2nd wave of boat show cancellations
Unfortunately, history seems to be repeating itself for the boating industry. The spring boat shows, coinciding with the first peak of the Covid-19 epidemic, had been cancelled one after the other in early 2020. Many professionals were counting on the fall shows to mark the recovery. Growing health fears also seem to be right. The Cannes Yachting Festival was the first French victim of this, revealed on 21 August, and fears about the maintenance of the Grand Pavois seem legitimate. With Barcelona and Southampton cancelled, the Genoa boat show is the last major Mediterranean event to be maintained to date. Pleasure boat builders and distributors are forced to invent new ways of reaching out to boaters. We asked them about their strategy.
Recreating private boat shows
If the tendency of shipyards to create their own single-brand events was already at work, the Covid crisis19 seems to be accelerating things. Fountaine-Pajot claims to have anticipated the risks of cancellation. " There are still a few final checks to be made, but the Fountaine-Pajot boats, motoryachts and Dufours will be on display for private visits and tests, on the same dates as the Cannes boat show, in a location in the south of France yet to be precisely defined. There will be 2 world premieres with the Samana 59 and the Isla 40 of Fountaine Pajot voile and the first afloat of the Dufour 530. This will continue in time with other Demo Days locally, elsewhere. We are also still betting on Genoa "says Hélène de Fontainieu, in charge of communications for the Fountaine-Pajot Group.
The strategy is the same for many other yards whose vessels were already often being ferried, either by sea or by road. From Hanse to Jeanneau, via smaller brands such as Wimbi Boats, everyone announced their event, usually without specifying the location yet. Requests are indeed pouring in to the captain's offices in the area, which probably won't be able to respond positively to everyone.
Targeted boat trials
At Alubat, whose first appearance at the Cannes Yachting Festival was supposed to be, the choice is different. " Organizing open doors seems complicated in the current context, as it still involves a gathering of people. And setting a date, a weekend, is also complex. We prefer to keep an open agenda and offer personalised visits to the site or tests of the Ovni 450 in the south. Indeed, she was already on her way to the Mediterranean and we are well supported by the owner who called us immediately. He told us that the boat was staying in the area for one year and that he had no problem if we organised trials for customers "explains Cécilia Edeline, sales representative for the Ovni yacht builder.
Review marketing methods
The choice had sometimes been linked upstream, as Jean-Baptiste Bittard of the Catway company, distributor of the Northman yard and its Maxus yachts, testifies. " We had already cancelled our participation in the Cannes show. The investment is heavy. The risk seemed to me to be too great for a small structure compared to the uncertain potential returns. My choice was rather to hire an additional salesman to do more and better our work as a salesman. Trade shows currently represented 90% of our communication budget. We will also be able to experiment with new ways of communicating. "
Finding prospects to fuel the revival of boating
The summer has been dynamic for the yards, with high sales and demand. With +20% sales in June and +400% in July, Hanse claims to have made up for the containment losses, without any particular commercial discounts. The concern is to maintain this momentum. " At the private days will come dealers with serious customers who are already in our database. But we will have lost the new prospects component which is one of the purposes of the shows. The difficulty will be to know where to find them. We will find some of them on social networks, but for the rest? "concludes Pierre Duchein, Hanse Group Sales Manager for France.
