May 2004

Best Practices: Magical mystical tours

Guided tours take mystery out of technologies exhibited at Retail Systems

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

More than one in five of the 3,944 industry executives who attended Retail Systems 2003, held June 9–12 at McCormick Place in Chicago, took a guided TechTour of the 93,000-square-foot exhibit hall to find technology solutions that were right for their needs.

 “The trade show floor was a big and scary place from an attendee’s perspective,” says Eric Olson, Vice President of Products and Services for Retail Systems Alert Group, Newton Upper Falls, MA. “They have limited time and a big expanse to cover. They want to know, ‘How can I focus my time effectively?’”

Retail Systems introduced TechTours to help attendees navigate the daunting array of new and emerging technologies for retail and supply chain management when the show moved to McCormick Place in Chicago six years ago. Growing in synch with the Internet space, the exhibition had expanded to more than 110,000 square feet. About 950 attendees signed up for 40 guided tours the first year.

Since then, the program has been refined to target up to 10 industry segments deemed to be “hot” by industry analysts. Although all the technologies fit into core categories of planning, buying, selling and tracking retail, apparel and consumer goods, it can be hard to distinguish which exhibitors offer what. Retail Systems enlists the help of industry experts to select exhibitors for inclusion, based on their responses to a pre-show marketplace analysis survey. Last year, 70 of the 262 exhibiting companies were selected to participate.

Scheduled over a three-hour lunch break on two consecutive days, each TechTour begins with a 30-minute marketplace analysis presented by an industry consultant/analyst to provide an overview of the given industry segment, such as radio frequency identification technologies, store innovation and customer relationship management (CRM). The analyst then moderates a 45-minute panel discussion among five vendors, who pay $5,000 each to be positioned as market leaders offering “best-of-breed” systems in that segment.

After the panel, attendees break up into groups of 20 to be taken on a tour of selected exhibits. The guides are volunteers recruited in advance from the ranks of industry trade publications, as well as Retail Systems’ staff. Each exhibitor gets a set amount of time to demonstrate products, depending on how many exhibits are included on the tour. Some tours have less than 10 exhibits, while others have as many as 30. Qualified exhibitors who choose not to make a live presentation are listed on the self-guided tour map, which is available to all attendees.

The difficulties in orchestrating the TechTours are many. First is choosing the industry segments. In the beginning, segments paralleled the conference tracks, but the emergence of new and fringe technologies complicated the process.

“You had interplay from the knowledge leaders who were giving the marketplace analysis,” Olson says. “They wanted to focus on CRM or some other thing. So they had to prove their case that more than one or two system vendors would support it.”

Then companies applying for inclusion in the tour have to be pre-qualified. Panelist spots are offered as a paid sponsorship opportunity on a first-come, first-served basis but must be approved by the analysts. For the guided tour, Olson enlists the help of his editorial department to sift through the applications and slot them into the appropriate segments. There’s no cap on the number allowed.

Finally, scheduling the number and timing of tours is a challenge. Attendees can pre-register for up to four tours, but many simply show up. To keep groups small, last-minute recruits for volunteer tour guides have even included students, who appreciated a complimentary conference registration in return.

“We have to deal with the quirks and hiccups that happen. You try to fix one, and it creates another,” Olson says.

Cathy Chatfield-Taylor is a freelance writer/ editor. E-mail cathy@cc-tunlimited.com.