CNET has been reporting on the issue of diminished trade show attendance since 2002 (which, admittedly, was at the end of another rough patch for the economy of the industry). All around, things have been better. Money is tight. Travel bans are on.
But is it more than that? Concerns about the cost and even the environmental implications of hitting the road for a trade show have tarnished the cachet of the event. The large number of events has made allocating dollars more difficult, and has made audiences more widely dispersed.
Let’s drill down to telecommunications, specifically. Our entire industry is designed around enabling people to have access to anyone or anything at any time from where they are at that moment. We endeavor to bring the world to the customer. At the same time, we’re going to demand that when we need to check out new technologies or make sales presentations, we need to be standing in a convention hall, eating a box lunch, with hair that smells faintly of hotel shampoo? It’s counterintuitive.
We, as an industry, can take the (probable) death of SUPERCOMM as a chance for reflection.
Furthermore, drilling down to the level of OSS/BSS: What is it that we can show in person that we can’t show remotely? We can run demos, but those demos are generally the sort of thing that could be easily viewed online. This industry was made for remote events!
So it must be an issue of the personal touch. Personal contact. Putting names with faces. There are other options for this, as well. Many vendors now just use trade shows as places for meetings with existing clients and prospects. So what’s the advantage of the booth? Increasingly, many vendors are answering this question by skipping the booth, altogether, opting for meeting rooms or hospitality suites, instead. Over time, are booths just a vestige? A habit? A monument to a bygone era?
We, as an industry, can take the (probable) death of
SUPERCOMM as a chance for reflection. Is this a singular event, or a glimpse of the future of events, as a whole? Superman returned, but he was never quite the same. Was it Superman that had changed? Or had the world around him changed?
Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 9
