In today’s economic climate many industry suppliers are rethinking their approaches to which and what type of trade shows to attend. The plans of many of these companies are going through serious evaluation at present as the economics of how and where to exhibit are discussed. A number of future trade shows will see many suppliers withdrawing from exhibiting as they see their chances of getting a good return from their investments appear to be somewhat limited. I am sure the Print09 organizers are finding it difficult to sell all their available exhibition space for their forthcoming event later this year. The big losers however will be many of the smaller regional trade shows that will suffer as vendors cut their marketing budgets and look for different ways to show their products.

When I talk to many of the larger industry vendors, words I am hearing more and more are road shows or open houses. These are vendor specific events where the vendors invite the prospect and customers to a specific location for sales presentations, demonstrations and food and drink. The benefits of these events for the vendors are they are in control of the situation and can spend time with customers and prospects. We can expect to see more and more of such events. They tend to cost vendors less than the cost of attending and staffing a trade show, and at these vendors know who their customers and prospects are and they appear to offer a better financial return in the way of results.

One type of event we have in Europe is an extension of the open house, and this is multiple day open house organized by a vendor but in which partners participate and co-fund. I see that this type of event could well become a key new format of event that could replace some of the smaller local trade shows, as larger vendors decide such local shows do not show a good return on their investments. The two principal organizations that have built a very successful structure around this format are Océ with the Open House and Hunkeler with its innovationdays.  These are events where customers and prospects are invited from around the world, and where the main vendor demonstrates its equipment often working together with the partner’s equipment. Océ is not having an Open House this year and held its last one at its Poing, Germany location in 2007. Hunkeler is running its innovation days this week in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The Hunkeler innovationdays 2009 event has sixty vendor partners supporting Hunkeler in demonstrating their offerings, and have around 4,000 registered attendees from more than 60 countries. It is interesting that among the vendor supporters are many of Hunkeler’s competitors. When asked about this Stefan Hunkeler, the company’s CEO indicated that while these companies are competitors, many of them also work with Hunkeler in developing total finishing systems solutions. Among the exhibiting companies are almost all the players in the digital printing industry. All of the representatives of these companies that I spoke to stated that the Hunkeler innovationdays was one of their most successful events in meeting customers and prospects and a superb event for networking.

For Hunkeler this is a major event in getting its products to market. It allows them to be shown in operation working with a wide range of printing products. For attendees at the event this is an ideal location to see all the latest high-speed digital continuous feed presses in action. There were plenty of new or updated products to see and I will be covering these in a separate blog post.