The current situation forced to change business models and how to continue interacting and offering value propositions to customers.
by Luis González Nogales*
Two editions of this magazine have passed and the structure of the business of training events and relationships between suppliers and users have changed radically, at the same pace that the way the world in general relates has changed.
In the March-April edition of this year we touched on the theme of the large number of events of exhibitions, congresses, summits, etc., related to private security, which were announced for this 2020 and the considerations regarding how to choose which ones to go to, today all are practically closed and tentatively postponed to 2021, without being able to define yet dates or modality of these.
Predicting how the events of security exhibitions and congresses will develop in the future is premature, however, we can analyze the behavior of the industry in recent months, which will undoubtedly mark the actions of the future.
Personal contact will again be important at some point, however, contacts will be at the most decisive levels, considering that for a while travel restrictions, new requirements of the same and possibly the frequencies of routes, number of direct destinations and prices of the tickets, make the physical presence of the exhibitor and the visitor is to really close deals.
The movement of manufacturers and distributors in visits to different countries and national and regional events that had increased in recent years, will undoubtedly decrease for the same reasons already stated, in addition to the massive incorporation of companies into virtual activities will make this the preferred method to evacuate consultations on marketing issues, new product features and even the presentation of new products; the practice already started of meetings and virtual business roundtables will undoubtedly increase to the detriment of the physical presence of both the exhibitor and the visitor.
Another aspect to take into account is why visitors and attendees to congresses will consider paying for access to talks, technical training, conferences and other modalities, if in these months hundreds of events have been organized with durations of full days or several simultaneous or alternate days for free with delivery of diplomas for the curriculum and with widely known exhibitors of the security industry.
This will create a difficulty for the presentation of offers, which must now be of real value to the attendee, which convinces him to pay for the attendance at these virtual events with cost.
On the other hand, physical events will be more complicated, both by getting staff of speakers willing to travel, and by organizing an academic program attractive enough so that the attendee is willing to assume the costs of the event, plus the associated costs of transfer and stay.
The last aspect to consider is that equipment and system manufacturers have been generating their own virtual content through talks, product presentations, participation in the multiple free virtual events sponsoring their brands and products; this has apparently not given them bad results, since it has not been a punctual activity but consecutive and repetitive in the weeks, which indicates that they are possibly reaching the end users or distributors who were not arriving in the physical presentations.
This will certainly influence the sponsorship budgets of physical events when they can be developed, as well as virtual ones where paid academic programs do not include (as they usually have been) commercial presentations.
In the cases of free virtual events, it can be foreseen that they will maintain with commercial sponsorships for the presentation of products, it can also be foreseen that at the moment in which the different countries are leaving the quarantines people will lose interest in spending hours watching a screen with one or more people presenting a product that is not of immediate interest, and whether they will focus these times on what is truly useful and valuable for their business segment.
All of the above, without forgetting that private security has been grouped very quickly and almost exponentially in these months in a consolidation of risk management in a more comprehensive and inclusive way with cybersecurity and criminalistics.
We can conclude by saying that events with physical presence in the next two or three years will be lower on offer but mandatorily with a greater offer of business value; that the boom of virtual events will become more selective in the sense that they should focus on time-value proposals more segmented in the different markets and actors of the same, likewise we will see more presence of the brands in new virtual training centers with physical grouping through the distributors of the different countries, without forgetting the massive activities of product presentation in the largest number of virtual dissemination channels, which will, as we said, be to the detriment of sponsorships of third-party events.
Undoubtedly, the analysis, accounting, monitoring of virtual events in recent months and those to come will be one of the activities of those responsible for marketing and market intelligence, in order to adapt as quickly as possible to the trends that quarantines have imposed on the different modalities of virtual communication.
Greetings.
* Luis González Nogales is the Executive President of INCASPRI. If you want to contact him, you can write to the email: [email protected]
