as possible and engage with as many exhibitors as they can. Retailing science, Cooke says, is a good model for increasing exhibitor ROI (and ultimately, your show’s value to both exhibitors and attendees). Why? Because exhibitor ROI is a function of how many qualified leads or sales are generated. Because those leads and sales can only come from exhibitor interaction with attendees, shows must create an environment that drives traffic by booths, and exhibitors must do a better job of engaging attendees who enter their booths. Ultimately, it’s all about improving the buyer’s experience.

WHY — AND HOW — IT WORKS “You want to get people to walk as much of the show floor as possible,” Cooke says. “With better show and floor planning, you can slow people down, but at the same time use techniques to help them navigate the floor better and easily find their way to the places they want to go.” By paying close attention to variables such as hall layout, aisle configuration, booth positioning, navigation aids and the placement of attendee-friendly amenities, show organizers can mimic what retailers do in their stores to make shopping pleasurable and stimulating for customers and more profitable for themselves. Shows that can fine-tune those elements can maximize “dwell time,” the amount of quality time that attendees spend on the floor — the foundation for a successful show. “A key ‘dwell-time’’ statistic that retailers rely on is that for every minute shoppers spend in the store, they spend three percent more money,” Cooke says. “One way supermarkets increase that is by placing the most-purchased products in the middle of an aisle, which requires the shopper to walk up and down an aisle and view other products.

The theory is getting the shopper to slow down or stop and possibly buy more.” Some tricks retailers use to get customers in a buying mood are application-specific. The smell of freshly baked bread, soothing music and buy-one-get-one-free offers won’t work well in many exhibit halls. But, Cooke says, there are ideas we can adapt.

• Encircle headline exhibitors: Just as grocers put top-sellers in the middle of the aisle, shows can expose attendees to more of the show floor by sprinkling the must-see exhibitors around. “Don’t put big anchor tenants right inside the front door,” Cooke says. “Spread them around the hall.”

• Create decompression zones: An exhibit hall’s energy and glitter can tax an attendee’s stamina. At the entrance and elsewhere, coffee stands, concierges and product locators let attendees slow down and get their bearings.

• Make them hoof it a little: Ensure restrooms, workshops and food courts are in back corners of the hall to bring more people by more booths. It’s the same concept as grocers putting must-haves like milk and bread at the back.

• Optimize traffic flow: When laying out the floor plan, pay attention to how it keeps people in the hall and steers them through. Booth positioning, hall ingress and egress, and strategic decompression points are key. “If you have an irregular series of different-sized halls, it’s harder to get good flow than in a single, square hall,” he says.

• Maximize all of your space: Dead zones created from unused space strand attendees and disrupt traffic flow. “If you have spare space, do something creative with it up front, don’t just chop 10,000-square feet in the back corner,” Cooke says. “Create some premium aisles out of that space and maybe charge extra to locate there.”

• Incorporate meeting spaces: To help exhibitors boost their interaction and conversion rates with attendees, set up areas for pre-arranged meetings. That can open up a booth for more spontaneous interactions.

CASE STUDY At some point, however, it falls to exhibitors looking to increase their own ROI to also employ some of the tenets of retailing science. With aisle traffic optimized through show organizer efforts, Cooke says, exhibitors must find ways to improve their ability to draw people into their booths, talk with those who enter and generate qualified leads, defined as the rates of “attraction,” “interaction” and “conversion,” respectively. It’s the retail equivalent of department stores using clerks to engage with customers and help them navigate a maze of choices, he says.

Cooke cites dmg’s Canadian International Farm Equipment Show, with an attendance of 22,000, as an example. Video captured activity at the booths of two tractor company exhibitors. The “Red Tractor Company,” despite having one of the hall’s largest exhibits, snared just 26 qualified leads from the more than 6,300 attendees passing and nearly 3,000 stopping in the booth. But the“Blue Tractor Company” came away with nearly 470 leads, despite drawing a lower percentage of people passing by into the booth than the Red Tractor Company was able to attract. The key difference was its interaction rate — 27 percent, compared with just 3 percent for the Red Tractor Company. “Essentially, no one was speaking to those who came into the Red booth,” Cooke says. “Blue was talking to a lot more people.”

Blue was able to accomplish this partly by staffing its booth properly. Unlike Red, which pulled in reps from local dealers, Blue brought in reps from various regions. This improved Blue’s odds that a visitor could talk to a rep with a stake in establishing a relationship. Cooke says that even a modest improvement in Red’s interaction rate, with everything else staying equal, would have yielded a much improved ROI. At 20 percent, Red would have generated 176 qualified leads, an increase of 576 percent. “A stunning statistic is that, on average, only one in three people at an exhibitor’s stand gets spoken to at all,” he says. “The interaction rate is what every exhibitor must worry about.”

For show organizers, the lesson of this case study — and the supermarket science — Cooke says, is that shows need to help position exhibitors properly and increase aisle traffic, and for exhibitors, it’s that they need to operate their booths better. “Rather than using how many people show up at the door as a measure of value, let’s help exhibitors interact more with those who do attend,” Cook says. “They’ll come away with more qualified leads.”

Mike Cooke originally presented on this topic at the 2009 Exhibition & Convention Executives Forum (ECEF) in Washington, DC, in June.

Tom Zind is a freelance business writer based in Lee’s Summit, MO. He can be reached at tomzind@att.net