And About Losing, Then Reclaiming, the Plot
One of the reasons trade shows are so instructive is that they compress market dynamics into a time-bound, physical space. For a few days, market elements that usually play out at a distance from one another show up in the same building. Buyers, sellers, educators, service providers, logistics teams, security, food service, marketing, operations … all of it running at the same time, under the same constraints, with real money and real relationships on the line. Then it packs up and goes away.
When a trade show works, you can feel it without needing a spreadsheet to tell you so. All the parties are excited to go, not just because it’s at a spa or in a fun city. They are excited about the event itself. Inside the event, conversations are taking place everywhere. The right people seem to keep finding one another. Time feels well spent. When it does not work, it’s just as apparent, even if no one can quite put their finger on why. There is movement, noise, activity, but something feels off. Artificial even.
My marketing company does mostly B2B marketing, which includes managing trade shows. We have recently taken on responsibility for a new show, and we’ve been struck by how clearly this environment exposes problems that exist not only in trade events, but in marketing in general. The problem is about what happens when you stop seeing the world through your primary customer’s lens, and what it takes to find your way back.
Trade shows are often described as serving two audiences. Exhibitors and attendees. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Exhibitors are the primary customers of a trade show. They fund it. They assume the risk, pay for the booths, the infrastructure, the marketing, the education, and the experiences. Attendees create the value for exhibitors, which makes them essential, but always and only in relation to exhibitor success.
When that relationship is understood and respected, trade shows are remarkably effective. When it starts to blur, shows begin making decisions that feel reasonable one at a time, but collectively undermine the very ecosystem they depend on.
Over time, many shows have drifted in this way. Not because anyone set out to fail them, but rather, because it is easy to confuse activity with progress.
Our most recent show provides some good examples of this. To sell more booths, the show opened the door to exhibitors whose products were more at the fringes of the core category. Those exhibitors, understandably, attracted buyers who were primarily interested in those peripheral products. Over time, the center of gravity shifted, and the vendors who had built the show found themselves becoming less central to it.
Another example - and this is true of a lot of shows - is that to increase attendance, they leaned into exhibitors that offered discounted goods. Attendance numbers improved, but the buyers who arrived were shopping for price, not building supplier relationships. The economic profile of the floor changed, and core exhibitors felt it immediately.
Education, experiences, and events were added to create excitement and energy. Rooms may have been filled and schedules may have seemed busy, but the content and timing were not always designed with exhibitor outcomes in mind. Less qualified buyers showed up for the experiences and education. People were pulled off the floor during times when buying conversations should have been happening. There was a lot of action, but not enough exhibitor value.
None of these choices were irrational. Each one made sense on its own. But trade shows are not collections of independent decisions. They are systems. And systems respond to incentives, not intentions.
And that’s why trade shows are a great analogy for the point I’m trying to make: this is not just a trade show problem. It’s a marketing problem.
The same pattern shows up in product businesses all the time. When companies design everything through the lens of their immediate buyer, say a retailer or distributor, without deeply understanding the end consumer, they produce products or services that seem promising, but they don’t sell. They meet specifications, but don’t generate desire.
When companies design everything through the lens of the end consumer, without understanding the retailer or distributor, they produce offerings that are hard to stock, hard to explain, hard to price, or hard to support. The product may be compelling in theory, but it fails in the distribution channel.
This is the central challenge of B2B businesses. You are not serving two markets independently. You are serving one market through the lens of the other.
Direct-to-consumer businesses do not face this particular tension. Their challenge is different. They design for one customer, one decision maker, one set of expectations. B2B requires balance. Positioning, pricing, packaging, education, logistics, marketing, and delivery all have to work for multiple parties who do not share the same incentives.
Trade shows simply make that balancing act impossible to ignore.
It is tempting to blame the pandemic for the struggles many trade shows experienced. The disruption was real, and the impact was significant. But the pandemic did not create the problem, because trade shows were already suffering in the years before 2020. Sure, the pandemic removed momentum and stripped away habit and routine. And when that happened, many shows were forced to confront a question they had not answered clearly in a long time.
Who is this show actually for?
When that question is not answered, everything downstream becomes guesswork. Marketing messages lose their impact, education offerings lose coherence, and the exhibitor mix becomes unfocused. The result may be loss of attendance, or it can be the wrong attendance. Either way, the show loses value.
Rebuilding a trade show in this environment is not about adding more: more categories, more events, more excitement. The only way to rebuild is to go back to the original value proposition: What do our primary customers (the exhibitors) need, and how do we deliver that?
Who should be on the floor? Why should they be there? What kind of business does the show exist to support? And what does not belong, even if it looks like traffic or fun?
A trade show is a temporary city. It has infrastructure, governance, traffic patterns, neighborhoods, and gathering places. The purpose of the show determines who the inhabitants of the city should be. Marketing does the work of attracting those inhabitants, while design and messaging communicate value and values and help avoid identity creep. Sales finds the right people to open the shops. Education provides the knowledge necessary for community prosperity. Events and activations aren’t just for fun - they also influence traffic flow. And both education and events help reinforce a sense of community.
When those elements are designed through the primary customer’s lens, the city works because it feels intentional. Exhibitors do business, attendees feel their time was well spent, and everyone gains monetary and network value.
When those elements are not designed through the primary customer’s lens, the city still exists. But the people who fund it slowly decide not to return.
Good marketing, whether for a trade show or a business, does not chase attention for its own sake. It attracts the right attention. It focuses on relevance and fit to deliver results. Good marketing is not performative. It doesn’t create activity to look hip or feel busy. It creates alignment so the right things can happen.
Trade shows make this visible because everything happens at once. But the lesson applies far beyond the show floor. When you design products, services or experiences through the wrong lens, growth might still happen, but it will happen in a way that eventually undermines the system supporting it, causing traffic to stall, margins to decrease, or leading to a shift in customers that ultimately aren’t the right ones and can’t support long-term health.
When you design through the right lens, you build something that is more resilient and far more likely to compound over time.
Trade shows, at their best, are not just marketplaces. They are reflections of how well an industry understands itself. And when they are rebuilt with clarity and intent, they can once again do what they were always meant to do. Bring the right people together, for the right reasons, in a way that creates value long after the city disappears.
