A Day Early - and with Good Cause

Well hello there my blog loving friends, eagerly working away at your desks whilst the rest of the UK slaps on their best Eskimo kit and tries to race a pack of penguins to the office. Well done you. I'm writing this at 4pm on a Wednesday and have only just made it in, having being trapped at home looking after Felix whose nursery was just impossible to reach and whose mother actually managed to make it to work.

But enough of my woes. The reason I'm writing this now is because tomorrow I will be attending a massive promotional merchandise trade show in Germany. Trust me, it's not as much fun as it sounds - but at least I get away from this weather for a day, so that's nice.

So put yourself in my position. You have one day to walk through 6 massive exhibition halls crammed with merchandise. There's just no way you can see everybody, so how do you choose who to see and who to pass by?

My formula is simple. If I already know you, then I'll say hello if I see you and speak to you another time. I'm not trying to be rude, but if I'm able to meet you at your UK offices or better still, arrange for you to come to mine, is it not better to do that, knowing that you will then have my full attention?

It is - trust me.

OK, so we've managed to whittle down a lot of exhibitors. So what next? Well, next I need to establish exactly why it is I am there. I am NOT there to negotiate with suppliers for better buying rates - they're not likely to be able to do that at a show anyway.

I am not there to see who has the cheapest version of a product that I can buy from 20 different people - we all know how I feel about bargain hunters when it comes to marketing.

No. I am there for inspiration. Year upon year I am asked by clients old and new to show them all the new and wonderful merchandise that our world has to offer them. That's why I go to the show - to find that one perfect product which leaps off of the shelves and screams PICK ME - I'M EFFECTIVE!

Sadly, in a show surrounded by literally tens of thousands of products, that item doesn't always find me. It's not that I feel I have seen it all before, it's just that I find it really difficult to get excited by certain items that I just regard as tacky, useless rubbish.

I don't want to spend my time trying to work out how to get my clients excited about stuff. I want to find them the items that do it without even trying. We're all of us looking for that 'WOW' moment where we're not only blown away by what a product is, but more by what it can do for us.

The positive spin on this for me is that when I do call you, excited about a product, then you know that the call is going to be worth taking. I've never called anyone to tell them that I've just seen the most amazing pen but rest assured if I ever did, then you'd better believe that the pen in question was going to CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT WORDS - FOREVER!

So be warned. I plan to come back excited. Forget all this new year, new decade, new whatever nonsense - it's hard enough even getting to work right now. Let's just get your marketing exactly where it needs to be - profitable.