Annotation 4

Showgirls Boost the Atmosphere, Not the Brand

In this annotation, I want to talk about what showgirls can really bring in exhibitions. And using showgirls as a commercial strategy may not be as efficient as companies think it would be. As I said in my previous annotations, using showgirls in exhibitions has become a trend. Companies realize that showgirls brought customers to their stands, so all of them started to hire showgirls to help promote their products and attract customers. This is why, over the past few years, we put equation between exhibition and showgirl’s performance.

Video games exhibition, and electronic devices exhibition gradually became popular in the past few years, visitors increases every year. We can say that most of the credit goes to showgirls. The impact that showgirls bring is obvious; they stimulate the atmosphere in the exhibition, and indeed attract more customers than before. However, if everyone’s doing the same thing, then no one is special anymore. It is true that the atmosphere that showgirls create brings enjoyment to customer’s senses, but companies hiring showgirls instead of emphasizing on the character of their brand is a big mistake. If a company wants to stand out from other companies and let people recognize them in an instance, they have to have a strong brand image. So, in the long run, using showgirls to promote their products instead of their brand is not at all efficient. Especially for those new companies that joined the exhibition in recent years; the best way to promote their products is to make the customers remember their brand, so they have to leave strong impression on customers. Showgirls can introduce the product and interact with the customers, but their purpose was not selling the brand.

Also, using showgirls eliminated companies’ chance to communicate with other kinds of customers (馮建三, 2011). Showgirls attract males to come to the exhibition; that is a fact. So the companies assume all of the customers are males, and they stick to this idea and continue to use showgirls at their stands, hoping to increase their revenue. They stop exploring new customers, and this is a fatal mistake for every company.

What we really need to think about is that an exhibition is for companies to face the customers directly and show them that they are different from others. But now, exhibitions that filled with showgirls are all about building a bustling atmosphere, and neglect the much more important part of building their brand image.