GuyExpo’s unrealized potential

In just over a week’s time GuyExpo would have come and gone without us being any closer to being able to identify in specific and concrete terms just what particular benefits the event has brought to the country.

At the end of each GuyExpo, since 1995, the organizers have provided us with information on the number of patrons attending the event, which, frankly, has allowed us to do no more than gauge GuyExpo’s public popularity and roughly determine its gate receipts. What the organizers have always neglected to provide, however, is the kind of data that assesses the extent of economic activity generated over the GuyExpo weekend, the volume of sales accruing to local vendors, notable marketing successes for local products launched at GuyExpo, bilateral and other types of entrepreneurial agreements between local and foreign firms participating at GuyExpo and the extent to which new overseas markets for locally produced goods and services might have been created (or old ones expanded) on account of GuyExpo.

No less important is the role that GuyExpo might have played as an incubator for local small businesses. Here again nothing of any real significance has ever been forthcoming from the organizers over the years though oddly enough, this year’s official blurb on the event lists six local enterprises (AHL Kissoon, Toolsie Persaud Limited, Banks DIH, Demerara Distillers Limited, Geddes Grant and Gafoors) that have “grown with” GuyExpo; none of these can be said to be small businesses in the sense that we in Guyana understand a small business.

There also exists an overwhelmingly neglected case for moving away from the manner in which GuyExpo has been marketed over the years. The focus on the number of visitors to the event and the number of overseas participants have always been favoured as critical marketing signposts ahead of the categories of local vendors, the number of new products that come on the market through GuyExpo and the extent to which demand for those products has been created and sustained on the local and international markets.

Another much overlooked feature of GuyExpo is the dichotomy between the surfeit of entertainment-seeking patrons and the failure of the organisers to transform that demand into a lucrative market that goes beyond music and the sale of alcohol, fast food and huge amounts of cheap, imported toys and trinkets. GuyExpo’s failure to take full creative advantage of its own home-grown and considerable entertainment market is one of its biggest failures.

In form as much as in substance there has been a general sameness to GuyExpo over the years, an absence of the kind of novelty and innovativeness that might justifiably be described as growth or as graduation to a higher plane. Here, one might well ask whether the promise of a   permanent GuyExpo secretariat with its own facilities, management and creative and business strategists has not remained just that, a promise. Here, it should be noted that the list of functionaries named in this year’s GuyExpo publicity material as members of a ‘GuyExpo Committee’ all have alternative jobs in other agencies. The question, therefore, as to whether a permanent GuyExpo secretariat (with all that this entails in terms of a permanent and continually operational entity) exists, is still open to question.

One is inclined to believe that GuyExpo would benefit from a shift in strategic thinking so that it worries less about the administrative mundanities of execution and seeks to effect innovative changes to the form and substance of the event. It must focus much more on making mature, professional judgements (for which it needs mature, professional and suitably qualified personnel) that have to do with how it can seriously enhance business growth amongst those small enterprises – craftspeople, farmers, agro processors, clothing designers, seamstresses, jewellers and a host of others.

Over the years there has not been anywhere near sufficient examples of the kinds of opportunistic marketing which might lift those small businesses that participate off the entrepreneurial floor. Here, one would have thought that there would be room for marketing advice and direction for small vendors participating at GuyExpo from both private and public sector marketing entities. Again, there has not been nearly enough of this.

All too often GuyExpo comes across as a routinized event and if its purpose has been called into question that is largely because its critics see in it a host of unrealized potential that derives from a fatal flaw in its makeup, that is, that for all the talk of public-private sector partnership GuyExpo still remains very much a state sector showpiece with the private sector going along with the event out of what appears to be a sense of duty and not a great deal more.

One gets the impression sometimes, that we may yet get a good deal more out of GuyExpo if its planning and execution were to embrace far more meaningful inputs from the business sector and the local business support organizations, which is where the real experience in matters of business lies. But then that would mean that the retinue of state bureaucrats who ‘manage’ GuyExpo every year and then quietly disappear without providing a proper post-event report on the outcomes will have to take a back seat, and that is not something that government is likely to accept without murmur.