In a recent article entitled, The Enduring Value of Face Time published in Meetings and Conventions Magazine, Tom Isler reports on industry leaders and their take on the value of face-to-face meetings. He starts off with this:
“One of the most urgent challenges facing planners today is to make an unassailable business case for the value of meetings.”
We would all agree with him. It is refreshing to see that CEIR holds value and worth to him as he notes:
“Thanks largely to CEIR, there is more research on trade shows than on any other kind of meeting, but many of the insights drawn from CEIR’s studies, particularly the extensive investigation of the power of face-to-face interaction, have implications for other kinds of meetings as well.”
The article is wonderfully laced with statistics as well as quotes from various industry leaders. In a side bar, Isler highlights all the research which supports the value of face-to-face meetings. This is a valuable resource all of us should highlight and keep handy as we are called on to argue that our exhibitions are solid investments even in tough economic times.
Doug Ducate is quoted as saying:
The difficulty of making the business case for meetings in times of recession is the meetings industry’s own fault, believes Doug Ducate, executive director of the Dallas-based Center for Exhibition Industry Research. Over the past 20 years, the exhibition industry grew at such an impressive rate that “we became enraptured with our own data,” he says. “The success story became built on growth: ‘We had 10 percent more attendees than last year, therefore it was a better show.’ We sold that message.”
When growth gives way to contraction, however, the trade show or conference becomes a failure by those flawed standards of success. “Organizations now realize the weakness of the argument,” Ducate continues. “We’ve got to get back to the core value proposition” as the essential defense of meetings.
Better measures of an exhibition, he says, are the quality of attendance and whether the event drove sales, influenced purchases, or strengthened relationships between buyers and sellers. But it’s no wonder attendance and net square feet became the favored standards. Those metrics are much easier to measure.
You can view the entire article here.
