What can you do differently to make your mark at trade shows?
Try innovative branding. It’s all about taking interesting ideas and transforming them into trend-setting events. Since branding is a constant experience, it should start from your logo to your brand identity, tradeshow banner design, and encompass everything that you do to communicate with your audience.
But with so many competing brands at a single trade show vying for customers’ attention, you need extraordinary ideas. Let us look at some.
In 2019, sustainability should be more of a prerequisite than just an innovative idea. While sustainable design and branding solutions are naturally aligned with organic products and services, there’s no reason your retail, medicine, technology, and industrial brands cannot also benefit from it.
Take L’Oreal, for example. To launch their eco-friendly beauty products range, they opted for an organic booth area and a design that is open, spacious, and sustainable.
Next, we have a retail clothing company opting for a sustainable booth architecture. As you can see, organic design not only looks good, it adds depth to the brand and gives it texture
As you prepare for your trade show exhibit, bear in mind that the design and the overall feel of it should be customer-centric instead of product-centric. How and where you place and feature your products should be based on the needs and wants of your target audience.
As per the statistics, people who will be coming to your booth are already interested in buying, so instead of aggressively selling them the product, give them an environment where they feel comfortable and encouraged to make that purchase decision.
Much like how Newport Beach did.
It simplified its booth and turned it into a meeting room. With a beach backdrop, comfortable couch, and a bar area with a Martini flag hoisted above, beckoning the visitors, companies lined up to start negotiating with the beach authority and it saw an instant boom in the business.
Or this trade show booth design with a literal bar built in. Such designs are especially efficient for the food and beverage industry.
Another great innovative branding idea is to provide your visitors an immersive and interactive experience that’ll increase awareness for your brand. It is not enough that they can recall your brand colors, it is the recall of positive memories that will convert a visitor into a customer.
You can create such memories by letting them experience your products and their features. Selfie-zones, 3D interactive videos, message walls, product try-outs and other ways in which they can engage with and what you have to offer will help create immersive brand experiences.
This wedding company provided its trade show visitors with an outdoor experience with its grass floor, burlap backdrop, and lots of flowers. A wedding-styled photo-op area, white décor, and beribboned props made the space truly immersive.
In the tech world, Elevation 3D, a design and marketing firm, won the Best Small Booth prize in February 2019 with its interactive and immersive 3D wall art installation. The visitors could pick up the tablets, put on the headphones, and engage with the company’s 3D video about its live marketing skills.
Brand activation refers to the launch of a new brand or the introduction of a rebrand through some kind of engaging experience. In marketing terms, such launches or ‘activates’ a brand. Options trade alerts shows are great opportunities to launch new products or rebrands. With so many people available, your target market comes to you instead of you going to them.
You can curate a number of brand activation activities such as letting people create their own scents, or let them see a meal being cooked in a new cookware line you’re launching, or play a game, or print their photos taken on the new Polaroid device that offers instant printing.
Another interesting example of a brand activation at trade shows is by HBO centered on its show Westworld.
HBO started the second season of the show with a brand activation at last year’s SXSW event. Attendees were invited to wear top hats and were handed special drinks to immerse them in the experience of the Westworld.
Explore: How To Use Your Logo To Amplify Your Brand Identity?
As the trend predictors keep on reporting, the next age is all about experience that encompasses all senses. People are less into buying stuff more interested in activities and experiences that they can remember. You can also join this movement by offering people multisensory experiences. Letting people write a message on a wall, or add their handprint to a mural. If you are a food brand, entice them with aromas. Let them touch, feel, listen to, and smell the scent of what they are consuming.
Bloomsday Run, the road race organization in Spokane, Washington has used these creative and fun interactive wall displays to engage the trade show visitors.
In 2018, Land o Lakes, the food co-op showcased how it produces food and the multiple ways it uses technology in farming and production by launching The Food Effect at a SXSW.
Land O’Lakes encouraged visitors to stick their heads inside a giant head of lettuce to see on virtual reality how their food is farmed and produced.
Virtual Reality has been a staple for the tech trade shows for a while now. Since not every product being showcased in a tradeshow booth can be experienced physically (cars, jets, robotics, huge manufacturing machines, and such) without investing huge amounts of money, most companies switch to VR or AR to make the experience as real as possible.
For 2016’s SXSW, McDonald’s offered its visitors a fun VR experience where they could paint a giant Happy Meal box with globs of bright paint in virtual reality.
Further emphasizing that it’s not only tech companies that benefit from a VR feature at trade shows, the Mountain Home Area Chamber of Commerce allowed its attendees to watch a short VR film about the activities they could indulge in around the Twin Lakes Area. The immersive and experiential display earned an award and a lot of positive reviews from the visitors.
Lighting is a branding tool that not many companies seem to capitalize on. In trade shows, most notably, you see that same white LED light everywhere, which does its job remarkably, but signifies a lost branding opportunity.
You can enhance your brand visibility by installing interactive LEDs or even using softer lights if it suits your unique brand voice. With lighting, you can set the mood, represent your brand, instill a soothing effect in a noisy place (or stimulate them if that’s what you’re after), and remain on-brand while doing all that.
You can see how Philips fully embraced this innovative branding opportunity and made its booth a piece of visual art.
As you can see, the use of lighting is sparse and strategic. The company has shown the variety of its product line without any information dump. The minimal design of the booth effectively highlights the brand.
Artificial Intelligence is as innovative as it can get. It is a definite crowd draw at trade shows. More people like to interact with AI chatbots as the conversations can become really interesting and intuitive. It can also save you, the vendor, a lot of time if you use AI to welcome attendees at your booth, find out the most potential leads, and even do upsells. If you are a food vendor, you can attract customers with personalized offers of food.
SXSW uses its chatbot Abby to help attendees navigate the event more easily and answer any questions they might have about schedules, live videos, and different exhibitions, etc.
If you have constructed your trade show booth design and planned the event activities, keeping ethical and socially conscious themes in mind, people will be more likely to come see you and interact with you at a trade show.
The Swiss bakery items company, Aryzta did just that by introducing the Exotic Food Dice Roll. The activity was not only fun, it also raised funds for a food-related charity.
Similarly, the nonprofit, Charity Water, planned an activity where their visitors walked carrying two 40lb jugs of water for 50 yards. It was an attempt to draw the visitors’ attention to areas of developing nations that did not have proper water supply.
What good will all these innovative and interactive activities be if you are not enjoying yourself at the trade show? If you are new to these events, you’ll likely have more energy and willingness to truly be a part of the experience. For the veterans of trade shows, things may become boring after a while, but not if you don’t let them. Don’t think of it as just another business thing you have to do. Take part in activities that you’ve arranged, hire a DJ, hold a contest, talk to people, ask insightful questions, and just enjoy yourself.
Sometimes, the most innovative thing you can do to stand out is actually the simplest and easiest solution. Everything that we have discussed in this list is something that was always there and needed just a bit of creative tweaking.
If you also know some original ways to market your brand at trade shows, please comment below and let’s make this space an idea factory.
There’s something thrilling about watching a design contest unfold. You post a brief, and soon…
Just think about what you notice most about Amazon’s logo first for a moment. Is…
Take it from the data that speaks volumes! Approximately 76% of consumers evaluate the credibility…
When people think about UX design, they usually picture buttons, layouts, and colors. But if…
Once upon a time, the business card was a badge of honor. Crisp cardstock. Foil…
Banner design isn’t just about looking good — it’s about influencing action. The right CTA…