Michael Reinhold

Tradeshows are an essential instrument in the marketing of goods and services. Thus, the fair and tradeshow business has become a multi-billion dollar industry, in which trade fair organizers earn the biggest share of sales with exhibitors, paying fees for exhibition services. In order to increase service quality on trade shows, trade fair organizers strive for achieving a high level of exhibitor satisfaction. Despite its major importance for the fair and tradeshow industry, instruments to poll exhibitors satisfaction remain very basic. This research focuses on exhibitor satisfaction in a business-to-business context. The paper contributes to the field of trade show research by (1) exploring relevant issues of exhibitor satisfaction, (2) developing a measurement approach, (3) collecting data from a number of 362 exhibitors in business-to-business trade shows and 404 exhibitors in business-to-consumer fairs, and finally (4) omparing results upon the Vavra's importance grid.

The purpose of this study is to enhance the knowledge base about rebuying decision processes in B2B-service industries. The professional organization and realization of trade shows and exhibitions is an important service industry globally with over 31'000 exhibitions taking place annually (UFI, 2014). Business with exhibitions is flourishing for a long time not only for exhibitors but also for exhibition organizers. Although research on how to attract exhibitors has been conducted earlier, literature on how to lead exhibitors to re-exhibit and become loyal customers is scarce. It only focuses on the process chain exhibitor satisfaction as an antecedent to the intention to rebuy and not on actual behavior. In order to close this gap and to substantially advance the knowledge we performed a large-scale survey of 313 (out of a total of 642) companies exhibiting at a major public trade fair, conducted annually in Switzerland. This study fills the gaps in four ways: (1) we conceptualize the exhibitor's trade fair satisfaction in a way that reflects its multifaceted, multidimensional nature, (2) we show that focus on exhibitor's trade fair satisfaction is the key antecedent and examine its effect on the exhibitor's decision to re-exhibit at the same trade show again, (3) we prove that the exhibitors' expressed intention to rebuy neither useful as a proxy for surmised nor as a mediator for observed behavior, and (4) we show that the relationship between exhibitor satisfaction and the re-exhibiting decision might be contingent on several factors involved in the organizational decision process. These factors, such as the company's strategic orientation, the street distance between a company's head office and the trade show location, and information orientation vs. sales orientation at the trade show moderate a company's decision whether to re-exhibit or not. Finally we derive managerial implications for exhibition organizers. They are the hierarchical heads in a network industry. The results presented in this study may apply to other network industries, such as hospitality and tourism, where customer's behavior to re-buy services is an important managerial issue as well.