WorldofPaving.com

You would be surprised how often we hear this phrase – maybe, dear reader, you have also thought it yourself – don’t worry, there’s no disgrace in it, in fact we tend to agree, for many people the “traditional shows”, those that have treated paving and hard landscaping as an odd-on, almost an after thought, have failed to deliver for their exhibitors and many visitors and as a result have left some people with a rather jaundiced view of show participation.

World of Paving and The Hard Landscaping Show are specialist shows aimed specifically at Designers, Architects and installation professionals and retailers of these products and these are the people that will be attending our shows.

They are new shows so they cannot have yet had a chance to work for you so whether you are a potential exhibitor or potential visitor, please don’t tar them with the same brush as the old format generic events, come along and help us make them unmissable industry events.

No sooner am I back from Saltex (for my review of the show see Landscape Juice (http://www.landscapejuice.com/2009/09/saltex-review-2009.html – IOG Saltex Show Review 2009) than I am off for a meeting at the Ricoh Arena, we are a little over 6 months out from the shows so the logistics work begins now. We had an excellent reaction to the shows from people at Saltex and we could have as many as 15 new exhibitors as a result of talks held there.We will shortly be confirming the details of some specialist exhibitor zones within the shows and also be publishing the details for the World of Paving project awards so plenty to look out for between now and the end of September. We have a little stand at HAUC tomorrow and Thursday to promote the show to highway professionals and council works departments so we hope to see some of you at the Staffordshire show ground.

You know that ad on TV, that features the puppet meerkat?

The one that a lot of kids love and a lot of adults hate and that has lead to hate mail from the educational establishment because of the catchphrase “simples” allegedly corrupting the English language?

Well, for those of us who may have thought it was a lot of fuss about nothing, news that the marketshare of comparethemarket.com has increased by 76% and the traffic to their website by 83% will come as a bit of a shock.

But not half as much of a shock as it’s come to their competitors such as moneysupermarket.com, whose campaign that started in June featuring Peter Jones from Dragons Den, has been completely trounced.

OK, it can be argued that recession or not people still need to insure their cars so this is a straight fight for share of a pie that remains pretty much intact from before the chaps in the red braces lost all of our money – yes, this can be argued but to do so, in our view, would be to miss the main points.

The first one is that Google and other search engines are not the be all and end all in driving traffic to your website.

The second is that it’s possible to increase your sales in a recession but this has to be at the expense of your competitors – like the meerkat, you have to get out there and compete even harder and this means by spending money on advertising which includes shows.

Simples!