skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Share, Don't Stare
Tradeshows are an ideal opportunity for "storytelling," as my previous post emphasized.
But most exhibitors waste that opportunity.
Rather than engaging attendees in their why, they lurk about their booths, eyeing attendees like predators... waiting for some display of vulnerability.
The moment they detect a sign of weakness, they pounce, hoping to subdue victims with a deadly shower of product features.
Tradeshow marketing guru Steve Miller likens this behavior to "hunting."
He advises exhibitors to quit hunting and, through friendly words and gestures, create a "safe zone" where attendees won't feel threatened.
Miller also recommends that exhibitors avoid these unfriendly behaviors:
- Sitting
- Reading
- Eating and drinking
- Talking on the phone and texting
- Standing in the aisle like the "border guard"
- Clustering with other booth staffers (like some "street gang")
- Ignoring attendees
- Sizing up attendees instantly
- Handing out stuff freely
NOTE: This is the first in a series of two posts. Without shame, I confess to pirating ideas from others. But in the words of poet T.S. Eliot, "Good writers borrow. Great writers steal."
Tell, Don't Sell
A tradeshow can be an ideal medium for "storytelling" (in Seth Godin's sense).
Think of the attendees as scouts gathered round your campfire, except their badges aren't for merit.
Unfortunately, most companies don't maximize the medium. That's because they define selling not as storytelling, but as revenue generation.
Desperate to generate revenue, most companies that exhibit at tradeshows try to engage attendees by "pitching" product features.
But this definition of selling is passe. Worse yet, allowing this definition of selling to drive exhibiting produces nothing but the real-world equivalent of spam. And everyone hates spam.
Tradeshow exhibiting—when handled effectively—generates relationships.
And relationships are built on stories, stories that "start with why" (in Simon Sinek's sense). Why are you in business? Why should anyone care? Why do customers spend money with you?
As an exhibitor, you have two compelling reasons to quit selling and start telling:
- Most attendees have done their homework (product research) before the show. They know what the players in your field do. The one thing they may not know is why.
- With all your competition—all the me-too products vying for attendees' attention—you can't afford to waste the chance to engage them with your why by focusing on features.
What's the lesson here?
Revenue generation is imperative. But storytelling precedes it.
Scout's honor.
Next installment: Share, Don't Stare
NOTE: This is my first guest post, contributed by Edward Segal. Edward is the author of two books,
Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and Profit by Publicity. He was the marketing strategies columnist for The Wall Street Journal’s StartUpJournal.com, a PR consultant to more than 500 clients and press secretary to members of Congress. He is now CEO of the Marin County Association of REALTORS® in San Rafael, California.
If you saw an unmarked bottle of brown liquid, you’d have no idea of its purpose or taste.
But if the same bottle carried the famous Coca-Cola logo, you'd know exactly what was inside the bottle. You’d even have a good idea of what the liquid tastes like.
Such is the power of branding, which can immediately communicate the purpose, benefits and advantages of a product or company through the use of a name, logo, symbol or phrase.
If branding works for Coca-Cola, Apple, Google and thousands of other companies and organizations, then it can certainly work for you to quickly communicate who or what your company or organization are, what you do, how you do it, etc.
Deciding what you’d like your image and reputation to be, and taking steps to effectively promote your brand, takes careful thought and planning.
To help guide you through the process, I’ve prepared a series of short videos on how you can create and market your brand. The series is based on a workshop I conducted for the California Association of REALTORS®.
I'm visiting California and on Saturday toured the Donner Memorial State Park.
It's the site of the 1846 winter camp of the infamous Donner Party.
In case you've forgotten your American history, the Donner Party was the hapless band of Westward emigrants who resorted to cannabalism when their food supply ran out.
The fatal mistake the Donner Party made—the misjudgment that led them to wind up stranded in a wintry trap in a steep mountain pass—was taking a shortcut.
How many times has taking a shortcut led to disastrous outcomes?
Consider these recent examples:
- Wall Street took a shortcut in 2000 when it gauged the risk of mortgages by applying assumptions based on "credit default swaps." The problem? Credit default swaps had only been around for 10 years. In their brief lifetime, the price of homes had skyrocketed and nobody knew how a crash in home prices might affect credit default swaps.
- On the morning of April 20, the day the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP executive ordered the engineers operating the rig to take a shortcut to speed up the drilling.
- Toyota became so determined to beat rival GM, it took manufacturing shortcuts that have resulted in recalls of more than 10 million vehicles in 2010 due to faulty accelerators and brakes.
What shortcuts are you contemplating?
Are you troubled by the fact that negative impresssions are more powerful than positive ones?
You can blame it on Darwin.
According to neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, evolution has hard-wired our brains to "default" to a state of constant vigilance.
Without knowing it, we're always scanning the environment for threats.
In the Jurassic Period, our mammalian ancestors did this consciously.
One hundred and fifty millon years later, we're doing it (albeit unconsciously).
Science describes this vigilance as the brain's built-in "negativity bias."
The brain's negativity bias is bad news for marketers.
Social scientists and neuroscientists studying the phenomenon have demonstrated that:
- People will do more to avoid loss than acquire gain;
- Negative information about someone carries more weight than positive;
- It takes five positive interactions to overcome the effect of one negative interaction; and
- Even after a negative interaction is unlearned, it leaves an indelible trace in the brain that's easy to reactivate.
What does the science suggest?
Your marketing has to work doubly hard to counteract evolution's subtle effect on customers' neurophysiology.
As if you didn't have enough to do.
