When I’ve been to trade shows, I was uninterested in the people promoting it if they weren’t knowledgeable about the product. The kinds of questions I had were the kinds of specific product questions or pricing questions or marketing kind of questions that booth babes who were working the boat show in the same convention hall last week wouldn’t be able to answer (nor would I probably have trusted their answers if they had tried to give me answers).
And there’s usually enough ground to cover while I’m there, more than enough on the agenda, that I don’t have time to mess around with booths that I’m not getting something useful out of visiting the booth. I narrow my interactions and connections to the companies that I’m really likely to be interested in purchasing from. I don’t care if your booth has the most attractive people in the world doing the most entertaining thing you can do in public, if it’s not a product or service that I’m interested in actually buying for my store, I don’t have time to stop at your booth. Nor will I have time to deal with your sales calls following up with me after I get home.
Very true. It really is an out of date custom at serious trade shows. Along with exhibitors who offer raffles, pig-in-a-blanket, photo booths, free cappuccinos and on site caricature artists.
These things only attract the non buyers-people who attend the show just for a day out. (Realize that I am not talking about the low rent, draped table/hotel conventions, but rather the large, professional trade shows.)
There’s a lot of privileged bigotry in ‘professional’ appearance and interviews. The appearance standards cut out people who look different, cut out people with sensitive skin, kinky hair, and/or physical disabilities. The interview processes cut out people who sound different, cut out people who are autistic, and so on.
I think part of the confusion may be that sex sells better to the direct consumer than it does to the busy commercial buyer. At home, maybe an ad with someone attractive on it will get my attention. At an event where I’m browsing and having fun, maybe someone good looking might win my attention a wee bit. But when I’m there for business, my mind is focused hard on making money, finding things that are going to make me money or save me money.
I bet a booth babe might generate an increase at a show that was aimed at people buying directly for themselves more than it would in this test show that sounds like it’s aimed at business people purchasing for businesses.
It’s funny several commenters have mentioned auto shows. The really big one in Detroit only seems to have the eye-candy-for-hetero-males promotional models at the press preview and on charity ball night. Both of which I’ve only seen on TV because I’m not rich or in the press. Anyway, on the days us pleebs can go, manufacturer’s staff, male and female, are wearing corporate branded, work-casual gear like the woman in Aloisius’s SAP pic. I’m having a difficult time recalling the last time I saw a teleprompter-reader in a sequined gown at the auto show. 1996?
My husband is in the auto parts manufacturing industry. We were talking about conventions a while back and I was telling him I was guessing his industry’s shows were just packed full of booth babes since so many of the attendees at those are males. He said it wasn’t like that at all. I was envisioning one of those hot rod car magazines come to life, floozies in bikinis draped over hoods and posing seductively with carbeurators. Nope. He says the presenters are about as big a sausage fest of a crowd as the attendees. I joked with him about that just being what he wants me to think is going on. But then I was watching a show on television a couple days later centered around one of the major car companies that a lot of his parts go into, and there was a bunch of footage from an automotive show and he was totally right. Not a scantily clad model in sight. A whole lot of people, mostly men, in slacks and corporate logo polos.
It’s about both actually, because lazy dependence on common belief that is basically just derived from unexamined sexism to increase sales seems to persevere despite the fact that it potentially has a negative impact on the connection the buyer makes with the product. A marketing 101 type analysis from an undergrad could easily show how and why the type of products and the type of consumer being targeted make a poor fit for the old “sex sells” canard. You are more likely to have a low trust/high risk relationship with the buyer in technology. You also may have a buyer with significant investment to make, and that buyer may be quite knowledgeable themselves, approaching you with specific requirements. If it appears you are putting most of your marketing effort into making your product seem sexy and cool, you may even lower your buyer’s trust because it may leave them with the impression that you don’t have enough to offer them. So really it’s interesting from that perspective because it’s about how sex and sexism (in the belief about the best way to get buyers to your booth) may be causing you to lose sales without understanding why. In fact it might even be causing you to refuse to be willing to try to understand why.
The sexism isn’t so much the existence of the promotional model here. There definitely are products where promo models work well. Typically where the product is something familiar, product diversity is rather low and/or there is a lot of saturation, the consumers are diverse and buying the product for personal use, the consumer’s level of risk in buying is moderate to low, and brand differentiation is improved by association with sexuality and youth. That last one is of key importance. If your product fits into that category, promo models very much may improve your sales.
Actual institutionalized sexism and its effects really show up in the astonishing difficulty that some marketing teams are apparently having with recognizing their own market because sexy women = $$$ is so deeply ingrained in their expectation.
Um… RTFA. Both groups had engineers and sales reps, and in both groups the “show contractors” knew nothing (or very little, being, y’know, show contractors) about the product.
It’s just that one group was made up of conventionally attractive “models” and the other group was older/less conventionally attractive but trained for people skills.
One other possible reason why booth babes don’t work in tech:
Cars are primarily consumer devices. They’re supposed to look “sexy” and work well. This goes across all car companies and is an industry standard. They also adhere to industry standards–in fact, they’re forced to by law.
Tech is mostly sold to corporations, though, and there’s a real tradeoff between aesthetics and performance/stability. What looks really shiny in the demo can torpedo spectacularly when it’s rolled out–and then the guy who made that purchase loses their job. And it’s a far less regulated industry, so that’s going to happen more often.
As a result, people who go to tech trade shows are trained to resist all the glamour and luxury that booth babes are supposed to foster, because who cares if you got to see a few pretty girls if the tech you buy blows up in your face? Using booth babes then becomes a demonstration of incompetence, revealing a belief that your product cannot stand up on its own and so you need to spruce up the demo.
Yeah, in both cases they were actually know-nothings. However, someone attending the show will know the booth babe is a know-nothing and not even try to get information from her, they won’t know that in the second case.
Naw G, both booths had direct representation. The 2 variants being discussed (Bbabes vs experienced professional communicators) are sticky doorknobs, they are to keep the attention of prospects that are or may be waiting for direct interaction.
& for your second paragraph, see my first, they are ideally supposed to know how to hold attention. Getting it is easy regardless of babeness for the simple fact that attendees are attendees specifically to attend.
One show I did I was lucky in a sense, I hired a woman who was extremely knowledgeable & experienced, who happened to also be attractive in several conventional ways. She wore gear appropriate to our field. She kicked ass, b/c she seemed like a direct rep which helped prevent her large breasts from scaring off anxious attendees or those who have no interest in Bbabes & severely challenged the overconfident goofs w/her knowledge base/comms, who soon found themselves having to make a choice to speak to me or my partner srsly, or tuck tail & fuck off.
Yes, the best of both worlds is ideal, but brains+ego totally trump looks+/-ego every time, so if you have to choose, you should choose the pro regardless of appearance so long as appearance is pro.
My next show, my partner & I did it alone as she was not available & no one of her caliber could be had. We were lucky to get her even once, since she did it more as a friend, tho we paid her well. The only downside was I didn’t get to see as much of the show since I had to spend way more time at the booth. That, and overconfident goofs are not generally attracted to me, may have cost me a potential, but fuck it, I did shows b/c I wanted business, not b/c we needed it. Close my m/fin booth for lunch, sho do.
