You Need
Betting the Company!
January 2002
Google now
searches 3 billion indexed pages. Only seventeen contain a variant of the
saying: "Half of my marketing budget is wasted, but which half?". No
page contains an attribution (my purpose in looking). This "first dictum of
marketing" is attributed to "a wise man", "an astute (or honest)
business man", "a famous marketer" and "a famous industrial
magnet". Not famous enough! I first heard the saying from Don Johnston of
Don Johnston, Inc. the large American assistive technology/learning
disabilities corporation. Don has pretty much all of the characteristics above
so it could be him! Anyway, now one of Google's eighteen indexed pages
does have an attribution. I hope to see it catching on.
I was really looking for a definition of marketing. I liked this one from Mississippi University best:
MARKETING includes identifying unmet needs; producing products and services to meet those needs: and pricing, distributing, and promoting those products and services to produce a profit.
This is the time of year when both halves of the education IT marketing budget get spent. Four hundred and eighty five organizations exhibit at BETT at London Olympia and most produce and mail their annual catalogue to coincide with the show.
Exhibitions like BETT fulfill every aspect of marketing detailed above. At successive shows you can get ideas for products from customers, perhaps find partners to help produce them, and then tell customers that you have them. The networking soup at BETT is nutritious.
But at a cost. BETT is big business. In January exhibitors will, between them, spend £8.4 million on or at BETT 2002. And it is all over in four days! BETT has grown to 20,000 visitors but spending by exhibitors has grown faster. Each and every visitor represents combined exhibitor spending of around £410. BETT's own research has shown that the average visitor talks to exhibitors on just twelve stands. That is £34 per visitor to the average exhibition stand.
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| Thirty-four pounds per delegate buys a day aboard the SS Great Britain, including lunch. | ||
Now if visitors make a purchase they would not have made otherwise from companies represented on half of the stands they visit … or a quarter? Work it out for yourself. Actually it is worse: companies at BETT will work on gross margins (that's before any salaries, rent, marketing or other bills are paid) that average of 45%, companies would need to sell £150 worth of new business from every second customer who visits the stand to just break even. And thirty-four pounds per head is a healthy event organizers' budget. We ran our Coordinators Day on the SS Great Britain for almost exactly this figure. Our customers got a smart lunch and plenty of coffee aboard a really interesting vessel and we got their undivided attention from ten o'clock in the morning to four in the afternoon. This seemed better value than a twenty-minute chat on a busy stand. Also we were able to treat our customers well: food, drink and a sit down.
BETT is a great event in its eighteenth year but has some problems.
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1. BETT is too expensive. Companies feel they must do BETT.
You kind of know you are not going to get a good deal. The active sponsorship
of the DfES, BESA, EC&T and the TES have turned BETT into a national
institution. But actually EMAP, the organizers, are a huge multi-national who run
forty exhibitions in Britain and many more overseas. They will charge what the
market will bear. It costs less than £4 per square metre gross space to
hire the various halls at Olympia for a week. BETT exhibitors pay £285
per square metre for the net space they occupy. Perhaps the market needs to
wise up and rebel.
2. Competitive stand building or "cod piece marketing"* pushes cost up further. Who remembers these £100,000 confections after they are torn down on day four? US exhibitions have much simpler and smaller stands more hospitality and many more seminars.
3. If we spend £410 or even £34 on each customer or contact we should be able to show them how much we value them.
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We are making a start with the Special Needs Fringe next door to BETT. Food and coffee are free. There is plenty of space to sit down and chat and a full seminar programme which is free too. Next year we are opening up the Special Needs Fringe Exhibition to our friends currently in the Special Needs Village at BETT. If nothing else we will probably ensure that they get a good deal where ever they exhibit.
A lot of work (and a lot of guesstimating) went into this piece. We calculated and estimated the expenditure and likely number of visitors for every one of the 485 exhibitors.
You can download our working as an Excel or .pdf file. This will answer your questions for each exhibitor. What are they spending? How many visitors can they expect? Who are the biggest spenders? What assumptions are you working from?
Half of these figures may be wildly inaccurate. If only we knew which half!
* COD PIECE MARKETING "making your thingy look much bigger than it really is" Baldrick (a pointless peasant) , Blackadder II.
Martin Littler
4th January 2002