What is Grand Basel doing at the IAA?
It's amazing. The MCH Group needs all the help it can get—and it's getting it. First through its partnership with the SIHH, and now with the IAA Frankfurt.
The MCH Group has invested heavily in new exhibitions in Switzerland. For example, in the Grand Basel, which was held for the first time in 2018, for lovers of cars of yesterday, today and tomorrow. But it came at the wrong time. There was suddenly a lack of funds for many years of development work. Cancellation? No, now the brand "Grand Basel" will continue at the world's leading trade fair for the automotive industry, the IAA in Frankfurt from September 2019. Grand Basel was one of the first trade fairs to rely on the combination of trade fair and digital with the Grand Basel app, with which all kinds of things could be done.
Cooperations such as that of the Baselworld watch and jewelry show usually come about as a result of external pressure. The conditions for the Grand Basel cooperation between the MCH Group and the IAA can be interpreted in the same way. When the exhibitions in Switzerland were at their zenith, such cooperations and even serious talks about them would have been unthinkable. Perhaps a paradigm shift is now taking place with regard to such and similar shoulder closures. It is not only in Switzerland that the trade show industry is undergoing a transformation that is not caused by digitality alone.
Open questions that remain: What is Grand Basel doing at the IAA? Will the partnership with IAA Frankfurt save Grand Basel? Will something new emerge from it? What can that be?
Is it an enrichment for the IAA? Yes. Is there an image transfer for the Basel brand? Yes, the Grand Basel at the IAA carries the name Basel and Baselworld to the world. Is the Grand Basel in Frankfurt a business case? It will have to be seen whether it is planned as a special show with additional entries. Probably not, that would not go down well with the (declining) trade show audience in Frankfurt. So free of charge to the Grand Basel in Frankfurt? How will the previous investments, for example in the specially manufactured, expensive "frames", be amortized? Is it planned that the Grand Basel will ever return to Basel? What interest would the IAA then have in strengthening the MCH Group as an organizer? Finally, the sideshow: the Grand Basel launch in 2018 was one of the first exhibitions to consistently rely on on-site digitality in the form of the Grand Basel App, which allowed all sorts of things. Will the next step for a hybrid, so-called "digital" meeting place follow in Frankfurt or will the promising entry be given away?
The losers here are the trade, the so-called indirect beneficiaries in Switzerland, exhibition construction companies such as MCH's own Expomobilia, and the hotel and catering industry, which to date has not distinguished itself as a promoter of Switzerland as an exhibition venue, but rather as a beneficiary. But how we assess the situation in the European exhibition industry can best be summed up in a sentence by the former German Minister of the Interior, Gustav Heinemann: Those who do not want to change anything will also lose what they want to preserve.
