November 2013 - The Hill Group Trade Show Training Blog

Trade Show Marketing

Where your exhibit staff can effectively practice Anti-Branding
Want fewer conversations? Fewer leads? Fewer sales? Read on!

Effective Anti-Branding by your exhibit staff includes:
• Wearing wrinkled clothing.
•Eating and drinking in the booth.
•Looking lazy or bored.
•Cell phoning and texting.

A key trade show skill for effective Anti-Branding:
Stand in closed circles with your colleagues. Visitors love this!

Effective Anti-Branding staffers also know to arrive late to the booth so there’s no time to check out their equipment before they do a demo.
Failed demonstrations really help ensure that your key booth visitors walk away totally unimpressed.

Focusing a conversation or demonstration on what you care about and not what the visitor cares about helps the overall marketing objective of Anti-Branding.
Visitors love it when they’re forced to listen to you ramble on about stuff they don’t care about. And they’ll tell their friends!

With 80% of what visitors remember most about their visit to a booth being their interaction with the exhibit staff and with 75% of the effectiveness of any trade show due to the exhibit staff, what better opportunity is there for an exhibit staff that actively practices Anti-Branding?

1. You have to wait in lines everywhere: Checking a bag, in the jetway, for a taxi, at hotel check-in, at conference registration, for food, for another taxi, for the hotel elevator, to get a free tchotchke that even your niece won’t care about, etc.
2. The freight doors in the exhibit hall are wide open in Chicago in November.
3. The freight doors in the exhibit hall are wide open in Orlando in August.
4. Every restaurant is packed and noisy except for the ones with the $75 á la carte steaks.
5. You always see some poor guy setting up his 10×10 booth 15 minutes after the show opens.
6. Ph.Ds, MDs, and other highly educated individuals will wait in a long line for 15 minutes a free cup of lemonade (worth about $1.50).
7. It costs $75 to rent a plant for three days.
8. You will typically drink more alcohol in three days than you will for the next three months back home.
9. A dry turkey sandwich is $9.
10. A bottle of water in your hotel room is $5.
11. You suffer through monotonous ground transportation: Car to the airport, in a cab to a hotel, on a bus to the convention center, on a bus back to your hotel, in a cab to a restaurant, in a cab back to your hotel, repeat for three days.
12. You act like you remember people who know you by name.
13. You see at least one guy wearing an expensive suit and … tennis shoes.
14. The only place that’s quiet is in your hotel room.
15. You eat dinner at 9PM and stay up way too late.
16. A hotel room that usually costs $125 a night is $350 a night.

Matt Hill • The Hill Group • mhill@hillgroup.com

Month: November 2013

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