VISITOR AND EXHIBITOR CLUSTERS AT EASTERN-EUROPEAN AGRICULTURAL FAIRS

Abstract

There is no exact information concerning the economic effect of the agricultural exhibitions neither on national nor on international level. Some publications focus on the positive externalities of exhibitions, but the exhibition itself is a neglected topic. Although the fair is one of the most ancient marketing-tools; its role is still relatively high in the marketing mix of different economic sectors, even nowadays, in the Internet-age. One of these sectors is the agribusiness, where the exhibition is a place of business-to-business communication, Customer Relationship Management, and last, but not least an important Point Of Sale. The aim of the present paper is to point out the importance of exhibitions through the assessment of their popularity. From this aim, we have derived the following objectives: - To build a model concerning the relationships among the interested parties. - To asses the visitors of five Eastern-European exhibitions. - To asses the exhibitors of the same exhibitions. - To compare the opinion and expectance of the mentioned groups. - To test the model, based on the questionnaires data. - To measure the radius of attraction by the attendees, as well as by exhibitors I have collected primary data through questionnaires and site visit, and also have obtained secondary data from printed and electronic documents. In this paper, I present a model, which describes the relationships among the interested parties. The data was collected on four different exhibitions: Farmerexpo (Debrecen, Hungary) in 2005 and 2006, OMK (Budapest, Hungary) from 2005 and Polagra-Farm (Poznan, Poland) 2006.

Keywords

• Exhibition, fair, visitors (attendees), exhibitors, radius of attraction, cluster analysis