An Endangered Species?

It's a strange time for Special Markets types at Branded Goods companies. We seem to be under attack from all sides--from outside channels like Amazon, to internal competition from our own retail stores, to retailers deciding it would be "nice" to score some incremental business.

Add this to the ongoing saga of Gift Cards and how they're stealing "merchandise" business and it all adds up to more than a little queasiness in my stomach. I mean--we don't sell Retailers, so why do they sell our clients?

The answers (and there are more than a few) paint a picture that should make everyone who works for a Branded Goods company uneasy. The barriers to our market (none), the commoditization of our products (daily), and the savviness of our clients (increasing, thanks to the Internet) make our position more tenuous each day.

I believe we need to find new leadership for our market-and this is no small task. Our business is so fragmented, so lacking in a single entity we can all look to for leadership that it looks inevitable that we will become just another incremental business. Brands will start looking at the revenue we produce as something they are going to get anyway (from retailers, or Gift Cards, or whatever), and this might lead them to reassess how they come to our business.

This is a material concern--and those of us who sit in the Special Markets Chairs are the ones that will feel the pain. I'm reminded of the line from Benjamin Franklin--"we must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately". That's not all that far from the truth--we live in a market where no player has even 1% of it--how can we create leadership from such a diffuse constituent base?

So, while I'm on a Crusade kick (see my prior blog about the Chicago Motivation Show), I want to start another one--a meeting of the minds to figure out what we can do to ensure our survival in a rapidly-changing marketplace. A dialogue (to coin a phrase) needs to be started to develop defenses and weapons that will ensure our longer-term survival. Too many Brands are leaving the business, or significantly changing the way they come to the business.

Another one of my favorite phrases is "silence is acceptance", and if we remain silent we will suffer the consequences. I'm issuing a Call to Arms amongst the Branded Goods Supplier community--the challenges are great but the consequences are too. Personally, I'm not a good enough poker player to survive my company's exit from the business...

Pete

Vedi, Vidi, Vendi, Prodigo

We came, we saw, we sold, we spent...

And what did we get for what we spent? That's the question that lots of exhibitors at the recent Chicago Motivation Show are asking this week. If you ask 20 suppliers how their show went, you will get 20 different answers, but there are some things that everyone could agree on:

• Attendance was down. Period.


• There was little or no "buzz".


• Even the Gift Card people said traffic was "slow".

If these symptoms seem a little familiar, there's a reason--we experienced them in New York over the past 5-7 years. And we all know what happened to THAT show, don't we?

It appears to me that the question is whether Chicago is at the "tipping point"--that moment where New York stopped "slowing down" and started "dying"--or if it's just short of it. By the time we all acknowledged that New York was "dying" it was already "dead"--no amount of effort was going to resuscitate it.

Some on the floor last week said Chicago was already "dead" and that it needed to be "blown up"--changed in a fundamental way (moved to Las Vegas, etc.). Others said that we needed to re-examine how to attract end-buyers, including the possibility of "sponsoring" them like the Travel side does.

A calmer voice asked me this question--"who do exhibitors want to see? End Users? Resellers?" There is no doubt that the number of End Users is down-but they have been replaced by resellers, and one reseller may equal 10 End Users (my thanks to Jon Hanson for that lesson in "new math").

I believe that the suppliers hold the key to Chicago's future. As exhbitors, we need to determine who we want to see (and the answer to the above questions is not "yes" because we don't have enough money), and to some extent how we want to see them. Perhaps we need to come to the realization that our Trade Shows are 25 year-old models that simply do not reflect the audience the way they used to.

We live in an on-demand world--to wait for a Trade Show is in direct opposition to the way most business is conducted today. Our expectations of the show need realignment, and we need to consider that pitching a tent at a Trade Show might not be a prudent use of resources. I'm old enough to believe that face-to-face contact is the way to build relationships, but there is an entire generation of "buyers" who want no part of face-to-face contact--"send me a PDF" has replaced "come and see me". Trade Shows may indeed be part of the past, not the future.

It's time to launch a crusade--for exhibitors to interact with each other to determine how we are going to "fix" the Chicago Show because it's reasonably obvious that it's "broken". I know that several suggestions were given to Show Management last year, and many were implemented. But we cannot sit around like baby birds in the nest--open mouths pointing to the sky, waiting for someone to feed us. It's OUR business--we need to take charge of our experience.

Anyone care to join me?

Pete