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Spicing It Up At IMEX in May, the Malaysia Convention & Exhibition Bureau provided attendees with faux currency at a version of a traditional market.

executive in both commercial publishing and event manage- ment. “But an awful lot of them, if you think it through, can be adapted to a business-to-business environment. I don’t know if trade shows are learning from retailers, or retailers are learning from events, but they are all trying to be experi- ential marketers.” One show floor where the strategies of sensory selling can

be readily found — and sniffed and tasted — is at IMEX, the global exhibition for incentive travel, meetings, and events that has been held annually in Frankfurt for a decade. More than 150 countries are represented at the exhibition, where individual trade-show booths can cover nearly the area of a city block and rise two stories high. At this year’s show, held from May 22–24 at Messe Frankfurt, nearly every booth fea- tured digital images, with photomontages and videos looping and flickering on plasma screens of every size. Many hoteliers exhibiting at IMEX 2012 sought to recre-

ate a version of the physical experience of being in a hotel lobby, with multilevel booths furnished with banks of plants, pillow-strewn sofas, low coffee tables, and chandeliers. DMOs and CVBs brought the flavors of their destinations to the show floor — sometimes literally, as at the Colombia booth, where a barista pulled one thousand fragrant shots of espresso on the show’s opening day. Attendees visiting the Texas booth were met by a life-sized plastic horse and cowhide-patterned stools. At the Malaysia booth, sponsored by the Malaysia Conven-

tion & Exhibition Bureau, exhibitors hosted a cocktail recep- tion that featured a version of a centuries-old spice market.

38 PCMA CONVENE JULY 2012

Color Me India Stunning images filled the India Convention Promotion Bureau’s IMEX booth.

Booth staff, dressed in traditional attire, spread cloths on the floor and swapped merchandise, including pepper and other spices, for paper currency distributed to visitors, in an elbow- to-elbow cacophony of color and sound. It was intentionally cramped, an exhibitor explained to an attendee, to make the market feel more authentic. In retail, when people physically get their hands on some-

thing and become engaged in some way, there is a lot more conversion, Davis-Taylor said, with customers turned into buyers. Trade-show booth exhibitors, she said, can “do so much more than just hand out brochures, if you think about [exhibits] in terms of experience design.”

THE STORE OF THE FUTURE The National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Annual Convention & EXPO, known as Retail’s BIG Show and held every January at the Javits Center in New York City, is the epitome of the dis- tracted environment that Davis-Taylor describes. As exhibitors vie to get noticed in the competitive field of retail marketing,

“there are a billion banners in the air,” plus lights and entertain- ment, said Susan Newman, NRF’s senior vice president for con- ferences, who has worked for the organization since 2003. This year, attendance at Retail’s BIG Show increased 10

percent over 2011, to 25,000, and NRF expects that the exhi- bition floor — 140,000 square feet in 2012 — will grow another 22,000 square feet in 2013. The 101-year-old show is expand- ing, Newman said, because the retail industry is changing so quickly. She said: “People need to come to our show to figure out the next innovation.”

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