Face-to-Face Purist

This makes all the sense in the world. The Face-to-face, in-person events industry survived the mother of all burning platforms merely a few years ago. The industry went from one of the most significant years of its history, 2019, to a complete halt by the end of 2020, and then the recovery and all-time highs by 2024 all over again. We are absolutely right to feel invincible.

My Hierarchy of Human Interactions

But, what is it exactly that makes us invincible?

The power of our B2B medium, Face-to-Face, absolutely.
We don’t stop to think much about the qualities of face-to-face communication. It occurs in person, is spoken in real-time, and is ephemeral, making it unrecorded and confidential. These often overlooked characteristics position F2F at the top of the human interaction hierarchy I’ve put together. The focused, direct attention of both parties fosters trust from the ground up, enabling them to solve complex problems collaboratively, negotiate, and conduct business effectively.

The other modes listed below it each provide elements of this proposition in decreasing order of significance. This is based on the media richness theory.

As part of the UFI GRI Study in 2021, covering 763 exhibitors and 4102 visitors, we tested three types of communication (Face-to-Face, Video Call, and Audio Call) against four business goals that are vital to buyer-seller interactions:

• Ease of building business relationships (establishing initial trust)

• Ease of conveying a complex message (conducting business negotiation)

• Ease of keeping someone’s full attention (staying focussed)

• Ease of sharing confidential information (pricing or IP-related disclosure)

The results for tradeshow exhibitors and visitors strongly favour face-to-face interactions, aligning perfectly with the initially proposed hierarchy. Here are some key takeaways:

• Face-to-face outperforms all other methods of communication for all the mentioned business goals.

• Meanwhile, the marginal utility of Face-to-Face is an order of magnitude different from the next best thing (video calls). Video calls and audio calls do not have that separation.

• The proportion of people who find face-to-face interactions easy for building business relationships is 2.5X higher than those who find video calls easy for the same purpose.

The picture gets much clearer when we compare face-to-face interaction to Structured networking activities at a virtual event. (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is the worst performing medium we tested) For exhibitors, the delta between ease of achieving business goals is a striking 308%, suggesting a 4X price premium justification for the same business return for face-to-face events compared to virtual events.

Enhancing the Value of our Face-to-Face medium
While operating the highest-quality medium of Human interaction, we cannot just sit back and expect everything to be okay. We must constantly strive to create the maximum number of meaningful face-to-face meetings between our visitors and exhibitors. From an organiser's point of view, there are three simple levers to pull here:

1. Get more visitors

2. Get higher-quality visitors

3. Get more meetings per visitor

*bonus idea: Do all of the above!

I know you clicked on “don’t fix what’s not broken”, but I’m sure we can agree most of the enablers behind these levers are technology solutions. If you’d like to look at digital as an enabler, click here.

Or send me a note if you have any questions.

Barış