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27 October 2009 |
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| From airports to venues, the NEC’s Kathryn James gives her take on the exhibition industry. |
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Every now and again events occur that force industries to take a long, hard look at themselves. The catalyst for the aviation sector was 9/11, for the exhibition industry and many others, it’s the current recession. Having experienced the impact of the terrorist attacks on the airline business during her 11 years of running airports, Kathryn James, managing director of Birmingham’s NEC, says these episodes do have value however painful they may be.
“For aviation, 9/11 was a horrible cathartic moment. The business had lost sight of the customer and to a certain extent this sector has done the same. In our desire to make money and be successful, we’ve lost sight of who really matters; the visitor and exhibitor. These are the people who pay our wages,” she says.
The economic downturn has forced the exhibition industry to re-evaluate itself and the NEC is not immune from this self-examination. The venue has had to reduce costs, which has most recently resulted in the redundancy of 82 members of staff. While regrettable, the job losses are part of a reorganisation that is necessary to the future success of the venue says James. “A lot of this change would have happened without the recession, because we need to reshape ourselves and get fit for purpose.”
The prospect of redeveloping the NEC was what attracted James to the role in the first place. Leading organisations through change is where she performs best. In Birmingham, her task is to create a more customer-focussed venue moving it away from the “it’s about us” attitude James says it was guilty of holding in the past.
In line with this customer-focused approach, the venue’s sales processes have been restructured to bring all the teams together to form one single venue sales team, so customers no longer have to interact with each department individually. A new contact centre is being developed to act as a single point of contact for all customer enquiries. And the venue is also investing in technology with the remaining £5 million of its £40 million Venue Improvement Programme fund.
It has rolled out the EBMS system across the business so there is one repository for all information. “Previously, the tenancy guys would use it when booking shows, but the media team would use another system. Now the whole venue runs through EBMS and it’s proving really powerful for the team, empowering them with all the information they need to be the best they can be,” says James.
Other technology solutions include the introduction of Fish Software’s visitor tracking technology due to complete by summer 2010. Also the launch of a new website at the end of the year providing visitors and exhibitors to the NEC with useful information on transport, accommodation and entertainment in the region for a better visitor experience. “It feels like we’ve put our foot on the accelerator, caught up and are moving ahead,” adds James.
The aviation and exhibition industries share similarities says James. They each have big infrastructure, are customer-facing businesses and serve both the consumer and trade communities. But there’s one area of the exhibition sector that baffles James and that’s its reluctance to prove its worth. “I’ve been somewhat surprised at how slow this industry has been at articulating its value proposition. Everyone in the industry knows it, lives it, feels it, so why are we so reticent about saying and proving it?”
It’s something the industry must get better at, she says. “Exhibitors are rightly challenging us as a sector and asking why they should spend their limited marketing pounds with us. And that challenge is no bad thing, because quite frankly if we can’t explain, we shouldn’t be here.”
Profile protection is another bone of contention. Having hailed from a sector where competition is rife, James says the idea that you can protect an industry is simply not feasible. “I can understand why organisers want to protect their shows, but equally we can’t stifle
innovation. We’ll be simply giving other media channels the bullet to shoot us with.”
And while she acknowledges that some sectors like giftware are quite congested, that should be no reason for organisers not to create new shows with exciting content. “The view that a sector can only support one show is clearly nonsense. If we can’t innovate as an industry, we’re in a sorry state,” she adds.
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One of the concepts we are looking at is turning the Pavilion (4-5,000 square metres) into a launch pad purely for new shows. |
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There’s also a job to be done in the way that exhibitions measure success, she says. “When I first joined the industry I said that one of the products we should sell is rent-a-crowd, because that’s the only way we seem to measure the success of a show.”
James admits she was being facetious at the time, but says there are other ways of determining success. And this has been confirmed by her conversations with exhibitors, many of who are still experiencing quality interaction at events despite falling visitor numbers.
“As a sector we are wired to quantity not quality. And as a venue we are guilty of it too. The more square metres we sell the better we are judged,” she says.
The NEC offers some 200,000 square metres and James admits the venue’s occupancy and utilisation figures are both down by a few percentage points to around 30 and 80 per cent respectively.
So, with shows getting smaller, is the venue in danger of becoming a white elephant? Not at all, says James. “We’re too far ahead in the market and our brand perception. Geography is on our side too as we’re smack bang in the middle of the country. But we’re not going to be blasé about it, our strategy now is to be the venue of choice.”
With 20 halls of varying capacity, the real strength of the NEC is that it can be all things to all people, she says, capable of hosting huge events like Spring Fair at one end of the spectrum to small shows of just 1,300 square metres at the other.
Having said that, James concedes that the venue is not the most obvious launch platform, but she has plans to rectify this. “One of the concepts we are looking at is turning the Pavilion (4-5,000 square metres) into a launch pad purely for new shows.”
It’s initiatives like this that will improve the 30-year-old venue’s competitive edge going forward says James. “We’ve completely reshaped the way this business will operate in the future. There’s been a lot for the teams to deal with, but it’s energising for them and they can see new ways of working, a new focus on the customer and are really positive about the future.”
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