Are general business exhibitions a thing of the past?

General business exhibitions used to be a great way for businesses to be able to exhibit their wares as well as meet prospective new clients in a targeted professional surrounding. 

However, in these current times, there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm lately for businesses to not only agree to attend either as an exhibitor or attendee in the first place?

People and businesses booking on as attending isn't the issue. It's those that have booked gathering and summing up the effort to physically attend on the day is the real problem for general business exhibitions. 

Recently, we took steps to hold some general business exhibitions and in doing so experienced much wasted time and effort for several reasons. 

The first of which is that all general business exhibitions were being tarred with the same brush, and by that we mean no matter who the organiser was - when talking to prospective businesses to attend many would pass negative comments of history experiences and use that as the reasoning in declining the invitation to attend. 

The second main reason was the thought that organisers of general business exhibitions tend to over promise and under deliver, the fact that such exhibitions are general the food of thought by some organisers was that bigger is better, but whilst a nice thought on a more localised scale that is not necessarily the case as what those who get involved wish to see its results. 

The third and perhaps more important reason is that businesses do not currently see the value in general business exhibitions, that’s not to say that no value is provided to anyone - it’s more of thereof no value to them personally and in the current climate businesses are at last focusing on how, where and why, they would benefit as opposed to how everyone they know would benefit. 

We had to twice postpone our planned general business exhibition because of their uncertainly in businesses turning up even though they had booked on, this was also compounded by the unwillingness of many businesses to pay the invoices in time which had been raised for attending the funding by networking lunch or to exhibit. 

Our view was that whilst having to postpone the general business exhibition would be an embarrassment, actually going ahead regardless and taking people’s money whilst having concerns would have been more embarrassing and more important of absolutely of no use or benefit to local businesses. 

It would seem that it’s not only us who have and are suffering problems in convincing businesses of any benefits of general business exhibitions and as such these types of events should not be planned or if they are they should be under a different format.