Trade fairs as a marketing tool to promote companies and explore potential markets

This thesis examines the strategic role of international trade fairs as a marketing and internationalisation tool for Czech companies in the food, confectionery, and packaging sectors, with a specific focus on ISM Cologne. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with representatives from ten exhibiting companies and the Director of the CzechTrade branch in Düsseldorf, the study identifies four core objectives driving trade fair participation: new customer acquisition, relationship maintenance, brand building, and market research. The findings reveal a consistent polarisation between SMEs, for which trade fairs often constitute the entirety of proactive B2B marketing activity, and larger companies that treat exhibitions as one element within a diversified portfolio. The research further demonstrates that successful market entry is conditioned by internal readiness factors including production capacity, certifications, and multilingual follow-up capacity, and that the B2B sales cycle from exhibition contacts typically spans twelve to thirty-six months. Practical recommendations are offered across five strategic dimensions.