The international exhibition venue marketplace operates in cycles of development and demand, and as we have all witnessed, the two rarely run in sync. When occupancy is high, investment is high - investment that comes on-stream just in time for the market to collapse. What is certain however for venue designers and managers is new projects must be adaptable and able to cater for a variety of different sectors if they are to succeed in today’s buyer’s market.
As CEO of the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) Martin Sirk explains, what used to be seen as differentiators for a venue are now entry-level expectations event organisers have.
“The really interesting things are the areas coming up as new competitive differentiators for the suppliers in our side of the business,” he said. “We live in a flat world and what used to be competitive differentiators are now entry-level requirements in most cases.
“Instead of issues like venue accessibility, hotels and local competence, we’re now looking at new forms of teamwork and designing customer relationship management to be both high-tech and high-touch. The high level of personalisation demanded by organisers of all kinds nowadays and creativity is becoming a big differentiator.” Sirk adds that delivering this creativity and in the first instance proving you can deliver it, has become the main driving force for venue owners.
Executive director of the Belgium-based international association of congress centres AIPC, Rod Cameron, says most people aren’t looking to cater for the one big hit any more. “These days venues are looking to cater for lots of smaller events,” he says. “One thing we have noticed is a shift in the culture of venues looking at themselves in the context of what is the biggest single event we can handle, to looking at themselves in the context of how can we best handle multiple simultaneous smaller events. The big single event is the exception.”
What that illustrates, according to Cameron, is that the vast majority of market opportunity is for smaller events. “There is suggestion that meetings may even be getting smaller and more discreet because that allows for a better focus on content. Some venues are realising that and they are now trying to respond as best they can.”
Another trend to emerge in the last couple of years is that of destinations competing on the basis of how effectively they can harness the “intellectual capacity in that destination”, according to Cameron.
Denzil Rankine, founder and chief executive of AMR International, says venues can make this more straightforward if they place events in different categories. “There are transactional, educational and networking events. This often depends on the maturity of the industry,” he claims.
“Information technology, for example, has gone through a certain maturity and we’re now going to move towards a completely different type of event. We have to understand how these events are going to change over time.”
Sirk says we have to shift our thinking from organising one event for a thousand people to simply creating an environment where we could allow a thousand meetings to take place. “You need to drill down to that level to start redesigning your building, your flows, the way things operate. It’s a fundamental shift – personalisation on a very deep level.
“If you are building a major facility in a major hub, you need to design that so it can handle multiple events very efficiently and enable those events to be very strongly identified and branded separately, so those customers can co-exist without falling over one another.”
In addition, Sirk claims corporate events are now threatening exhibitions and conferences. “I’ve been to events organised by Oracle and IBM where only a minority of people are actually from those companies,” he claims. “The content is being driven by outsiders to try and stimulate thinking. If trade shows are not enabling their biggest spenders to create that sense of engagement and community within the trade show environment, the guys with the biggest budgets will go across and invent another Oracle OpenWorld with 45,000 people.
“You might think you can survive with the revenue from the other partners – the smaller players – but the truth is they will choose to spend their money with the big players because they’re effectively linked into that community,” he comments.
Rankine quotes Mike Rusbridge when he sums up the situation for venues today. “The random contact model is dead. This links to the points we’re making about community and networking, and linking people through facilities content.”
Cameron agrees. “Something all of us share with venues is the desperate importance for us to reposition ourselves as an industry,” he says. “We need to show our events are core, integral parts of the biggest single issue the world is facing today, which is how to stimulate stable future growth and be seen as an economic engine as opposed to simply a way of filling up hotel rooms. Not many venues have got that right.”
Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
