hile shopping for groceries the other day, I overheard a couple having a bit of a spat in the cereal aisle. As the woman dutifully plopped a box of Cheerios in the cart, the gentleman threw a mini “Cheerios again?” tantrum.
“I thought you liked Cheerios,” exclaimed the woman. “You eat them every morning!” To which the gentleman replied, “That’s because you keep buying them.” As it turns out, he prefers Lucky Charms.

I have no idea how long this couple has been together, or how many bowls of Cheerios the man has had to endure, but the woman’s assumption reminded me of a conversation I had with an exhibit manager at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

The exhibit manager, flanked by booth babes, explained that the company always uses scantily clad spokesmodels as crowd gatherers because its mostly male target audience likes it. When I asked how he knew that clients and prospects appreciated this tactic, he said simply, “Well, they keep coming back.”

He might be right. It is possible that his target audience loves the booth babes, and that the tactic is hugely successful in attracting attendees. But his rationale is based entirely on assumption.

In fact, the vast majority of exhibit managers’ tactics are based on such assumptions. Why do you distribute branded pens? Because attendees like them. How do you know they like them? Because hundreds of attendees grab them while visiting your exhibit. But just because attendees eat the Cheerios you’re serving doesn’t mean they like them.

So why do we insist on designing exhibits, selecting giveaways, and establishing entire exhibit-marketing strategies based largely on assumption? Why, in an era of intense connectivity, do we make decisions based on what we assume will appeal to attendees, rather than asking them directly?

Now I don’t expect you to field a massive survey effort to justify every element of your exhibit-marketing program. But if you haven’t taken the time to informally survey a handful of clients or booth visitors about, say, whether or not they expect — or even appreciate — in-booth promotional literature, you are sending pallets of heavy product catalogs to every show you attend based on the assumption that they do.

It’s possible that they throw away your catalogs before getting back to their hotel. And it’s possible that they would prefer to receive one via e-mail with a link to an online version. Having a little information surrounding attendees’ preferences could, in this case, save you a lot of time and money.

To help provide exhibit managers with some of the information that will allow them to align their programs with attendees’ wants and needs, EXHIBITOR is launching a new research initiative we call “Ask the Attendees.” Through this initiative, we plan to survey show attendees in various industry sectors on everything from their preferred method of pre-show communication to their opinions on cause-marketing promotions. Our goal is to provide data points on which marketers can begin to build more customer-centric initiatives that reflect actual attendee preferences vs. existing assumptions.

But in crafting the survey, we realized that if we wrote the questions ourselves, we would be assuming we knew what you wanted. So we’re asking you to submit your questions and help us understand what you wish you knew about attendees. For example, do you wish you knew which promotional items attendees hoped to collect at shows, or how long they’ll spend watching an in-booth presentation or product demo before they tune out and move on? Please send your questions to editor@exhibitormagazine.com. Once we know what you want to know, we’ll do our best to find the answers. After all, we’d hate to feed you Cheerios if, in fact, you’d prefer Lucky Charms.e