PES have attended the Royal Cornwall Show every year for the last 20 years apart from the ‘Covid years’ when it was cancelled. We always exhibited products that we sold in the west country and the Channel Islands such as Volvo, Thwaites, Epiroc and Augertorque and, up until Covid, was always worth doing from both a commercial and PR point of view.
The show was always different from all the other county shows which have turned into a family day out kind of show. The Royal Cornwall was always a ‘mini construction equipment show’ within a county show with most construction equipment dealers in the south west attending but post-Covid we have noticed a decline in the effectiveness and worth of attending. When we look at the age demographics of people who come on the show stand it tends to be ‘older’ customers, in fact we still get customers who have retired or semi-retired coming for a chat but crucially their sons/daughters who have taken over the business don’t come. Anybody who is under the age of 40 tends to have embraced the digital and social media age and if I reflect on our sales operation, 20 years ago Mike, Laura and Geoff before her used to drive around with car boot’s full of leaflets and were distributors and purveyors of information. These days manufacturers don’t print leaflets, it’s all on-line and sometimes, because of the wealth of information/websites/forums etc available via the internet, the customers know more about the products than we do!!
With all this in mind it means the effectiveness of parking a few machines on a piece of grass on the outskirts of Wadebridge is questionable. As much as we like the social aspect of meeting everybody, if we are brutally honest with the cost, not just financial but manpower, of moving machinery and everything else down to that piece of grass it can’t really be justified anymore. We have never kidded ourselves like other dealers do that they’ve sold 50 million mini-diggers on the show stand, we all know the reality is they were all sold beforehand but they announce it at the show to justify their marketing budgets. Let’s face it, nobody comes to the show and thinks ‘bloody hell, I’ve always wanted to buy a new digger and never knew where to buy it from, I’ll buy it here and now on the stand.’ We’ve done our analysis and looked at it from a reverse point of view inasmuch as how many bits of equipment are we not going to sell if we don’t do it.
So, it’s with a degree of sadness that 2024 will be the last year that PES exhibit at the show as we move more to an on-line and digital marketing strategy rather than a ‘park it on the grass’ one. We would like to thank all our past and present customers who have come and visited us on our stand and thank all the staff at the RCS for putting on a brilliant event. It’s nothing they have done that’s making us stop doing it, it’s just times have evolved and moved on.
Come and see us in June at our normal spot for the last time and get all nostalgic and we’ll talk about the ‘good ole days’ at the show.
Favourite bit of the show.
Seeing the young kids climbing on the machines enjoying themselves who might one day become a digger driver.
Worst bit of the show.
Visitors assuming a brand new dumper skip seconds up as a show bin.
