Marketing Unplugged

Quark’s Billi Little takes her events to the next level

Name: Billi Little

Title: Tradeshow and Event Manager

Brand: Quark

How has your trade show presence grown in the last few years?

When I started at Quark three years ago, we were doing four trade shows a year. We’ve grown to about 60 or 70 pretty targeted trade shows that hit our main audiences, like designers, output providers, newspapers, catalogs and publishers. We feel like face-to-face marketing is a great way to teach people what’s new with Quark.

How is your strategy changing?

Now, we’re really focusing on the enterprise side of the business, which means that not everyone is our customer and we have to be very direct on which person in the company would actually buy our product. It’s not the designers, and it’s not the IT guys, it’s the line-of-business person who would influence those decisions. So we’re working on picking the right shows and doing them the right way.

How do you determine which shows you want Quark to go to every year?

Quark is a great brand and QuarkXPress is everywhere, so honestly in the event world, I could go to 700 shows a year, because they’re all going to have our audience somewhere. There’s a few shows we’re always at. We’re always at MacWorld, because we are one of Apple’s premier partners. That’s a great audience for us, because designers love Macs. Graph Expo is probably our best show. It hits everything. It’s got the designers… and it’s unique because the exhibitors are our target audience, too. We want all the big printers to be accepting output documents via QuarkXPress and via our enterprise products.

What are the challenges with infusing the Quark brand in your events?

On one hand, it’s kind of fun. People see the Quark logo and they say, “Oh, we know QuarkXPress.” So, it’s great in one way, but not great in other ways, because we do sell many more products than QuarkXPress.

How involved is the trade show team in Quark product launches?

We don’t do a lot of product launches. Our last one was in May 2006. When we do, I spend time meting with product management. Sometimes we’re dealing with new audiences. I need to know who wants to buy the product. Then there’s a lot of ways to research shows. We go out and try to find that person and where they’re going to go. Then we also work with senior management to determine the scope—is this show the be-all, end-all of the launch, or is this a launch where we want to target the 25 big customers?

What is your favorite event to work on?

The most fun trade show is MacWorld, because of what offers and the excitement that surrounds the show. Apple always announces something there, and it’s fun to be a part of that hype.