A Study On The Factors Inlfuencing The Re-attend Intention Of Trade Exhibitors

With the rapid development of China’s economy and its frequent internationalexchanges, the development of exhibition industry has won an unprecedentedsuccess. The exhibition venues and facilities have been gradually improving allaround the country, and exhibition industry is growing at15%-20%annually. However,China’s exhibition industry just plays a low position in the world, and it has theseproblems, such as similar theme, poor quality, incorrect orientations and so on.These problems left China’s exhibition industry in the status of cutthroat competition,and the phenomenon of customer churn is very severe. The exhibition enterprisesdon’t pay attention to customer relationship management or services marketing.In the marketing circle, the social exchange theory and investment model theoryare widely accepted. Many scholars have applied these theories to study the factorsthat influencing the customers’ repurchase intention of industrial consumer goodsand general services. But so far, no scholar has applied these theories in exhibitionindustry to study the factors influencing the re-attend intention of exhibitors.Exhibitors play a core part in the value chain of exhibition industry; theirparticipations in the exhibitions relate to the interests of the exhibition enterprises.The study on the factors influencing the re-attend intention of the exhibitor is of vitalsignificance to the organizers to effectively carry out customer relationshipmanagement and marketing management. Based on the literature review and theinterview results from exhibitors and relevant experts, this paper constructs ageneral model of exhibitors’ re-attend intention (ERI).The model includes factors ofsix categories: exhibitor perceived value(EPV), exhibitor satisfaction(ES), brandcharacteristics (BC), attractiveness of alternatives(AA), switching cost(SC)，andexhibitor trust(ET).Through questionnaires, the author interviewed212trade exhibitors whoparticipated in the trade exhibitions hosted in Shanghai New International Expo.Making use of statistical analysis software, this study does the empirical research ofthe theoretical model. The results show that the exhibitor perceived value, exhibitor satisfaction, brand characteristics, and exhibitor trust are positively associated withre-attend intention; attractiveness of alternatives demonstrates a negative correctionwith re-attend intention, and there is no remarkable relevance between switchingcost and re-attend intention. Within the five factors, only exhibitor perceived valueand exhibitor trust effect re-attend intention directly. Moreover, exhibitor perceivedvalue can make a significant difference in companies of different natures; bothexhibitor perceived value and exhibitor trust can make a significant difference incompanies of different sizes.Finally, according to the conclusions, this study presents the correspondingmanagement proposals for organizers to enhance the exhibitors’ re-attend intentionand points out the shortage of this study and the expectation of the future research.