The Chicago Auto Show Inside Out

Those of us that have planned and worked at shows designed to promote and show products know the preparation that goes into a major trade show. Every square foot of show space must be planned. If your trade show exhibit does not have flooring, carpets must be chosen and rented from show suppliers. That is never cheap. Even the most basic trade show booth must be assembled from the ground up. Some require sky lifts to install.

That is why a visit to the Chicago Auto Show brought on some introspection. Wtih a background in planning and conducting trade shows, one can't help looking at the whole enterprise from the inside out.

It's all about attracting show traffic of course. The swooping infinity symbol over the Audi floor space looking wooden and classy from a distance. Up close it turned out to be a wood-patterned vinyl wrapped around metal frame. Impressions matter. Methods, not really.

Marketing underfoot

Subaru spent some real dough on their carpeting. It was thick and rich beneath the feet, communicating comfort and the sort of stay-awhile greeting Subaru likes to sell. That meant ordering thick padding beneath the carpet itself. The companies that rent carpeting at big floor shows do so at a premium. Plus a premium for installing. All with union labor. Don't mess with the system. You can't.

By contrast there were a number of manufacturers that went the clean, hard route when it came to flooring. Some of these were high-end auto companies while others, such as Volkswagen, simply went for the clean feel because that is the design of their vehicles. Does the flooring match the lines of the vehicles? Check.

Color and styles of choice

The color of the year in 2015 appears to be orange. Or reddish orange. Or something in between. At least 10 manufacturers had orange cars on display in a wide range of alternatives within the orange spectrum. There were burnt orange cars and metallic orange trucks and a flat-toned orange paint job on a Scion that looked most like a Dreamsicle left out in the sun. That was a tinge only a car buyer between the ages of 21 and 26 could love. And that's the point. It screams, "Old people. Don't buy this car. We don't want to see you in it."

Because Scion was invented to attract new buyers to the car market. They make cars that looks like cubes and boxes. They are gadgets on wheels. Customizable if you make it so. Yet old people keep buying Scions. That's the irony of the car market. You can market it all you want and fail to calculate who the real end buyer will be. There are Muscle Cars and Chick Cars. Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear trucks. Smart Cars that seem to fit in the palm of your hand.

Making an Impact

None of these choices is an actual mistake, of course. The cars and trucks shown were chosen quite carefully for their impact. Yet color makes quite a difference in how people view an automobile.

The lone exception to this rule of order seemed to be Mitsubishi, whose disparate display was shoved off in a corner and seemed to have been thrown together by an overworked Marketing Coordinator, not the VP of Marketing. The color choices in the vehicles displayed showed bad taste, if not plain stupidity. There was no rhythm or rhyme to their display. It was easy to walk right through and not care what was being shown. Too random. Like an artist that paints in too many styles and genres, it was hard to grasp what the Mitsubishi line was all about.

Claiming territory

Yes, the auto show circuit is susceptible to the same bad choices and poor planning as any other. The big players like Chevy and Ford don't mess around, and Toyota bought up an enough land in McCormick Place to start it's own country. You always know who came to play at an event like the auto show. That real estate factor brought back a conversation from an educational technology show years ago. One of the exhibitors had hand designed and built a $1M display. On receiving a compliment about the arched metal monstrosity, he blurted out the fact of most trade shows. "Go big or go home."

Workin' it

My companion kept remarking on the women working the displays in their four-inch heels. Forced smiles gave way to fatigued expressions if you watched these people long enough. There were young men as well, each wearing gray suits of different stripes. Almost always gray. But the truly impressive schtick of talking about cars with composure and style takes real talent. They may be models or actors, but they earn their pay.

Which brings up the cash flow and merchandising of the Chicago Auto Show. It's nice to attract a million people and let them hop in and out of vehicles. There were even massive test drive displays and screeching tires. People come to dream and sometimes drive at an auto show (although the lines were long.) The $2.5M vehicle (perhaps a Bugati, I forget) on display did not look like it belonged anywhere other than Los Angeles, California of course. But in between there is quite a bit of dreaming to do.

Auto humanity

It comes down to this: people often buy cars and trucks for silly, vain reasons. The tide of humanity wading through the auto show proved that beyond doubt. The cars were in great shape. The people? Not so much. America apparently loves it cars more than it loves working out.

That means there is a whole lot of high-brow yet lowdown marketing going on at an auto show. Cars have long been known to fill the void of otherwise fragile or dependent egos. There's the classic midlife crisis of the middle-aged man sitting in a red Corvette, of course. But there are also millions of people willing to finance to the hilt in order to drive a car that befits their image of themselves. One guy in a black cowboy outfit and boots perched on the back of a Chevy truck and was running his fingers over the rough surface. Perhaps he was imagining how the surface would feel on the paws of his hunting dog. Such is the touch and feel marketing of an auto show.

Where the buck starts and stops

There's a car for every purpose under the sun. The cost of communicating those dreams to an already-willing audience is on full display at an event such as the Chicago Auto Show.

But that's not where the buck stops. There are television and radio campaigns run in support of the auto show, which bleed out over the landscape like an aural, visual dream. Then the direct marketers swing into action distributing print collateral branded and personalized by Big Data. These reach target households with prayerful precision and timing.

The entire process of selling cars is both technically brilliant and remarkably stupid. Why else would leading dealership still spend thousands on auto advertising in newspapers. Everything's different in the auto industry these days, and yet nothing has changed in some respects. In the Chicago market everyone buys ads where Al Rohrman buys. That's how the game is played.

Repeated blows to the head

By the time a family walks into their local Honda or Hyundai (who spent a lot for presence at the Auto Show) they have been concussed by repeated and colorful blows to the cerebral car cortex. Then it's just a matter of deciding how much the monthly payment will be. Every sales guy or gal on the floor knows the deal, which is how to get the sale going before too much thinking goes on. Sell the emotion of a vehicle and let the practicality settle out in the back room with the finance guy and his little calculator. "This is reality in here," a finance guy once told one of my relatives. "Out there is La La Land."

Proving that the biggest auto show of all is the one that goes on inside our heads.