FROM THE INDUSTRY
Make sure your give aways have an enormous logo on them that ruins their style and are such an odd colour that they end up in landfill really quick. Have ‘mints’ or other open candies on your booth so that all those lovely germs pass from one visitor to the next - having wrappings on them would be too much of an extravagance. Don’t wipe down surfaces and keep them clean, because people really like crumbs on the high tables - and make sure you don’t have seats for guest at all!
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Ensure your signage is so low or so high that people who walk past have no idea who you are or what you do.
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Don’t have any QR codes to link to web-based content - you want them to have to type in that really long URL. Make sure the data capture tool is so flaky that it takes 5 minutes to scan the badge, if it will scan at all. Of course, getting those badge photos off everyone’s smartphone is really easy as the backup... Make sure you have an appointment booking system that no one looks at... so when you turn up, every contact is nice and fresh, brand new and greeted with the phrase ‘who are you?’ When going off stand for that super-secret customer meeting, make sure you just used the onsite facilities so everyone can see who you are meeting with and can listen into the whole conversation. Ensure that you don’t have the right weather protection so that you can always turn up either sodden from the rain, blinded from the sun, sweaty from the walk in or with tears on your clothes from slipping on the ice. Book your travel for booth workers so that they don’t have enough time to prepare before meeting the first comes, and have no time to align with all the others about the key priorities of the show. Make sure that booth workers start flying out early before the show is finished, because it is clearly more important to get home than to meet that prospect who can make a difference who can only make it just before the end of the show. Make sure that you start shutting down and packing up before the end of show as well, so those late prospects can only see big gaps on the booth. It is also a great idea to save money on that easy to find booth, by picking the off-site or obscurely located meeting room instead because you are so much more important than anyone else at the show, even the attendees.
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It might seem unlikely that these things still happen, but they do. So much so that many of these anti-observations come from comments from colleagues and friends. I hope that those of you who work in booths at shows can learn from this list and make sure that we eradicate them from our industry to make these shows more productive, more inclusive, more welcoming, and more educational to new entrants, clients and colleagues alike. Certainly, I hope it also inspires these shows to improve their best practices and terms/conditions applied to exhibitors, to make some of the worst practices inadvisable. I’d like to see an end to the worst behaviours that make some of our industry participants so non-inclusive, and hopefully then much more commercially successful. * I did look up synonyms for ‘dolly birds’ and all of these were much worse than this phrase, so I chose to use this one. As I said, I am shocked that any company thinks this is a good idea for any show today. - Ian Nock
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www.fairmilewest.com
MARCH 2025 Volume 47 No.1
63
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