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 am often reminded of the first time I read a Candy Adams column that warned: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick any two.” But in an era where price is increasingly powerful in terms of influencing purchasing decisions — almost to the point of being the sole differentiator — I fear too many exhibit and event professionals are narrow-mindedly picking the cheap option without worrying about the other two attributes.
The truth is, we live in an eBay environment and believe we can find anything more cheaply through nontraditional channels than we can through traditional means. On top of that, we’re far more budget conscious than we were even a few years ago — making bargain hunters out of buyers who previously valued exclusivity, service, and design.
Penny pinching is not a bad practice, but a penny saved is only a penny earned if your purchase pans out. Cutting corners on your exhibit, for instance, could land you with a money pit of sorts, full of cheap materials that were not designed to withstand the rigors of constant shipping, setup, dismantle, and crating.
I’ve heard plenty of sob stories from exhibitors who purchased substandard portable/modular displays online, only to have them fall apart midway through their first show. Other marketers have bought fabrics and building materials at big-box retailers before realizing they don’t meet convention centers’ fire-safety regulations. And still others have purchased lighting and other equipment through bargain-basement international vendors that wasn’t Underwriters Laboratories certified, and therefore couldn’t be used in their exhibits.
But it’s not always a lack of quality that slaps price-centric purchasers in the face. Far too few see the forest for the trees when evaluating responses to their RFPs. They fail to factor suppliers’ reputations into their decisions and land themselves with low-end goods and even lower-end levels of service.
I think most exhibitors start out with the best intentions of weighing quality, service, and reputation as heavily as sticker price, but are forced — due to procurement or a budget with less wiggle room than a “Biggest Loser” T-shirt — to let dollars and cents be the ultimate deciding factor.
While we might like to consider exhibit-related products and services commodities, they are anything but. Furthermore, reputable businesses are more likely to give you an accurate estimate in the first place; whereas bargain-basement options are more apt to come with invisible footnotes that translate into unforeseen fees that leave your out-of-pocket expenses oddly close to those other bids you eliminated because you just couldn’t afford them.
In an era of economic unrest, we seem to have forgotten that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. One disturbing reminder of that hit me during a presentation by Torsten Heinze, chairman of the international chapter of FAMAB, a German-based organization of exhibit- and event-industry suppliers. He showed a photo of a 12-year-old boy working at a factory in Syria. The boy’s job was to make low-end exhibit components. He wasn’t tall enough to operate the equipment, so he stood on a step stool for the duration of his daily shift. What exhibit house or fabrication firm were those components later shipped to? And is that company bidding for your business?
We’d like to assume all vendors are above-board business people. And my hunch is that only a less-than-precious few use substandard materials, shady business practices, and child labor to make sure their quotes are the cheapest options on the table. But if you’re buying bargain-basement goods from a no-name supplier in a far-off land you can’t pronounce, I have one piece of advice: Caveat emptor, exhibitor. Caveat emptor.e
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EXHIBITOR
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