I am against narrow definitions of marketing and blind reliance on marketing mixes and SWOT analyses. Instead, I am all for a holistic, flexible concept of marketing which recognises the importance of a personal touch. Above all, I feel the function of marketing is certainly not to produce a beautiful coating to disguise a bad quality product or service.
Or what do you think? Suppose you have received bad service from a certain company time after time. Does seeing their brand-new expensive advertisement suffice to change your impression? Isn’t it true that no matter how much energy their marketing department puts into devising an amazing marketing campaign, you will still be taking your money somewhere else – simply because you know that behind those beautiful words there lies poor quality and bad service? Yep, I thought as much.
You can only sell bad quality once
The same goes for trade fair stands: the hours and euros we invest in marketing would be all in vain if the all-round, turnkey nature of our service turned out to be nothing more than a hollow catchphrase. Or if our designer, blaming the busy season, decided to cut corners with your stand design and ended up designing a mediocre stand for your most important event of the year.
An unsatisfied or wrongly treated customer will not return. And no marketing campaign, however big or expensive, is going to change that fact.
It is part of our professionalism to not only offer our customers all the basic elements of good service, but also put the whole range of our expertise to their use: if needed, we can provide advice on how to do pre-event advertising; how to behave at the stand; how to go over the outcome of the event afterwards; or how to attract better trade fair leads. Or, if the customer simply wants to find a nice restaurant after a long day at the fair, we can also help them with that.
We are all ears
At Wulff Entre, we always aim for a good, holistic service, which starts by mapping our customer’s needs even before the first elements of the stand sketch are drafted on the computer screen. It is one thing to merely sell a customer a random ”stand located somewhere along the main aisle”, and quite another to actually take the time to discuss together with them their aims and hopes for the presence at that particular fair, find out the company’s graphic guidelines, and then use this background information to build a customised package. This latter approach ensures we can offer our customers just what they need – in accordance with the company’s image and in a way that best helps them to reach their goals. And that’s because we know how to ask the right questions!
Despite the undeniable importance of strong know-how and solid expertise, there is something still more important: a sincere wish to help the customer to get as much as possible out of their trade fair participation. The most content customer is one who feels they have been listened to and understood. A customer whom we have helped to find a nice dinner restaurant – never mind that this is not part of our core processes, because in the end, all it takes is a willingness to help.
This post has been originally posted in Finnish 10.9.2014. Translation by Annemari Kettunen.