Posted by

Barry Siskind

Community Manager

 

Have you ever sat back and wondered why….

 

The exhibitors who are most successful at your fairs and continue to be successful, all of a sudden surprise you by producing lacklustre results.

 

Or those exhibitors who regularly produce below average results and never seem to be able to break out of their self-defeating pattern?

 

A recent study by Geir Jordet a professor at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences in Oslo, Norway, conducted an interesting study involving Soccer that may shed some light on the problem.

 

What Jordet did was to examine 200 penalty shootouts in two international tournaments – World Cup and European Championships.  What he found  was that the teams who had lost the preceding shootout made 65.7 percent of these game winning shots. This is far below the average of 85.1 percent of those teams who had successfully made a similar shot in a previous shootout.  You might now simply conclude that success breeds success and with the positive psychological attitude, winning is a natural result. Not so fast.

 

You see what Jordet went on to discover was “There was a significant relationship between team status, self-regulation, strategies and performance. Players from countries that at the time of the penalty shootout either had international club titles or featured many internationally decorated players spent less time preparing their shots and were less successful from the penalty shot than players from less successful countries with lower public status.”

 

What I think this tells us about our exhibitors is that there may be two reasons for failure:

 

  1. Those who have won in the past may become complacent and not prepare for the shot.
  2. Those who have lost in the past may have a low self image

 

This phenomenon signifies an interesting dilemma for organizers who have attempted to reach out to their exhibitors with specialized training, coaching or other such initiatives designed to help them become more successful. The mistake may be that a one-solution-fits-all is a flawed strategy.  It’s analogous to teachers who have discovered that children have different learning patterns and that by teaching one way often misses the mark for many students.

 

If you agree that exhibitor assistance needs to be as specialized as teaching youngsters, then the question that it raises is how. I don’t know the answer; I was hoping our followers had some suggestions.