Our tea culture and tea industry have continued to evolve in a number of tough times and environments, but they have faced a serious crisis due to a sharp decrease of tea consumption from various factors since detected pesticides from green tea was re...
Our tea culture and tea industry have continued to evolve in a number of tough times and environments, but they have faced a serious crisis due to a sharp decrease of tea consumption from various factors since detected pesticides from green tea was reported in 2007. In spite of these difficulties, there have been tea-related local events as part of efforts to create economic profits by reviving tea culture and tea industry.
A brief dip into such events serves to find there were certain exhibitions such as Seoul Tea World Festival, Daegu World Tea Culture Festival, Busan International Tea & Craft Fair and Gwangju International Tea Fair which were intended to popularize tea culture by focusing cultural events in the beginning. However, the results of them was said to fall short of expectations due to several reasons such as over-competition between sponsors like local governments or organizations, overlap or concentrated period of events, and lack of budgets or expertise in events.
One example of tea exhibitions in other countries is Guangzhou International Tea Expo which shows us it is ahead of ours in terms of the scale and contents because it emphasized the combination between government's proactive support and strong industrial drive. In case of Shizuoka World-Cha (TEA) Festival, it aims to generate a demand by creating and expanding a tea market, so it is well organized with exhibition contents to attract visitors to experience for themselves by utilizing geographical advantages as a tea producing area. In addition, Las Vegas World Tea Expo is a one of world famous tea exhibitions and its impacts and effects to tea industry are considered huge due to its business-oriented thorough planning on exhibition.
In fact, it is not to say that the scale of Korean tea industry is large, compared to other countries such as China, Japan and US, but I expect our constant efforts to introduce tea culture through tea exhibitions and promote people to enjoy it shall contribute greatly to significant tea exhibitions and tea industry development. In this regard, following contents to develop such tea exhibitions were reviewed:
First of all, we need to upgrade homepages of individual tea exhibitions to reflect information related to results of exhibitions and collect diverse opinions on them in order to attract voluntary participation in the development of tea exhibition from more people, and then, we can divide types of contents development into 4 followings types: Hands-on experience, education, culture and industry.
First, hands-on experience contents are composed of diverse programs such as tea-manufacturing experience, operation of space to enjoy tea, proof stamp or photo after visits.
Second, educational contents are composed of expansion of specialized education and seminars related to tea industry, experts' clinical seminars, selection of tea book of the year, and book seminars with authors.
Third, cultural contents are composed of tea-related private collection appraisals and auctions, tea-road tour connected tourism industry, tea-related UCC contests and annual exhibition with different specific themes.
Fourth, industrial contents are composed of spread and development of 'Tea Performance, Tea Fighting', Today's Tea Shop, promotions and SMS of products of interested companies, overseas exhibition participation and support for excellent companies participating in the exhibition, special tea manufacturing for exhibition, tea tasting competitions, tea sommelier competitions, tea exhibition in connection with Seoul International Food Industry Exhibition, and suitable for geographical characteristics.
In addition, we need to help buyers and visitors collect a large amount of good information in exhibitions as much as they can, by offering more opportunities to give the basic information on tea or tea products for them, with objectives to develop our tea culture and tea industry through its exhibitions where are the space to figure out tea trend and its desirable development direction.
All the tea exhibition contents suggested in this study are expected to be put into practices when we have an overall understanding on tea itself and carry forward them with the lavish investment based commercial perspectives and strong drive of all sponsors and organizers.
Above and beyond contents mentioned, some more diverse contents could be considered which vitalize tea exhibitions, and more studies and suggestions on contents of tea exhibitions are expected.