Here’s the message that should strike our industry in your April 9 [2001] cover story ("Floundering Economy Slams Into Meeting Biz"): Commercial engines are running rough, and our customers who drive them have no idea how valuable meetings and trade shows can be as tools for their recovery.

Worse yet, many of our clients are deciding to reallocate their diminished resources away from "touch-media" in favor of further investment in the very bubble that got them into these difficult predicaments in the first place.

A recent Harvard Business Review piece argues that "the Internet tends to weaken industry profitability without providing proprietary operational advantages" ("Strategy and the Internet," by Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business Review, March 2001). Differentiation is lost, enterprise-wide loyalties are destroyed, and strategic discipline is compromised.

Interestingly, those closest to the value proposition of virtual environments are the same ones who have invested most heavily of late in our traditional physically-present, time-specific marketplaces.

Page 1 2 next