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Benefits of Exhibiting at Salone del Mobile for Design Oriented Companies

Ellfo Salone Del Mobile 2010

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TRADE SHOW EXHIBITION Part II of III

How to Gain the Most from Your Presence
Part two of a three part series about deciding the benefits having a booth at a trade show and how to get the most out of your attendance.

Your company is going, so how can you make sure that your booth attracts clients and gives your company the most it can to make its presence a success? Do sales and marketing crave a junket to gain free hotel soaps? In years past maybe that was a good enough reason to book a place in Las Vegas, Frankfurt or Hong Kong, but these days we all need to make sure that any expenditures will reap rewards.

A trade show is a powerful opportunity to define your brand and in turn capture more clients. If you are going to go, you should do it right or you risk sending the wrong message. “Doing it right” does not have to mean elaborate and large, but your physical space at a show will send a message, so it’s good to ask yourself a few questions to make sure the one it sends is the one you intend.

Your presence at a show is often the only physical interaction you have on your turf and on your terms with customers. If your company has taken the time to craft advertising, websites, business cards, brochures etc, remember that your trade show booth is 3d expression of what your company and its products are about. A combination of your company’s or product’s identity along with careful thought to what you want to gain from the show can help you to achieve your goals.

So how can you get the most bang for your buck, or the most yippee for your euro? (or name the excitement and currency of your choice) Trade shows are not cheap but working out what your goals are for the particular event, before renting space and designing or modifying a booth will make your show investment more profitable and maybe give you a little extra to choose a hotel with better free shampoo and fluffier towels.

A design that is successful for your company must do two things:
It has to function to help you achieve the goals you set for the show.
It has to reflect the message you wan to send about your company and products

In order for your booth design to achieve the above goals, you and your designer should address the following questions.

• Are you introducing one new product or a line of new products?
Through wall placement, lighting and other design elements such as graphics, booth design
for to highlight one product can focus vision and traffic to a centerpiece of the stand, while
having multiple products of equal importance requires a space plan which encourages
movement to see all that is available.
• Are you there primarily to serve existing customers or make yourself known to a new
market?
Going for a new market gives you an opportunity to define yourself visually. A design focused
primarily on serving existing customers should remind them of why they have chosen you but
be careful not to limit yourself to only the same old things, as you don’t want to be perceived as
stagnant.
• Do you want visitors to linger or do you prefer a quicker traffic flow?
Wall and display stand placement controls how people access and move through the space,
decide if you may be served better by easy access and more open sides, or less open access
that may keep those who enter in the space longer.
• Do you need private or semi private meeting areas?
Can an open sales area with tables and chairs function, or do you need more secluded spaces
with the ability to close doors?
• How does your company distinguish itself from its competition?
Are you known to be innovative, environmentally friendly, provide superior service or
technologically advanced? If so, make sure that the booth design reinforces this message. A
company that prides itself on innovation could benefit from having a booth design that is
innovative in some way.
• What do you want visitors to take away from their experience at your stand?
Hopefully a receipt for an order place or plans to follow up post show. Make sure that their
experience in the stand is a food one. First that they are attracted enough by it to enter, that
there is adequate space to see and try products and talk with reps. Make sure that it is
physically comfortable and the environment is one where they enjoy being, if not they may leave
before they’ve had the chance to understand your offerings

A well planned booth design which addresses both function and message has a concrete impact on your success at a trade show.

TRADE SHOW EXHIBITION PART I of III

To Go or Not to Go, That is the Question.

Part one of a three part series about deciding the benefits having a booth at a trade show and how to get the most out of your attendance.

We know that budgets continue to be cut and it is not always easy to know where to best wield the ax. Considering costs for travel, space rental and booth design/build, trade shows can be a tempting target to lop off, but before chopping trade show presence out of the budget too quickly, consider the benefits a trade show investment can bring to your company. Merchant Circle, www.merchantcircle.com offered a summary of statistics on trade show attendance:

• 83% of the attendees have some kind of buying power.
• 85% of decision makers say attending trade shows saves their company time and money by bringing vendors together under one roof.
• 79% of the attendees say that attending shows helps them decide on what products to buy.
• 91% of attendees say that trade shows impact their buying decisions because the competition is in one place allowing for comparison shopping in real time.
• 85% of an exhibitor’s success lies in the performance of the staff.
• People to people medium where the quality of communication is critical, ineffective staffing equals ineffective exhibiting.
• Trade shows cost 38% less than sales calls.
• Trade show visitors will tell 6+ people about their experience.
• 81% testify that trade shows help attendees become aware of new products and services.
• Trade shows are the #1 business-to-business marketing spending to support sales beating out specialty publications, internet, promotions, and PR respectively.
• 91% of attendees tell us they get the most useful buying info from trade shows and events.

While trade show attendance has dropped in some fields and countries, it is not all bad news. Trade Show Week, www.tradeshowweek.com indicated a slight drop in attendance in consumer shows in the USA from 2007 to 2008 (down 1.3%) but this drop has slowed from the previous year’s drop.

If you attend more than one show, one option can be to consider cutting out smaller shows and focus your efforts on important shows. While less tangible ask yourself, if you are not available, who will they be buying from instead who is at the show?

Ultimately there are many factors to weigh when budgeting for a trade show, but having a clearer understanding of the benefits will help you to make a more valid decision.

Salone del Mobile 2009

The 2009 Salone del Mobile begins this week in Milan. The international furniture fair brings a typical design world mix of interesting, pretentious, cool, stupid, ugly, and clever or some combination of the above in people and objects to Milan.

The week includes the official fair which is a trade show open to anyone who purchases a ticket, (this year: 20.00 euros for one day) which is held at the massive mix of grey and glass Rho Fiera convention center outside of Milan. Rho is a painful 40 minute metro ride followed by long walk for before you enter the first of the halls. Still there is much to see and the best place to go if you want to actually buy furniture or get a concentrated display if furniture and lighting produced by top Italian and non Italian designers and manufacturers. It is worth a visit for at least one or part of one of your days, to get an idea of what it’s like. www.cosmit.it

I think the more interesting part of the week is Fuori Salone, (outside Salone) which is comprised of a series of exhibitions, and events scattered throughout Milan.

A mix of furniture designers and non furnishing names, from such as industries as automotive, fashion, technology and alcoholic beverage, who want their brands associated with design, innovation or luxury host exhibitions. Here exhibitors strive to come up with new ways to show off their goods, create an atmosphere and attract visibility. www.fuorisalone.it


In this age of virtual substitutes for so many aspects of life, it is nice to see that the Salone del Mobile values real space and time and creates an opportunity in which to enjoy the non virtual world.

More later on trends and observations from Salone 2009.

How Your Work Space Design Affects Your Profits.

Gensler’s 2008 Workplace Survey shows that the physical work environment is an asset with a specific and quantifiable impact on business success. The results showed that top performing companies - those with higher profits, better employee engagement and stronger market and brand position - have significantly higher-performing
work environments than average companies.
- Gensler 2008 Work Place Survey


Looking for new ways to boost your profits? Consider the design of your work space. International architecture firm Gensler, surveyed companies in both the UK and USA to try to understand how the design of the work space influences the success of a business. Their most recent survey provides tangible evidence which links well designed work places to profitability, revenue growth and a strong corporate brand.

Distinguishing top performing companies from average ones; (based on criteria such as financial strength, brand identity and ability to attract and retain top talent) the survey’s results demonstrate that companies with the most effective work places are the most successful businesses.

So what does this all mean to you? You can consider your won work environment and whether or not it is moving your business forward or holding it back. Begin with an examination of your space on a functional level. Does your work place actually work? Is it safe and comfortable, does it allow you to perform the tasks that you need to do without the distractions of disorganization, physical discomfort or acoustical and visual privacy issues? Does your space balance your needs of focus and silent work with collaboration and socializing?

Setting up your workspace to function is key, but to be a top performing business, it is not enough on its own. How does your work space reflect you values and goals as an individual and as an organization? Ask yourself what inspires you, and gives you the creative and competitive edge, and are these qualities included in the space where you want to perform?

Time spent considering these factors can help you create, innovate and succeed by putting yourself into an environment which supports your goals and can bring your business to a higher level of performance.

How Loose Hamstrings Can Improve Our Business.

Flexibility: it is a term that I have heard repeatedly in these last weeks from people I know in a variety of businesses and who work in countries around the world. Cross culturally and across fields, they are all talking about being more flexible in their business in order to survive the economic crisis.

I must admit, that before the economic crisis, when I heard the term flexibility, I thought first about how I wasn’t. How despite time spent stretching, or in pilates and yoga, I was still unable to touch my toes without bending my knees. I understand that more flexibility provides advantages that sheer strength does not for other athletic activities, but despite my awareness of the benefits that it could bring I remained a bit stiff and unfortunately more prone to injury.

However I was not so injury prone that I was forced to stop my activities for any significant period of time. The fact is, that I had figured out how to work around my not so bendy self, and so what if I had to bend my knees to tie my shoes, I would just wear clogs more.

Yes, this was good, I was being flexible about how to be flexible! However if I had gotten to the point where my stiffness prevented me from doing what I wanted, I would have been forced to work out the kinks.

Now more of us are recognizing the need to be flexible in our ways of working. If we have always been successful in the past by moving in our old patterns, it can be hard to stretch ourselves in different ways, but like having a flexible body, a flexible approach to work can minimize the risk damage; in this case, to our livelihood. Flexibility enables us to move in different ways, it gives us a grace to deal with unexpected challenges.

OK, so we all can probably agree that it is good to be flexible, but how can we become more flexible? How can we use this newfound pliability to resolve our challenges?

Designers are supposed to be flexible in our approach to solving problems. In less challenging times those problems may have been more focused and we soon established patterns that worked to meet those challenges. Across all fields, successful business all have worked to refine our processes, to improve it, but now we may need to perform in different ways and it can be hard to retrain ourselves

While flexibility may no longer be an optional strategy, there is good news in being pushed to consider it, as the combination of flexibility and more challenging obstacles can lead in the end to a superior solution; one that without the new and at first more restrictive parameters, may have not been as good. If we can rise to meet the new challenges we can produce even better solutions and have greater success.

For example, in architecture, if a client approaches a designer with a large amount of space for a given project it may be relatively simple to lay out a plan and move on, but if the designer were given the same client’s needs to fulfill within a smaller space, we are forced to become more creative and flexible with your solutions.

We must consider things not thought about before. Maybe it is how to use the ceiling, how to build in storage, how to have flexibility (it seems I can’t get away from that word right now) with the components used within the space. In the end, with the right approach the smaller space can function better and cost less than the larger space.

In your business how can your current obstacles stimulate you to make use of previously untapped resources and produce a better solution had those obstacles not been there? Maybe you have to be flexible in your approach to being flexible. Loose hamstrings are not the only solution to tying your shoes, maybe wearing shoes without laces is another way around the problem.

Being flexible can have you looking at today’s new challenges as opportunities to improve your service or your product. It is not an easy task, but perhaps by viewing your next obstacle as an opportunity you can survive these economic difficulties and come out more successful in the end.