In 2018 and 2019, the leadership team at the Northwest Marine Trade Association was perplexed. Its flagship event, the Seattle Boat Show, was not drawing the crowds it had previously, and association president George Harris wanted to know why.
“We were starting to ask the question, ‘Why are folks not coming to the Seattle Boat Show?’ ” Harris told Trade Only Today last week.
It turns out there were myriad reasons, but after the this year’s show, NMTA commissioned a survey of current and previous attendees. The results showed that the Seattle Boat Show has higher consumer satisfaction scores than such corporations as McDonald’s, Disney and Chick-fil-A.
NMTA said in a statement that the show has a net promoter score of 72, while McDonald’s is 25, and Disney is in the high 30s.
The Seattle show’s low attendance could have been the result of a construction project in 2019 during which the city replaced a viaduct along the waterfront in the vicinity of the show site, but Harris said 2020 attendance wasn’t any better.
And then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. “At our 2020 show, nobody knew what Covid was,” Harris said. With everyone sheltering at home, the 2021 show was held virtually, and in-person attendance returned in 2022.
For this year’s edition, NMTA hired GMA Research in Bellingham, Wash., to survey current and previous showgoers to see what could be done to improve attendance and keep loyal customers coming back.
“The 2023 Seattle Boat Show was sold out, and some of our members suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you survey the membership on whether we should have this or that on the Seattle Boat Show?’ ” Harris said. “Everybody that had a statistics class in high school thinks they’re an expert, so you need someone like GMA to ask the questions.”
Around 35,000 to 40,000 people attended the 2023 show, and GMA surveyed 7,600 of them. “It shows a level of support and connection the boat show has with the public,” said GMA senior partner Don Morgan. “Our challenge was the people who used to attend and haven’t.”
With the show’s high net promoter score for current attendees in mind, NMTA went back to 2016 and found 35,000 unique email addresses for people who had been to the show but didn’t buy a ticket this year. If the person didn’t attend this year, they received an email with a survey asking why and what they remembered about their previous experience.
The NPS for previous attendees was 59. “There were a lot of similarities in terms of lasting impressions that people had from the show,” Morgan said. “The likelihood of them recommending the show to others even if they didn’t attend in 2023 was still high.”
Harris said NMTA is still poring over the GMA data, but one age-related highlight stands out. Attendees aged 55 to 64 made up the majority of showgoers in 2020, followed by 45- to 54-year-olds and the 35 to 44 demographic. In 2023, people ages 35 to 44 were the majority, followed by 45 to 54 and 55 to 64, respectively.
