few weeks ago, I was chatting with an exhibit manager who had recently overcome a significant budget cut. Well, overcome might be a bit of an overstatement. With travel costs rising, and faced with a directive to decrease her budget by several thousand dollars, she chose to cut the number of booth staffers she sent to the show by 30 percent. Having sufficiently trimmed her costs, she went off to the show with her downsized booth staff, and came home just dollars under her approved budget. Hooray, right? Well, not exactly.

When I asked if she considered her cost-cutting technique a success, she was somewhat baffled. She had successfully decreased her company’s expenses, and that was the directive she was given from management. But what I later learned, through much prodding, was that by decreasing the number of staffers in her booth, she effectively decreased the number of leads her company collected at the show — by almost a third. So the question remains: Was her technique successful?

With all due respect, I have to say no. While she was able to deliver the required savings, she forgot her company’s other exhibit-marketing objectives in the process. Cost cutting should never be your — nor your company’s — primary objective. After all, if your main objective is to decrease your marketing investment, the logical solution would be to stop exhibiting altogether. Rather, cost cutting is a secondary goal, and to be accomplished effectively, exhibit managers need a clear understanding of the overriding objectives they need to accomplish while cutting costs — or they risk making the wrong incisions.

Cost cutting is admittedly tricky business. Just ask President-elect Barack Obama. In a presidential debate at Hofstra University last October, Obama and John McCain went head to head over which instrument is best suited for the task of cutting costs: a hatchet or a scalpel. These two instruments, meant to personify two distinctly different approaches to balancing the budget, represent fairly universal cost-cutting methods. The hatchet represents a quick, bloody approach with instant results but potentially deadly consequences. The scalpel, on the other hand, takes more time and effort to produce a noticeable result, but represents a far more thoughtful and pragmatic approach.

In an exhibit-marketing context, the hatchet represents cost cutting as a primary objective. For example, when hatchet-wielding exhibit managers are asked to cut program costs by $10,000, they tend to look for a line item (or combination of line items) that will get them to the magic number. Then they slash away. Conversely, the scalpel represents cost cutting in the context of other objectives. When scalpel-wielding exhibit managers are asked to cut costs, they don’t simply ponder how to trim the fat, but how to do it while still accomplishing their programs’ overriding objectives. For example, they might ask themselves, “How can I cut $10,000 from my budget while maintaining last year’s lead counts?” Cost-cutting, in the context of other objectives, requires a more thoughtful approach — one that considers the consequence of each and every budgetary incision.

And that’s where the exhibit manager in the aforementioned example went horribly wrong. She cut costs out of context, and lost sight of her program’s measurable goals. Sure, her total expenditures decreased as a result of her hatchet job, but her cost per lead actually went up. Why? With fewer staffers in its exhibit, the company was unable to interact with as many prospects as it had in the past.
So the next time you’re faced with cost-cutting demands, put those demands in context and choose your incisions wisely. Exhibit marketing may not be brain surgery, but sometimes you need a scalpel to get the job done right.e