Dealer Expo 2009 goes down this past weekend in Indianapolis
- From: TRS Media | Published: February 16th, 2009 - 7:42 pm
I was a little reluctant to go to Indy this year as I live in Detroit and it’s been pretty tough to find good news lately, in or outside the industry. In the past Indy has always represented the beginning of the motorcycle racing season and for us at TRS the last chance to take a breath until about October. 
This year has had a different feeling. I’ve avoided taking a negative view of things like the relatively dramatic cut in purse money for the Daytona 200; the virtual withdrawal of the factories from AMA Pro competition, the dramatic reduction in new unit sales, etc. Blinders on I’d rather look at it like the Daytona purse is larger than it ever has been, the factories aren’t racing but they’ve found places for thier riders to go so that the familiar names are still in the race. For a road race guy who cares if people aren’t buying new bikes, the Mfg.’s didn’t make any changes to the race bikes (GSXR, CBR, ZX and R6). I mean; how many R1’s can Yamaha sell anyhow?
So back to the title “Dealer Expo 2009 goes down this past weekend in Indianapolis” it’s not actually supposed to represent my cool gangster tone. 
Unfortunately the dealer expo in 2009 was considerably down from past years. I don’t have exact numbers and expect that since the only people who would have those numbers is the show itself we’ll not see them anytime soon. 
It was obvious that there weren’t as many exhibitors. In past years part of the show has been in the now-demolished RCA Dome and those booths (now located in the newly constructed Lucas Oil Stadium) seemed half empty. Gone was the maze of packed conference rooms that while annoying made you feel compelled to search for that new product that would change your fortunes in some unforeseen way. To hazard a guess I would say that exhibitors fell off 25% in just this past year.
Dealers (foot traffic), the target audience of the show, was obviously down as well. The method I used to measure, while not exactly scientific, is something I call the elbow-room gauge. It’s not a secret that attendance has been declining slightly for some time but during peek hours on Sunday it used to feel a bit like rush hour in a mid-sized cities public train station. This year there was plenty of ‘elbow room,’ no feeling of claustrophobia at all. Unlike in the past, the other thing I couldn’t help but notice was that the celebrities and models of yesteryear have apparently become an endangered species. Someone better call Nancy Pelosi.
Don’t dispair, I have a positive spin, as I was pontificating the decline of the 
show and melding it with the other ‘not so positive’ news being circulated through the industry I realized (dealernews close your ears) the whole concept of the trade show is a bit antiquated. In reality there’s really not much product information that you see at the show that you can’t see on the internet for a 
fraction (understated) of the cost. I do (even for an internet guy) realize that there’s something sad about that but it’s true. I also don’t want to dismiss the positives that the trade show has to offer. You can’t do an internet search for something if you don’t know it exists and more importantly you can’t meet other like-minded people and build meaningful relationships without a hand shake and there certainly are others. Speaking for myself I have been going to the show for 15 odd years almost exclusively because there were so many people, people I call friends in the business who I only saw once a year at Cinci or Indy or wherever. The net obviously can never replace that but I would caution the promoters of the show that it’s on them to up their game because the ‘value issue’ will be more and more important to the ‘dealer’ for some time to come.
After all that, I certainly don’t want to give you the impression there wasn’t anything to see at the show. Old friends aside, the growth of the Asia mfg.’s is evident. There are a slew of new mfg. from China, Korea, India and others that are on the move. Without being disparaging to them some of their products seem a little sub-par today but I’ve lived long enough to remember well when people used to say the same thing about products from Japan. Given the fact that technology just keeps accelerating I can only assume that these burgeoning nations will catch up in no time.
Painting, graphics and design are another area that seems to have taken leaps and bounds recently. The types of paint and vinyl film you see on some of the images in this article and all over the show are amazing. Even more amazing to me is some of the mechanical feats of engineering some of the products show. Design in some of the prototype bikes was true 3D touchable machines from the future.
In conclusion, I will be there next year… however, I’m not convinced that the value is nearly what it once was. I’m not sure exactly what would change that but it doesn’t seem to me that more of the same is going to do it. At the end of the day the idea of a convention is to bring people together and I think that is where the focus should go.
