B-to-B Events

The days of in-booth demos and glassy-eyed product presentations are quickly going the way of the fax machine. In their place are trade show programs that are heavy on pre-show promotion, in-booth technology and laser-focused lead qualification strategies. Maybe the biggest shift changing the face of the trade show landscape is the consumer-generated experience. No longer are your prospects and customers content to merely pass by and act as receptacles of information.

A trade show typically is a launch pad for new products. Attendees troll the show floor seeking the latest and greatest, and exhibitors gladly oblige with displays, interactive exhibits and eye-catching graphics that tout their products’ features and benefits. But a trade show also can be a platform to unveil a marketing campaign that will endure long after the booth is packed up and the attendees go back home. The campaign may live on in the form of a contest, a website or a social community that continues to engage the target audience.

Italian coffee syrup brand Torani this summer will launch a new mobile tour aimed at the consumer market. Torani, which is headquartered in San Francisco, will kick off the tour in May at the 75th anniversary celebration of Golden Gate Bridge. From there the tour will hit festivals and fairs, such as the Portland Rose Festival and the San Diego County Fair, as well as smaller mid-week stops.

The b-to-b trade show world gets a bad rap for being behind the rest of the event marketing industry when it comes to innovative experiential tactics, but the SES Worldwide Conference and Expo Series is out to remove that stigma with some seriously exciting ideas about how to present a trade show that’s entertaining and relevant to attendees while providing big-time results to exhibitors and sponsors.

Large-scale trade shows, b-to-b conferences and trade show exhibitors have gotten a bad reputation over the years for producing too much waste and having too little regard for their impact on the environment. But over the last decade or so, the organizers and exhibitors at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (North America’s largest trade show and the world’s largest show for consumer technology) have been making strides to offset their carbon footprints as much as possible.