October 2006

The Importance of Trade Fairs - Germany

With its location in the heart of Europe, and its importance as a trading partner and economic power, Germany has always hosted a number of important international trade fairs in most industrial and consumer sectors. These trade fairs are often the most important event in their particular category.

Exhibiting at, or simply visiting, a German trade fair is often a key step for investigating or launching into the German and European market. The attached article, reprinted with permission from the Canadian German Chamber of Industry and Commerce Inc. http://www.germanchamber.ca/ gives a useful overview about participating in German trade shows. The article was originally prepared by AUMA, the Association of the German Trade Fair Industry, whose President is Dr. Peter Neven.

The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service in Germany http://www.infoexoprt.gc.ca can provide you with further assistance and advice when considering participating in a trade show in Germany, including discussing how to approach this market, selecting the right event and providing you with key contacts and additional service providers.

Winning New Customers with Trade Shows

What does a businessperson need for the marketing of their products? They need contacts to potential customers, sales and service partners and they need platforms for the public presentation of their products and their company.

To accomplish these goals a variety of individual cost-intensive instruments are required, or more effectively a well-prepared participation at a trade show. Because trade shows have by far the widest range of functions of all marketing instruments: trade shows serve the development and cultivation of customer relations, the search for partners and personnel, and the positioning of the company as a whole. Trade shows are test markets for new products and thus act as market research instruments. Founders of new businesses can obtain an overview of their competitors, their presentations and their products. In the early stage of opening up a market a visit to a trade show is often all that is needed.

Participation at trade shows in Germany is certainly not restricted solely to large and established companies: in total, around 56,000 German companies which operate in the business-to-business sector are exhibitors, 45% of them have less than 50 employees.

Planning to participate at a trade show does not begin with the choice of an event, but rather with the formulation of definite objectives for the show which are deduced from the company's marketing and communication objectives. In other words, only if a company first decides whether it wants to win 50 new customers in Southern Germany, or to introduce a new product to the world market, can a suitable event be selected on the basis of the visitor structures.

Anyone who already wants to check out how successful it will be prior to the show can make use of the AUMA Trade Fair Benefit Check which is available on the Internet free of charge (http://www.auma-fairs.com). It helps to consider the entire range of possible trade show objectives and to calculate the costs. Above all, however, it makes it clear to the businessperson what expenditure would be necessary to accomplish the set targets with instruments other than trade show participation. When this test has been successfully completed, it is then necessary to define and realize the individual planning steps. In this connection, the future exhibitor should start as early as possible because trade show participations require a time intensive engagement. The trade show companies help the exhibitors with custom-made service packages and support with marketing for the trade show appearance. After all, nobody can rely on the fact that the right visitors are going to appear automatically at their booths. On the contrary, current and potential customers must be informed in advance - whether through advertisements in trade journals or personal invitations. For success at the show, well-qualified booth personnel who are informed about the company's targets at the show are essential. Trade show organizers and special service providers also offer their services for such training courses.

And after the show, the work is not done. Now is the time to quickly and systematically follow up on the contacts that have been made. Participation at a trade show is not simply one event, but rather a process over several months. Anyone who understands this and makes use of all the functions of a show has a marketing instrument with an excellent costbenefit relationship. German trade shows are particularly well suited for this because they often bring all of the international market leaders of a sector together and are therefore of interest to visitors from all over the world.

Thus with 2.28 million, the trade shows in Germany registered a record number of international visitors in 2004. The share of international visitors in comparison with the total of 9,675 million exceeded the 20% mark for the first time with 23.5%. The survey which AUMA recently completed shows that for the first time over 500,000 visitors came from countries outside of Europe. Top of the rankings here were East, Southeast and Central Asia with 190,000 visitors, followed by the Middle East with 95,000 visitors.

Thus, about one-eighth of all foreign visitors, a total of 285,000 came from Asia. This figure shows that Asian importers make intensive use of the internationality of German trade shows in order to inform themselves about new products from all over the world. The European countries accounted for about 78% of all foreign visitors. Of this total, 1,390,000 came from the extended EU and 385,000 from other European countries. Since the year 2000, Europe's share has thus declined by four percentage points. At the same time, Asia's share has increased by about the same amount. Of the 140,000 visitors from America, almost two-thirds came from North America (85,000) and just over one-third from Latin America (55,000). Around 55,000 visitors also came from Africa.

German trade shows in particular offer medium-sized companies with no global sales networks of their own, very good opportunities to find new customers from all over the world.