Strategies for Results-Driven
Trade Show Exhibit Design

Your display should be a three-dimensional extension of your company’s image, marketing messages, and sales efforts. The design must enhance your corporate identity and differentiate your company from competitors.

Using Design to Bring Your Brand to Life

In a typical show, you will have about five seconds to get the decision maker’s attention, make a good impression, and entice him or her to walk into your exhibit. Presentation is everything.

One way to control the perceptions and impressions of your company is though creative and appropriate trade show exhibit design.

Creative booth design will bring a brand to life. It will catch the attention of attendees, invite them into your space and create a pleasurable environment to experience a product.

The longer visitors are in your booth space, the less time they will spend in a competitor’s. The more visitors you reach, the lower it costs to reach them.

Create Product Displays that Engage Visitors

The first approach to gaining that attention is to display products and messages in a way that encourages people to handle, use, and compare your products. This will also promote conversation and enable you to determine interest levels from booth visitors.

The use of clean and simple architecture, without a lot of clutter, provides a backdrop that allows the product and message to play the leading role.

As a result, visitors will have a clear and unobstructed line of sight to the product that catches their eye and draws them in. The booth environment as a whole, if designed well, becomes an experience in itself, creating memorable customer experiences that retain information.

Focus on Fewer Messages for Greater Impact

At most shows, the mind is flooded with visual clutter, which makes memory retention is extremely important. The best way to assure booth visitors remember your brand is to show as few products and messages as possible in your trade show exhibit design.

Strip away everything in your booth space that does not communicate the key features and benefits your products offer. It’s a lot easier to remember three things than it is to remember twelve.

Keep your trade show exhibit design graphics and demonstrations simple, attractive, and to the point. They need to explain the benefits to the end-user in terms they understand and care about.

The decision makers want to know:

• How your product will make life easier
• What makes your product better than those of your competitors
• Whether your product will solve a problem they have.

Consistent Messages Build Brand Awareness

Develop a good company identity and image, and keep it consistent throughout all marketing functions from business cards, letter heads, and websites all the way to executive briefing centers and trade show exhibits. When brands are used consistently they build recognition.

Good design will help ease some of the pressures of exhibit marketing by making sure your brand is displayed consistently with all your other marketing collateral.

In the trade show environment, this brand consistency creates recognition and trust, so prospects and customers will have heightened interest in visiting your display.

Existing marketing literature and company websites are often used to determine the look and feel of your exhibit. This will further guarantee brand consistency.

If your literature or logo has yet to be designed, do that first before taking on the task designing a three-dimensional environment.

Design as a whole should be apart of your overall business strategy as it communicates the passion companies have for their products or services. If a company isn’t passionate about its product, why should anyone else be?

This article on trade show exhibit design strategies was written by Bill Roozée, President and Creative Director of Billy Raygun Design, an award-winning designer of trade show exhibits, marketing centers, corporate environments and three-dimensional displays. For more information, visit www.billyraygun.com or call 469-293-5675.

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