I received a beautiful direct mail piece today for Modern Marketing Days, a tradeshow down the road in nearby San Diego. The interesting part about it is that it is organized by Modern Postcard, a company I have used several times to print “Save the Date” postcards for several Expos. There are other events of course that are put on by a company in an industry they serve, but not too many full blown tradeshows. Anyone know of others?

It’s a brilliant idea - put on a tradeshow that will attract current customers and prospects, have a healthy dose of education on the subject with, of course, branding everywhere for Modern Postcard as the place to go to implement all the ideas attendees are learning about. AND, my guess is they actually make money doing it. Marketing and exposure that is actually an income line in the budget rather than an expense. Awesome.

For the tradeshow owner side of me, it’s also a worry. There are other direct mail conferences out there (including the Direct Marketing Association’s own conference) that now are competing with a potential exhibitor’s own tradeshow.

My experience is that the best way to avoid having an exhibitor or sponsor feel like they need to have their own show is to deliver so much value for them at your own event that the cost in time, money and personnel resources it would take to host their own tradeshow just isn’t worth it. I’m not talking about smaller corporate events for existing customers - lots of companies do that who wouldn’t think about pulling out of their big industry events - but it’s a relatively small step to go from a corporate event to a full tradeshow which is why I want to constantly make sure exhibitors feel they are getting their money’s worth.

If they are determined to do their own event, as a last resort I’d offer to white-label manage/organize it for them. Better that than to lose them entirely.

Update: I hate it when I hit the “Publish” button just before I realize there is one more thing to say. One other thing: the irony of producing a great tradeshow is that the better job you do of organizing and managing it, the easier it looks to do by anyone else. The trick is to make it look easy while somehow also letting everyone know how damn hard it is.