Ever been heartbroken?
I hope you have. Not because suffering is nice, but because it teaches us something, if we know what to learn from it, that is. And what is there to learn from a broken heart could you ask? A strange phenomenon, I am sure will sound familiar. You probably spent a good amount of time remembering only the good parts. The laughs, the trips, the easy Sunday mornings. And the arguments? The silences? The reasons it ended? Strangely enough your brain did not seem to remember that, did it not? Did it edit the story? Because your best friend surely kept reminding you of these bad things, right? Yet it did not land.
That is the rosy retrospection effect in action. Pink glasses, applied to the past. A powerful cognitive bias.
It is why old advice like "there are plenty more fish in the sea" exists. The whole point of that phrase is to push you to stop looking at the past through a filter your brain created. Because things were not as rosy as you remember.
Now here is the part that concerns you as an exhibitor.
Exhibitors Fall for It Too
Ever walked off the show floor thinking the show was comme ci, comme ca, nothing special, and then when someone asked you about it a week later you heard yourself say it was great?
But was it? Or did your brain quietly rewrite the memory in a more favorable direction?
That is rosy retrospection, again, at work on your trade show results. And it is more dangerous than it sounds, because a brain that rates a mediocre show as great has no reason to change anything before the next one. And so the poor results will repeat.
Why Memory Is Not Enough
Relying on memory alone to evaluate a trade show is a problem because memory does not store what happened. It stores how you felt about what happened, filtered through the emotions and sensations of the moment and then reshaped every time you recall it.
And at the end of a show, your emotion was euphoria. A mix of relief from all the work done, coupled with testosterone from the action and oxytocin from the encounters. Enough to make you forget your complaints about the show while at it.
And on top of rosy retrospection, at least five or six other biases layer in: the fading effect, the serial position effect, source confusion, suggestibility, and the anchor bias to name a few. And that is before accounting for the fact that you probably were not alone on the booth, which adds a whole category of group biases on top of everything else.
The result is that most exhibitors end a show with a version of events that is part memory and part fiction. And they use that version to make decisions about the next show.
What I Hear When I Call Underperforming Exhibitors
When I call exhibitors I know are underperforming, I hear it constantly: our trade show was excellent.
So I ask: I am so happy for you. What is your ROI and what metrics did you use to measure your performance?
That question is usually enough to bring them back to reality. Because very often they did not measure anything. They have a feeling. And a feeling shaped by rosy retrospection is not a performance indicator.
The Only Fix Are Trade Show KPIs
Most businesses use KPIs to measure performance. For everything. Except for shows. But the best exhibitors use them also, and specifically for their shows, because they know that memory cannot be trusted to give an accurate picture of what happened on the floor.
Because KPIs do not care how you felt on day three. They do not soften the numbers or highlight the highlights like your brain does, helped by cognitive bias. They tell you what went well and what went less well, so you can make a real decision about whether to go back to that show, change your approach, or finally ask for help.
If you want to know what these KPIs look like, the ones the best exhibitors track, and how to set them up before your next show, there is a free masterclass waiting for you.
And if you want to understand the full landscape of cognitive biases working against your trade show results, I wrote What Neuroscience Says About Trade Shows.