I’m just wrapping up attendance at the Rio Oil & Gas Show 2010, where the world’s leading oil and gas companies – pretty much the only sector left untouched by the global recession – are exhibiting. 2010 is clearly a good year, and the discovery of billions of barrels of pre-salt oil off the Brazilian cost is the talk of the halls. Many of the exhibition stands accordingly reflect the sheer wealth being generated: immaculately designed steel-and-perspex constructs which double as VIP lounges, all filled with cocktail bars serving 12-year-old scotch to the great and the good as they talk business on expensive leather seating.
And to complete the illusion of it being backstage at a rock gig, there is in full effect what remains the most questionable marketing trick in the book. At least half the exhibition stands are fronted not by company employees, but by a cascade of pumped up, vivacious models, squeezed into a range of eyebrow-raising garments that run the gamut between slinky black dresses and S&M-style red leatherette numbers.
Handpicked from Rio’s many thousands of admittedly beautiful people, they flutter around their stands like ornate butterflies, dispensing promotional items and demure eye contact to the great unwashed. They are courteous, efficient and professional, working their charms in order to inject some hitherto unlikely sex appeal into the world of industrial drilling and hydrocarbon processing.
The intended effect is to confer a little glamour to an exhibitors; the actual outcome is both highly surreal and patently absurd. Walking the show feels nothing quite so much as strolling down a dubious nightclub strip – and the tourist guides warn you to be quite wary about that kind of thing in downtown Rio.
So how did trade shows end up like this? It’s a depressingly prosaic story. Marketing folklore states that whenever a company sticks a couple of pretty girls at the front to handing out materials and reel punters in, they get more visitors. The upshot is that a surprising proportion of businesses, many of them successful, credible global companies, have an inexplicable attack of inadequacy at seeing a competitor garlanded with a couple of pretty girls and feel compelled to respond accordingly. Psychologically, it is little more than juvenile.
None of the businesses attending need to do this. They are all forward-looking, successful companies, many of which generate millions or even billions of dollars of revenue every year. Is sex appeal required to sell a brand at this point? It undoubtedly has value in selling product in the consumer realm, but is there really any influence in the analytical purchase decision-making process of B2B?
Furthermore, it runs completely against the supposed ethics many of these brands profess to uphold. It doesn’t even extend to the rest of their marketing: you certainly wouldn’t find their brochures or websites decorated in the same way. So it’s hard to work out how this is reconciled with the brand image, unless there’s some vague notion about perfection being a recognisable quality of the brand – or if the business is involved in industrial pneumatics, in which case it’s a completely appropriate.
And times have changed. The perception remains that this is a man’s world, where grizzled roughnecks tough it out on the conference floor, but it just isn’t like that anymore – if indeed if ever was. Today’s industry is ever more run by expert operators where professionalism and capability is the virtue and gender is less of an issue.
The majority of visitors are here for the show alone, and in truth probably mildly embarrassed/intimidated by the eye candy; and spare a thought for stands where capable female staff are relegated to sideshow status by their pouting upstarts. And of the flood of university students attending the show, I’d reckon more than half were female undergraduates, all wisely eyeing the opportunities available to them. God know what signals this sends out to them about the place of women in their industry.
Maybe the most telling indicator on what really turns tradeshow visitors on lies on the Shell stand. Of shapely forms and delightful curves on display, it’s those of the Ferrari Formula One racecar that grabs the attention of passers-by. Marketing teams take note: there are other ways to get your visitor’s pulses racing.
