Two Alibaba news that catch my attention.

Alibaba is offering physical exhibition booth as a giveaway for each paid virtual booth on Alibaba.com.cn. The new marketing campaign is working with a trade show organized by CCPIT in Suzhou. For years, exhibition organizers are offering virtual booth as a freebie, but not the other way around. This is the first time that I’ve seen physical exhibition becomes a freebie.

In all these years, online and offline B2B media are overlapping and competing on the lead aggregator service. Physical exhibition has a service life-cycle which is generically short versus the virtual alternative which looks perpetual. But the face-2-face marketing has better trust level compare against the communication over the Internet. The same debate and discussion on jeopardization have been raised many times by many experts.

Internet B2B service is a threat to traditional B2B media. But jeopardization isn’t likely the case. Trade show business will last for long but whether or not it remains a priority choice for the consumers becomes a thought question. The new media convergence and the leverage stratify the product choices which might marginalize trade show becomes a secondary alternative.

Alright, just when I say jeopardization isn’t likely the case, here comes another thought question. Let’s hypothesize Alibaba is going to compete with the trade show organizers. What Alibaba needs isn’t only the presence of the SMEs (the long tail), but also that 20 percent anchor market leaders.

My second news about Alibaba is the strategic cooperation with GE signed just one week ago. Under the cooperation, GE will spend multi-million marketing dollars on Alibaba online promotion and uses Alibaba’s buyer tool to source for new suppliers.

I don’t mean to create any speculation based on the above hypothesis. But all the recent developments have pointed to the facts that tell us the changing anchor client’s appetite to adopt new marketing vehicle and physical exhibition is being offered as a freebie.

Well, I have seen more and more trade shows fail the service delivery because of the poor buyer promotion and the wrong people mix which seriously affect the lead acquisition result. Now with the big anchor B2B client is allocating more budget on virtual product, my next thought question is for the trade show organizers:

Yes, jeopardization isn’t likely the case. But think about what if one day you might end up organizing a nice-to-have event instead of a nice event?

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