Exhibitionist Tendencies: Evolve!

The exhibit industry faces challenging times. Economic turbulence has forced many would-be exhibitors and attendees to trim their travel budgets and stay home, which has impacted booth purchases and show traffic. Even before the current, choppy climate, the Internet and other resources made decisionmakers less dependent on tradeshows to glean more information about products and services that can enhance their operation.

According to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR), which tabulates data from voluntary submissions from organizations that conduct business-to-business (B2B) tradeshows, the B2B market declined 3.1% in 2008, the first decline since 2002. Among the 11 sectors into which CEIR divides its market, seven suffered declines last year. Communications and Information Technology fared the best and grew 9.8%, while the hardest-hit, Building, Construction and Home Repair sector sustained an identical-percentage decline.

Museum exhibits have endured a similar fate. Dewey Blanton, media-relations specialist for the American Assn. of Museums (Washington, DC), estimates the approximately 17,000 U.S. museums received 850 million annual visits, but museum boards and curators have increasingly cancelled exhibits, extended those presently in-house or relied on permanent collections rather than seeking new additions (e.g., fewer new graphics).

Amidst e-commerce’s advent and other corporate-landscape changes, tradeshow and exhibit-graphic fabricators have evolved their formulae to create exhibit graphics that appeal to the changing tastes and needs of tradeshow and exhibit attendees. Several tradeshow- and exhibit-graphic providers offer insights for creating effective graphics that will propel traffic and enhance all parties’ fiscal well being.