There’s a moment every organiser recognises once a show starts losing ground, and it usually happens in a meeting. Someone puts a slide up with a new logo on it, and there’s a visible sense of relief around the table, as if the problem’s been solved. It hasn’t. It’s been postponed, usually at the cost of another year of decline, because a new name and a fresh colour palette were never actually what was broken.
I inherited a show that had already made this mistake once. It had been rebranded a year before I arrived, chasing growth in a part of the market that was moving fast, and in doing so it threw away the one thing that had taken years to build, which was trust. Attendance was falling, loyalty was thin, and the market had quietly worked out that the show didn’t know what it was for anymore. Putting the old name back on the door looked, to a lot of people watching from outside, like the whole plan.
It wasn’t. The name mattered, and undoing that mistake mattered, but it was the smallest piece of what actually needed to happen. What I did, roughly in this order, was change the team before I changed anything visible, then rebuild relationships across the market personally, one conversation at a time, and only once both of those were properly underway did we touch how the show looked and felt on the day.
The team change happened fast, within the first year, and I wasn’t hiring for CVs so much as I was hiring against a single question: did this person have any attachment to how it used to be done. Experience mattered less than I expected it to. What mattered was whether someone would hesitate to change a process out of respect for whoever built it, because that instinct, however well meant, was exactly what had let the show drift for two years.
“The industry likes to believe it runs on relationships“
This is usually the point where people in events tell me it can’t be done, because the industry likes to believe it runs on relationships, and you can’t just remove the people who hold them. I think that’s mostly wrong, or at least it’s not/only true in the way people mean it. A relationship that only exists because the same rep has called the same buyer for ten years isn’t really a relationship, it’s a habit, and habits are transactional – whether we choose to admit it or not.
A big mistake: confusing transactional relationships with trust
Anyone reasonably competent can pick up a transactional relationship and keep it warm. What can’t be picked up by just anyone is trust. And trust was the thing that had actually broken, not the relationships sitting on top of it. Confusing the two is how organisers talk themselves out of the one decision that would actually fix things.
The relationship rebuilding took far longer than the team change – years rather than months. And it ran on a completely different timeline. I didn’t try to win the whole market back in one sweep. I went to the handful of exhibitors whose opinion the rest of the market actually followed, the ones everyone else was quietly watching to see what they’d do, and I focused on getting them to say yes. Not through a pitch; through questions.
“Once a handful of those bellwethers had said yes, the rest of the market didn’t need convincing“
I asked what had actually made them lose confidence, what would need to be true for them to commit again, and I listened properly rather than treating the conversation as a sale I needed to close. Once a handful of those bellwethers had said yes, the rest of the market didn’t need convincing in the same way, because trust in an industry like this travels through people, not press releases.
Making sure exhibitors didn’t hear three different stories from three different people
The other thing I was strict about was making sure the new team told exactly the same story I did. Not the same script, but the same true version of what we were actually trying to do and why. It’s a small thing that can undo a rebuild fast if you get it wrong. An exhibitor talks to three different people at your business and hears three slightly different explanations for what’s changed, and the whole effort starts to read as chaos dressed up as a turnaround.
“You cannot replace two years of eroded trust on the same schedule“
That gap between the two timelines is the part most people underestimate. You can replace a team in a matter of months if you’re decisive about it. You cannot replace two years of eroded trust on the same schedule, no matter how good the new team is or how convincing the bellwethers turn out to be. Pretending otherwise is exactly how organisers end up back in the rebrand meeting 18 months later wondering why the new identity didn’t fix anything.
Only once that foundation was properly there did the visible changes start to matter. And when they came, they looked different, because the market was already leaning back in rather than being asked to take another leap of faith on appearances alone. We grew that show from around 12,000sqm to 88,000sqm over the following decade, and pushed price up multiple times along the way, including a 10% increase the year we moved venues – without the market pushing back once.
“By the time we asked people to pay more, they already believed we’d earned it“
None of that was down to good branding. It was because by the time we asked people to pay more, they already believed we’d earned it, and belief like that isn’t bought with a new logo, it’s built one honest conversation at a time, with the right people first, over years you don’t get to skip.
If you’re in a meeting right now looking at a mood board for a show that’s losing ground, ask yourself which timeline you’re actually on. If the team hasn’t changed and the bellwethers haven’t come back yet, the mood board isn’t your next move; it’s just a more expensive way of delaying the one you’re avoiding.
