If you are a loss prevention technology provider with solutions that benefit other parts of the retail enterprise beyond LP and you market outside North America, exhibiting at the National Retail Federation BIG Show just may be worth your consideration.
I spent Monday walking the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, where the expo hall takes up literally acres of concrete real estate on multiple floors. You could likely fit five or six RILA or NRF asset protection exhibition spaces into the Big Show expo. That’s not a positive assessment from an exhibitor’s perspective, but assuming that the right attendees somehow find you, there are some potential positive outcomes.
One is the mix of retail professionals who attend the Big Show. While only a handful of LP executives attend, you will find people from operations, merchandising, marketing, customer service, and many other areas of the retail organization. If your technology has applications for those departments, those prospects are likely at the Big Show.
Take video analytics provider ClickIt, for example. They are showcasing an application that assigns a unique tracking ID number to everyone who visits a store. What that can provide is information about how often customers visit a store, which stores in the chain they visit, how long they shop, and do they regularly set off EAS alarms, among other things. The retailer can use that information across the enterprise for a number of benefits.
A second thing you will notice as you stroll the exhibition hall is that English is by far not the only language in use. The Big Show attracts a large international contingent. For example, while I waited to speak with one of the magazine’s Vendor Advisory Board members from FireKing Security Solutions, he was demonstrating their digital cash handling products to a group from Russia.
A lot of considerations go into how and where to market a company’s products and services. The loss prevention trade shows are mandatory events for loss prevention solutions providers. But those conferences simply do not attract many retail professionals outside of LP, nor do they have a significant international attendance. If those are important to your technology sales cycle, you just might want to consider the Big Show.