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2003 Government Marketing Government Marketing Free Subscription to The Amtower B2G Market Report Amtower & Company Mailing Lists
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The Amtower B2G Market Report Volume 2, #11, April 11, 2003 (Sign up for your free subscription at www.FederalDirect.net and please pass this along to your colleagues. To unsubscribe, email me at amtower@erols.com) FOSE occurred this week, and I have several observations. First, the new Washington Convention Center is huge, and not finished. The hall for FOSE was finished, and the show was accommodated in a single very large exhibit hall, so no vendors were exiled to smaller side rooms. The layout was good and the traffic wasn't bad. Not great, but not bad. MicroWarehouse ("take it to the house") did not disappoint, with the biggest booth and with the most traffic (perpetual line waiting to get into the inner sanctum of trinket-dom). They were there with registration area bag distribution rights (two different bags; pink and yellow, green and pink). They had the biggest booth on the floor, and they probably gave away more trinkets than most others combined. The word on the floor was the "House" spent $100,000 on merchandizing, took over the Spy Museum for a private party Tuesday night, took 100 people to a basketball game Wednesday night, had the Grand Hyatt put the MicroWarehouse emblem on the room keys (any Feds stay at the Grand Hyatt? Not often), and had their name on the floor of the exhibit hall (wipe your feet here when entering or exiting the House), floating around on a small blimp (probably 10 feet long) and had a busy booth (people standing in line for toys and t-shirts). This was as close to show domination as you can get, except that in the Exhibitor Guide, even though they had a full page advertisement, their listing in the alpha-portion of the Guide was plain vanilla - no colored box like many others. And the Exhibitor Guide has more shelf life than the bags. My best estimate is they spent somewhere between $350,000 and $500,000 total (most of their staff is local). When FOSE saw them coming, the voice at the drive through asked: "Would you like to super-size that?" The "battle of the bags" also did not disappoint. The official results: Brightest bag: I still think CDW-G has the brightest with the bright yellow and red. My wife said the Warehouse pink and yellow bag is as bright. But here is what I saw on the floor: many MicroWarehouse bags all over the floor, and about 25% of them inside the CDWG bags; some GTSI bags on the floor (tropical pastels), and a few others less conspicuous. My favorite bag? The Exabyte bag, as it was the only canvas bag (13x16x4.5) available at the show, and I had several people ask me where I got it. And in the trash cans on the way out of the convention center - hundreds of big bags. Dell, the largest of the IT vendors, had a modest presence, actually behind Micron PC (now MPC). Taking a cue from Compaq (which pulled out several years ago, back now by the grace of HP)? The booth with the least traffic both times I was at the show was the GSA FSS booth. Another PC vendor complained about the lack of uniformed personnel. I know that the Federal Business Council hosted an event at the Defense Intelligence Agency Thursday (last day of FOSE) and had over 300 people. And the same day at Hanscom AFB, they had 275. You want uniformed personnel - go where they are. The big FOSE winner, and the winner of the battle of the bags, is GovConnection. I saw their marketing manager on the first day of the show, and he told me they weren't exhibiting, but saving their money for more tactical efforts. In the first issue the Amtower B2G Market Report (8/21/02) I opened with a discussion of the "Battle of the B2G Catalog", and I will concentrate on them in the new Off-White Paper, to be published at FederalDirect.net in one week: GTSI, CDW-G, MicroWarehouse, PC Mall, and (new to our list) Insight. The "Off White Paper" will discuss in more detail what I feel is needed by players in this category and my predictions for the end of FY 2003 standings (via GSA Schedule 70). The Good, the Bad & The Ugly: The Best and Worst of the Web I'm not talking the NYC music hall here, but radio spots in DC for FOSE. First, the FOSE self-promotion spot. I like radio in DC for promoting events, as it casts a wide net. But I wish I hadn&Mac226;t been driving with coffee in the car when I heard the FOSE spot that touted "tens of thousands" of expected attenders. I started laughing, then choking, and nearly spit out the coffee. Hyperbole and wishful thinking is one thing, but FOSE hasn&Mac226;t qualified for „tens of thousands‰ for at least three years. "Tens" would indicate at least 20,000. And they haven't been there in a while. This rivals for silliness their "no trick or treaters" post card (see vol2#5, "Marketing Tip"), which was shown to be nonsense by the number of people lined up at the MicroWarehouse booth. Insight, a reseller also at FOSE, used radio as well. Their spot was confusing because it didn't seem to emphasize anything that differentiated them. And the announcer sounded like he was saying "Inside", not "Insight". Coupled with what seems to be no other marketing, I would place their chances well down my list of potential 2003 winners - winners being defined by placement on the FY 2003 Schedule 70. But they did have a big purple box in the Show Directory! The TRAVEL credit card is up over $700 million for FY 2003, and the number of cardholders is down about 150,000. The total so far (through January) for FY 2003 is $2.34 billion. It is a safe assumption that the military accounts for this jump over 2002. It is also a safe assumption that people in the government still have to travel on government related business - good news for the airlines and hotels that serve these people. One Minute Marketing Clinic: What's in a Name A few years back GE made a foray into the federal market by buying Ameridata, which had been Bohdan. Ameridata had purchased Bohdan and diluted that brand equity (Bohdan was once a major reseller in our space), and GE further compounded the error by naming the new group General Electric Capital Information Technology Federal Solutions - a real mouthful,. So I shortened it to GECITFS, pronounced GEE-SIT-FIZ. Upshot: GE exited and that division faded away. About the same time CompUSA bought PC Compleat, once a fairly major computer cataloger. They immediately changed the name to CompUSA Direct, immediately destroying the brand equity. The upshot: the catalog died. Now we have a similar, though non-government situation with UPS and Mail Boxes Etc (MBE). UPS bought MBE about a year or so back, and now they're changing the store names from MBE to "The UPS Store". While I do not expect the stores to die, I do expect them to lose business, starting with the fact that FedEx has already cancelled their contract with MBE as a result. UPS does an overnight letter, but "when it has to be there overnight" who do you think of? The idiocy mandated by corporate parents after acquisitions borders on criminal. They are either extremely arrogant, thinking their name brand will carry over (too few brain cells), downright stupid (pretty much the same) or so unsure of themselves that they suffer from a not-too-rare psychological malady I call "insufficient body parts for gender recognition." This is the same syndrome that is responsible for people taking calls which leads to booths at big trade shows. Government Marketing Forum: April 15: Selling your End-of-FY Marketing Plan to Mgmt & Gearing Up for End-of-FY: 50 Tips: A Panel Discussion, $35 7:30-9:00 AM, Tower Club, Vienna, VA Call 301-854-9493 to reserve your seat. This combines the cancelled event (no Forum March 11) The Second Annual B2G Catalog Summit will be in Chicago, November 11, 2003 at the Doubletree O'Hara. Details are at www.FederalDirect.net. The Government Marketing Best Practices 2003 Road Show starts in March!
April 15: Austin - University of Texas Club Seminars are 3-3 1/2 hours. Fee: $225, groups of 2 or more @ $200 each; email mark@federaldirect.net or visit www.FederalDirect.net for registration information. Each venue is limited to no more than 50 attenders, so reserve your seat(s) Today! Our sponsors for the 2003 Road show are CapITal Reps, Carroll Publishing, Coalition for Government Procurement, Federal Business Council, Federal Computer Week, Grant Thornton, Input, Lifeboat Distribution, MeritDirect, O'Keefe and Company, and The Bernhardt Agency. Information about and links for our sponsors are posted at www.FederalDirect.net - click on the "Road Show" button. The Federal Business Council is also hosting a "Selling to the Federal Government" road show: Federal Channels (www.fbcinc.com) will be visiting: Apr 14, 2003: Chicago, IL Feedback is always appreciated: let me know if any of this helps & what else you might be looking for. Thanks The Amtower B2G Market Report is published and copyrighted by Amtower & Company. It combines our former newsletters into a single, bi-weekly newsletter for companies targeting the government marketplace. Contact us at Amtower & Company, PO Box 339, Ashton, MD 20861-0339 (301-924-0058). This material is copyrighted and may not be duplicated, reprinted or otherwise replicated without written permission of the publisher. EMAIL subscriptions are free by request: sign up at www.FederalDirect.net. |
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