A safe pair of hands

Exhibitors want more than just an attractive booth. Stand construction companies are also the people to approach for other services. A particularly important aspect is safety.

None, unfortunately” is the reply from an exhibiting company to the question:
“Which fairs do your marketing executives attend?” That’s a pity, but it’s also a trend in the exhibition community. More than a quarter of the businesses polled by m+a
report admit to no-shows at marketing-specific exhibitions. If they do expand their horizons, potential exhibitors’ first port of call is still Euroshop, which 35 % of all respondents
do at least attend, followed by Marketing Services, which attracts 14.2 %.
Exhibitions with a rather more regional slant, such as the Ideenbörse or Komma, are also perceived as a source of inspiration by around 7% of respondents. None of the companies surveyed finds their way to the
Suisse Emex in Zurich, for example, and Creative Industries in Friedrichshafen has likewise not yet managed to establish itself as a marketing exhibition in the hearts and inds of the competent executives.
As a result more extra services are expected of stand construction companies. Transparent concepts and a reasonable cost-benefit ratio are also explicitly in demand, with exhibitors likewise seeing them as services.
Individual respondents even go so far as to entrust their stand design and construction companies with the brand management for their appearance, although the majority do place their faith in an agency when it comes to concepting.
More than 57 % of corporate speexhibitors use the services of a regular agency and around 28% work with external service providers project-specifically, while fully 14 % have no agency and devise their exhibition concepts in-house. As in last year’s poll, exhibitors rely on established partners for this. Only 14 % have given up working with a regular agency in favour of inviting bids for each individual project instead.

inSight
With inSight m+a report takes a brief look at newsworthy topics from the exhibition world. Around 500 companies are written regularly. In each issue we present trends that occupy our readers. Not intended as a representative survey, inSight reflects opinions and sentiment among exhibitors and exhibiting companies.

m+a report | March|April 2008