Live, Social, Experiential: the New life of Trade Fairs
Trade fairs have been around for a long time and still represent a major marketing tool in B2B sectors. For consumer products, large exhibits open to the public, which were also popular in Italy during the boom years (think of the great Milan Trade Fair), until recently seemed to have fallen out of favor: on the one hand, consumer visitors had become experienced about the purchase of complex products, such as automobiles or white goods, so that a visit to the fair to collect product brochures and compare price alternatives increasingly became unnecessary. Also, as time progressed, consumers could benefit from a growing variety of media to learn about market updates, without having to wait for the next edition of the fair. Thinking about the postwar period, one can note the diffusion and modernization of retail channels, which improved the availability and accessibility of products, or the development of the advertising industry, which culminated in the advent of commercial television. Advertising quickly became the main communication venue of B2C industries, absorbing a lion's share of the main brands' marketing budgets.
Today, the growing dominance of the web, social media and smart devices are reshuffling the cards again. The traditional model based on advertising has now a harder time hitting consumers who, although constantly online, are dispersed and nomadic across a plurality of media, making them harder to reach. Furthermore, consumers are no longer passive viewers seated on a couch, they are now mobile and active, capable of building their own customized media offer on demand.
In the new context, companies are constantly looking for novel ways to get in touch, interact and create relationships with their consumer targets, and, in this regard, trade fairs look like a useful marketing tool once again. However, they must evolve and adapt to the new needs of visitors, by abandoning their traditional informational role to become events that offer consumers moments of rich experience. Like the spectators going to a live concert in a stadium, whose participation is driven by experiential motivations that go well beyond simply listening to music, people going to a fair are not just looking for information on on the products on offer. They want to experience in person the product in a environment built around a world of shared values and passions. Consider the trade events dedicated to motorcycles, automobiles, foods and beverages, or wellness and fitness: products and industries that attract communities of consumers interested in sharing consumption lifestyles and interacting with their favorite brands.
From this point of view, the (new) consumer fairs have many traits in common with major live shows, but also with contemporary retailing: they all offer places where the experience offered is carefully calibrated and where collective rituals are celebrated by consumers, now active participants in the production process. These are moments through which companies and branded exhibitors can give concrete shape to their identity and image, and pursue their positioning objectives, by exploiting the pervasiveness of a medium that has become highly immersive since it established an alliance with the web.
Social media, in particular, with their endless possibilities of diffusion, engagement and re-transmission, have become central tools for enhancing the experience of trade events (both individual and collective ones), because they amplify the resonance of fairs and are themselves conduits of new content. In fact, fair events provide thousands of occasions for giving visibility to products and companies by disseminating content on social networks. On the other hand, thanks to social media, new marketing contexts and forms of engagement are possible with direct and indirect consumer targets, which protract the impact of these activities over time, well beyond the duration of the actual trade event.