Ordinary Nothing

Last week we were in the Technologies 2005 exhibition in
Tel-Aviv. It’s a purely Israeli event, but there are representatives
from many of the major suppliers (and buyers) in various hi-tech
sectors.

The exhibition itself was fairly interesting (well, some aspects
more, and some less, there were very myriad types on things presented).

One mistake many presenting companies made was in the design of
their stands. Everyone made sure you could see the company name, but
some where so enthusiastic about having colours,  graphics, and eye
candy, that they made it very hard to know what they do. If someone
came over to search for then, that’s fine. For people who intend to
spend time on each stand, and talk to reps of each company, that’s fine
too. But most buyers were either generally browsing, or looking for
specific kinds of items/technologies. And when someone makes it very
hard to discern at first, or second or third, sight what it is they’re
selling, many people would not spend the effort of coming over to talk
to the rep.

And there seemed to be extremely bad judgement exhibited by many of those presenting thin LCD screens for embedded systems.

One supplier had a wall full of a large amount of models and sizes
of screens. And what did they show on them, to demonstrate the display
quality? The standard Flying Windows screen saver. So the screen was
black, with the occasional fast-moving splotches of colour. Not helping
to know anything about the screen at all, and mostly made me wonder
what were they trying to hide…

Another vendor did worse. They also had a wall covered with LCD
screens. And two huge problems. The first was a nice screen that was so
totally out of synch that the picture looked sliced and flickering.
Nobody should show that when they’re trying to sell something. It’s a
huge run away – this product we’re selling is defective sign. The
second one was that the lovely hi-res flower pictures they showed were
often replaced by a notice that this is a free demo of some commercial
screen saver product, with web address and contact details to buy the
full version. And if it’s not clear, this was not by the company making
the presentation. That’s right, they probably took a demo version of a
screen saver of the Internet, and used it for the exhibition. This is both
serious copyright infringement, and plain stupid. It looked so unprofessional. And they didn’t mind, it was like that for two days…

A third vendor of those screen had a more conceptual problem. I
heard a discussion he had with one of the exhibition’s visitors that
was taking a look at his stand, and it was obvious they completely
misunderstood each other. The mistake of the visitor was
understandable, he didn’t come from the right field. But the vendor had
to know what he was talking about.  The visitor was mainly aware
of computer screens as things you connect to personal computers. But
the screens were meant for embedded systems (closed systems that also
need to display information. Like hand-held computers). So the screens
didn’t come with a connection to a regular computer’s graphical card,
since they were not meant to be connected externally to a full
computer. They were meant to be connected to computer boards for
embedded systems, which have special types of connectors built directly
into the circuitry of the board (TFT and LVDS).
So the vendor was repeating the claim that you don’t need a graphics
card in order to use the screens (which is true, but pointless for him
to mention since hardly any of those systems use external graphics
cards anyway), and the visitor kept claiming that you have to use a
graphics card since there isn’t any other way for the computer to use a
screen (which is also entirely true, for full computers like the
visitor know from home). It was a long argument, and they both ended it
feeling that the other person is an idiot…

Plus, as usual in these exhibitions, many of the traders brought all
sorts of silly gifts and trinkets, such as free food-stuff, candies,
pens, markers, flashlights, candles, toys, and up to a company that
gave free wine (good one, even) plus the wineglasses themselves. All a
colossal expenditure of money, which I doubt helped sales in any
noticeable manner, since the people who came just to take the free stuff
rarely paid attention to what was actually sold.

March 21st, 2005 at 12:35 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.