Marketing your NRA Show Exhibit

News from the Association's Industry Forecast

The National Restaurant Association has just released its 2013 Industry Forecast. Among the good news in the report are these snippets:

• America's 980,000 restaurants are expected to post record sales in 2013.
• Total restaurant industry sales are expected to exceed $660 billion in 2013 – a 3.8 percent increase over 2012.
• With 13.1 million individuals, 2013 will be the 14th straight year industry employment will outpace overall employment.

 

 

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Does Print Still Work?

By Lorrie Baumann

Let me take off my shoes and wade into some deep water here. There’s a lot of evidence out there that marketers are losing faith in print as an effective advertising vehicle, so naturally, as a publishing company, this is something that we think about a lot. If we had any evidence that an online publication was an effective vehicle for a trade show daily, we could abandon our very expensive printing and shipping of paper publications, deliver the content online, drop our advertising rates and still make a profit doing what we love to do best. We’d all be happy.

The problem is that despite the documented evidence that paper publications might be less effective as advertising vehicles in other contexts, we see a lot of evidence that paper still works for the show daily. Attendees still take them when we hand them out, and our advertisers still see more traffic at their booths than nonadvertisers do.

Capture the Attention of Your Audience at the NRA Show

When you exhibit at a trade show, you’re setting up a special place to which you hope to draw an audience for a performance in which you will create an engaging and memorable experience for them. It’s theater.

Every Leader is an Artist by Michael O’Malley and William F. Baker contains a useful discussion on how to think about stagecraft within a business context. They point out that putting on a successful performance requires us to think about how we’re going to capture attention to draw an audience and how to create a sense of anticipation that focuses their attention on what we think is important for them to notice and remember as well as how to create an experience on stage that will maintain that focus through the performance.

Storytelling Advice

By Lorrie Baumann

via osercommunicationsgroup.typepad.com

Storytelling Advice

By Lorrie Baumann

  I am reading Peter Guber's "Telling to Win" again for his thoughts on storytelling as a way to sell ideas, and I am struck this time by an observation that Guber quotes to the effect that the verbal telling of the story is very important to the effectiveness of the message. The suggestion is that the verbal face-to-face presentation might have more to do with whether you're going to convince someone of your point than the story itself.

This is a little bit of a comedown for a writer who makes a living in print. But then it occurred to me that print, and in particular a good show daily, is how you get people to your booth so they can hear you tell them the verbal message. After all, it's not enough to have a good story -- you have to put yourself in a position to have people to hear it.

Over and over again, as I visit our clients during shows, I see that the show daily makes a difference to that. It'll be the last day of the show, the "dead day," and all over the floor, there'll be exhibitors who are staring into space or playing with their phones, and yet I can't find one of my clients who isn't too busy to talk to me. And I'm the press, for cryin' out loud, trying to give them some free publicity in our monthly magazines, so if they're too busy to talk to me, it's because they're still writing business.

There's much more to say about Guber's book, of course, and you can expect me to be writing more about it, especially since everyone else is also talking about it. It's a solid read, full of fun stories about how Guber has used stories to sell his ideas and even more fun stories about the times he failed to sell his ideas because he forgot to tell a story (Shadenfreude, anyone?), and there's some solid advice about how you put together a story and find the openings to tell it.

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PowerPoint Presentation - Marketing Your Company at the NRA Show

Attracting Attention at the NRA Show

An NRA question you MUST answer:

NRA offers a once-a-year opportunity to meet people you might not otherwise even be able to get in to see. How are you going to attract THEIR attention to you and your products?

The smart answer: The pages of Restaurant Daily News reach your target buyers where they live. Distributed in 60 locations across Chicago each day during the show, Restaurant Daily News's editorial pages focus on you and your products. While other publications provide forums for discussing overall industry trends, what the keynote speakers had to say, or what the industry's giant players are bringing to the market, Restaurant Daily News gives you the opportunity to talk about you and your products to people who didn't know before they arrived in Chicago that they'd need to see you.

Restaurant Daily News publishes four issues during NRA – one for each day of the show. Restaurant Daily News will be distributed in more than 60 locations throughout the show, including in the lobbies of key Chicago hotels, in local restaurants and coffee shops where NRA
attendees gather to plan their day on the show floor, and at hotel shuttle stops. They take the publication with them as they plan their day in the last few quiet moments they'll have all day to cram one more note onto their to-do lists for the day. With your editorial feature in Restaurant Daily News, you tell them why that note should include your booth number.

Call 520.721.1300 today to let us tell you more about how Restaurant Daily News can put you onto the to-do lists of people who are too busy to let you come through their doors today.

 

 Restaurant Daily News is a publication of Oser Communications Group, an independent publishing company not affiliated with the National Restaurant Association. It is not an official publication of the NRA show.

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Make Your International Connection at NRA

What if Restaurant Daily News could save your CEO a trip to China?

 Experienced NRA exhibitors agree that one of the main reasons NRA is essential to their marketing plans is that it brings so many people from the Restaurant industry to Chicago at one time. For a few days each year, we get to meet people representing a broad cross-section of the industry without crossing the International Date Line to do it.

What's the value of that? In addition to the time and money it takes to make a pan-global trip to line up suppliers or see customers, traveling costs include the merciless physical effects of jet lag. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have documented that repeated exposure to jet lag has long-term effects on cognitive function, and other studies have linked jet lag to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer, weight gain, and mental health disorders including depression. Research for British Airways found that sleep loss and disruption to our body clocks can reduce communication skills by 30 percent, memory by 20 percent and decision-making skills by up to 50 percent.

It makes enormous sense to take NRA seriously for the opportunity it presents to do business without leaving the United States. It makes even more sense to maximize the value of that opportunity. That's where Restaurant Daily News comes into play.

 

Make Your Products and Company Relevant at NRA

How will you use NRA as a platform to underscore your company's relevance in the American marketplace?

American Suzuki's November 6 announcement that the company would declare bankruptcy and withdraw from the American car market came as no particular shock to anyone. After its peak sales year in 2007, steadily declining sales and failures to announce new products at major car shows had told anyone who was watching that the company wasn't doing well. The sad truth, though, is that by 2012, hardly anyone was watching – the company and its products had simply become irrelevant to the American marketplace.

NRA is a premier opportunity to prevent that from happening to your company. The question is how.

New product launches are only part of the answer. The plain fact is that it probably doesn't matter if you've built a better mousetrap if the mouse just doesn't notice. And NRA is also a premier place for even the best mousetrap to go largely unnoticed.

Think about it: somewhere around 2,000 exhibitors, over 60,000 people crowding the halls and aisles, all the glitz and entertainment that a company the size of U.S. Foods, Coca-Cola or Libbey Inc. can afford to put out there. Attendees will have to walk through and around all of that even to find their way to you – and that's assuming that they know you're out there and care enough to do that. That's what you have to make happen.

How are you going to do that?

How To Make Your CEO Happy During NRA

Marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin noted that, “Many companies are sales-force driven. When the sales force is happy, the CEO is happy.”

At Restaurant Daily News, we live by the truth of that, since our publishing company, like many others is one of those sales-force driven companies. Which brings us to today's question, “How are you going to make your CEO happy during NRA?”

The answer to that one is fairly easy, if you understand that what makes the sales force happy is the opportunity to make sales. You're halfway home if you just get them to NRA, which delivers the world of restaurant buyers to Chicago for four days of hunting down the products that will generate the most excitement in the marketplace over the next year.