My thanks to Peter for attempting to elicit serious responses which could benefit all parties.
Here are my thoughts and suggestions:
The Eastern Division and table holders need to form a bi-partison committee to develop proposals which create marketing pressure for the meet. Face it, the majority of members who hold tables are at York to make money or advertise their business. They attend York to promote sales. A working definition of a sales promotion is “media and non-media marketing pressure applied for a predetermined, limited period of time in order to stimulate trial, increase consumer demand, or improve product quality." While this definition covers the broad details of sales promotion, the truth is that sales promotion is all about incentives. In essence, sales promotion gives potential customers an additional reason (or reasons) to consider doing business with you.
The idea behind this is that once customers are willing to take that first leap of faith and try your product or services they’ll be satisfied enough with the results to be willing to be a return customer or recommend you to people they know. I see many examples table holder pricing being completely out of sync with what the market will bear.
To effectively motivate customers into doing business with your business or organization, the promotion strategy should include five elements:
1) Identifying your target audience. Over the course of a lifetime, loyal customers spend upwards of 10 times the amount spent by average customers. The difficulty of any marketing effort lies in locating individuals who will eventually develop into brand advocates. Many marketers believe that by casting a large enough net, they’ll be able to locate those individuals simply by virtue of percentages. After all, if enough prospects are contacted, a percentage of those prospects is bound to journey through the sales funnel and become paying customers, and a smaller percentage of those customers will become loyal customers.
The problem with this mentality is that it’s remarkably inefficient, with only a small fraction of prospects and leads “paying off” to offset the initial investment. By predetermining a target audience, businesses can put their own finite marketing resources to better use. Through this process, businesses can target those most likely to become loyal customers without wasting any resources on those who aren’t.
The same can be said for sales promotion campaigns. In order to understand the best target audience for your promotion, you first need to understand more about the customers you already have. Send out a simple survey or questionnaire (or have one built directly into your site) that allows customers to share demographic data. Offer an incentive up front in order to get customers to take the time to share personal information.
Once you’ve a clearer idea of what kinds of people use your product or service, identify exactly what kinds of problems your product or service is designed to solve. With these two factors in mind, you should focus your sales promotion toward those who are most likely to be genuinely interested.
At a minimum, all businesses should send out direct email blasts to their customers letting them know about the York Meet. Facebook postings are not enough and rely on the customer going to you. Businesses should be proactive and reach out themselves.
2) Determine and strive to achieve measurable goals. There’s no denying the importance of setting goals. In fact, in a study performed by the Harvard MBA program, those who made and recorded clear goals went on to earn on average 10 times the amount of those who didn’t. When designing a sales promotion campaign, your goals need to be more specific than ‘increasing sales.’
So, what's your strategy? Ask yourself what the most important objective of your promotion should be. Are you hoping to draw in new customers, or are you more inclined to focus on customer retention? Do you want your customers to purchase more frequently, or would you like for them to increase the average amount that they spend on a purchase? Are you attempting to increase the business that your organization gets during slower seasons or times of the day? Are you interested in regaining the attention of former customers who have taken their business elsewhere?
Determine exactly what you would like to accomplish with the meet, and when possible, translate that goal into a specific number. This will allow you to chart your failure or success as the campaign progresses, and to identify aspects of your campaign that need to be amended or further developed.
3) Limited Availability. Behavioral psychologists have found that human beings tend to assign greater value to things they perceive as being scarce. In a classic study performed in 1975, researchers had participants assign perceived value to identical cookies located in two identical jars. The only difference between the two jars was that one held 10 cookies, while the other held only two. The study discovered that while there was no apparent difference between the cookies or the jars, participants assigned greater value to the jar of two cookies.
When something seems limited, we naturally assign it greater value. We tend to want things we can’t have or that we fear that we won’t be able to have in the near future. At base, we’re animals that have a keen sense of regret, and we hate missed opportunities. Call FOMO – the fear of missing out. The best marketers have learned how to take advantage of this very human phenomenon by offering limited-time deals. A sales promotion—such as lower prices —may seem like an attractive incentive for motivating sales, but unless that promotion is only available for a limited time or in limited quantities, then a large majority of customers will not be interested. On the other hand, if those customers are faced with the possibility of missing the promotion if they don’t act quickly, they’ll be far more likely to commit.
Some ideas here are blowout pricing which is below your best advertised sale price during other sales or a one time coupon for select savings on a future purchase.
Anyone remember the stampede last year for the Lionel limited edition York boxcar?
4) Sufficient promotion. The promotion is an effort to draw customer attention to the table holders who are selling. But what about drawing attention to the promotion itself? In order for a promotion to be effective, it needs to be seen and understood by the same target audience identified back in point number-one. The question becomes, how does one promote a promotion?
I believe they can be promoted much like any other product or service. In-store signage, employee word-of-mouth, social media, your business’ website, email contact, flyers, paper mailers, articles in local publications, press releases, commercials and telephone contact may all be effective in letting your customers and prospective customers know about your sales promotion. Visibility is key but it may be most beneficial to focus promotional strategies on less-expensive—though still tightly focused—channels. For example, emails to interested parties have a very high rate of return, with 44% of email recipients making at least one annual purchase based on a promotional email.
While Rich said you have to spend money to make money, I don't believe this is entirely accurate. What you really are trying to do is reach your targeted audience – and yes, sometimes that takes money. 
5) Creating Value. When all is said and done, the customer is interested in just one thing: value. If your promotion doesn’t offer your customers real value, then all of the limited-time offers and targeted marketing in the world isn’t going to make your promotion a success.
Ask yourself what kind of offer your potential customers will find most interesting, and then determine whether or not you can afford to give it to them. If you can, then you may have found the perfect sales promotion. If you can’t, then scale it back until you come to a compromise that will be interesting to your target audience, while still remaining cost effective for your organization.
A successful promotional campaign is one in which everyone benefits. If either you or your customers are coming away from the experience feeling unsatisfied, then you need to revisit and reevaluate your promotional strategy.
The fact is there are certain realities which will not change (dealing with the tax man) so access to all halls without being a TCA member is a non-starter. But at its core this hobby is about PEOPLE. We all have countless stories of PEOPLE in our hobby stepping up to help out other PEOPLE both inside and outside the hobby. Surely, those with the expertise could very well advise on how to get started if that is their wish.
The time for complaining is over. The time for working together is here.
In closing, my sincere thanks to all the VOLUNTEERS who work tirelessly and mostly in anonymity year round to make the York meet the single best place to gather for the hobby!
-Greg
