Market Recession
Market Recession
LOOKING AT THE REAL ISSUES AND HOW YOUR STALL CAN SURVIVE A RECESSION
Let’s face it this is not the year for guaranteed successes!
So folks lets look at how you can prepare yourself when a Market/Festival does not meet your expectations.
First thing to do is LOWER your expectations….In years where there is hype about recession, everyone is affected.
Events struggle to get sponsorship, less stalls apply and events budgets get thinner. Corners have to be cut to ensure the event will go ahead as is the case with festivals, and some may even have to be postponed.
The effect of cutting corners is that the quality of an event and publicity may not be up to previous standards, now team this with an audience on a tighter budget and your trading figures may be massively affected.
Accept that there will be some years when an event is not as good as other years and it will flow the other way again.
Opting out of the event will only see you lose your position, so use the year as an opportunity to:
- Promote yourself for the next one
- Clear old stock by making your stall a clearance stall
- Make prices attractive enough for those whose wallets are supposedly clamped shut
- Share your Stall space with another, this can help cover the costs of a larger festival and if you chose someone with a similar story of product to yours it will still look like one Big Beautiful Store
- Vamp up your displays and come up with some special offers that make you stand out.
- Redo your signage and make sure the first thing that, passing customers see is a winner item or a great sale item
Don’t go out during a recession and at the end of a market day expect to pay off your mortgage or even double your money, that way if you do well, your pleasantly pleased and if you don’t you were already prepared for it.
WHEN THINGS GO WRONG ON THE DAY
I would love to say the promoters of an event will do everything right and that hire companies never have any problems, and that venues chosen to host an event are equipped to handle extreme weather, but unfortunately logistical constraints of working temporary venues, means it’s inevitable things will go wrong.
Something WILL potentially go wrong somewhere, it may not happen to you, however there will be some areas or someone affected, it’s about being prepared.
A Few of the most common problems experienced:
- An unfavourable site position
- A mobile fridge that stops working
- A generator that runs out of fuel or blows up
- A rain storm, heat wave, mud bath, or pot hole
- A tent that breaks, leaks or doesn’t get delivered by the hire company, or has missing parts to it
- A table that collapses or is too small or big
- A neighbouring stallholder who exceeds their space or overhangs into yours in a way that doesn’t work for you
- Or your site allocation or application have been missed altogether.
If your whole world hinges on the success or failure of an event you are playing with fire.
Always have a contingency plan.
While most event co-ordinators have a system of double checking orders from stallholders for hire equipment, power and passes, working with computers and human error or computer error means updates and changes may get lost. It shouldn’t happen but it does and it may have been your tent or extra staff passes lost in cyber space.
Have a follow up call on your CHECK LIST (which I am sure you have all created) to ensure that a week prior to the event you confirm the event has your exact site order.
ATTITUDE AND FLEXIBILITY
Be a stallholder who knows how to handle problems with flexibility, in a reasonable time frame so that issues may be solved or reconciled easily, for a positive outcome not just for this year but for future years.
Sometimes resolution may not be possible during an event, but will be reconciled at a future event or in the weeks post event.
Yet flexibility doesn’t mean giving up your rights or not seeing that the event honours its responsibilities.
Take into account though that everyone may be struggling, some events run for years not making a profit or are run by volunteers who give their time freely whilst stallholders will more often than not, even in difficult situations, walk away with something.
Many smaller community events or new festivals,have beg and borrow budgets so don’t expect too much.
The income from Stallholder Fees in many cases is used to organise the event, by paying for promotion, publicity, wages, equipment hire and artists bookings and is well and truly absorbed long before the day.
You are purchasing the rights to trade at the event they are publicising, you are not buying a guarantee of PROFIT on your trading experience.
CROWD NUMBERS
For less established events, this year will see many of them postponed or performance and crowd numbers down.
Event stall numbers may suffer however the plus side of this is that stalls will have less competition and in some cases they may trade better than previous years.
If the event your attending is a ticketed event, crowd attendance numbers may not be known until closer to the day, as audiences during a recession will lean more to last minute ticket purchasing, so don’t expect to have exact attendance figures prior to the day estimations will be all that is possible, work on last years numbers to be safe or less.
The benefit of ticketed events is that the crowds usually attend regardless of weather, but free events have their plus sides too as they have the potential to attract larger crowds, however they may be adversely affected in the case of bad weather as we saw in 2007 with many events.So shake the dust off your persistence and patience and keep smiling while we ride the market wave from the trough to another peak that is following behind it.
Please add a comment
Over the top event charges will result in vendors who are poorly organised or sell rubbish to maximise their profits to cover costs which will result in the failure of the event and poor feedback.
We recently applied for a site at a large event - our analysis of the fees versus the expected returns was too tight.
RESULT - Not attending - we vendors carry all the risks and those vendors that are foolish enough to not do a risk analysis may be profitable (but usually through immoral selling).
The end result of all this will be the failure of events and eventually - Bazaar Marketing.
Think about it - If the quality vendors do well, then the attendees will be able to purchase quality and rave about their experience, the vendors will return next time and the event will become the talk of the town.
If the event ends up having crap vendors, the critique will reflect the quality and the event (and organisers) will eventually fail...
Your choice, you choose!
Amounts charged for ground space may sometimes seem excessive, however if it is a popular event it is money well spent. Also leads can be generated for other events developing your brand.
The above comments by Kev saying his business would not be profitable a particular large event due to high site fees seems unreasonable. Maybe he has the wrong product for the crowd , or needs to look at his own overhead costs before critisising event organisers. Maybe start up your own event, and then you will understand why site fees at quality well patronaged, well organised events seems expensive.
I think the "crap" vendor will fail, not the event.
Read the page title - Market Recession - sometimes you have to change the way you do business to survive. As a vendor it is your responsability to meet the customers needs. Next year maybe a better year, and the vendors who stick with it during the bad times will be offered a good site when the good times return and every vendor is trying to secure a spot.
Regards Lorri Harrison