Shaping your Brand for the Show Floor

A company’s brand is its identity, a marketing practice that actively shapes the way a brand is perceived by its audiences. Branding manages the collective effect and lasting impression from all that is seen, heard or experienced by customers. Over the last century, brands have redefined themselves with new logo designs and new colour schemes to match the latest trends but at the heart of it all, the basic brand concept is still the same.

Psychology of branding is an interesting topic, the way we encounter brands and how often we think, feel, and experience them has a big effect on which ones we choose, and keep on choosing. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visual data is processed 60,000x faster than text. Meaning our brains have a soft spot for brands with strong identities as they’re easier to recognise and recall.

Kunal Guar, Founder and Creative Director of global creative agency Animal explored the power of branding by creating a campaign named “Generic Brands”, a project that combines brutalism and creativity in a dystopian world. His project removes the identifiable colours of a brands guidelines and leaves only the essentials of the brand behind.

“In a world where all brands are trying to get your attention, I wanted to experiment with stripped-down, product level communication behaviour of known brands, sans the embellishments they’re typically identified with.”

-Credit to Kunal Guar, “Generic Brands”

Guar’s project showcases a minimalist way of brand communication. By removing the brand’s attractive features, it loses audience appeal and impact, creating an almost outdated appearance.

The distinctive features of a brands identity are what makes it recognisable, colouration, shape, size, wording and font affect the experience people have with your brand. So, how do you maximise your brand to have the biggest impact at events?

On the show floor, there is an overwhelming number of brands of varying sizes and impacts, each one with its own story to tell. Much like with your brand, your event experience has to be distinctive and unique. It takes about 30 seconds to remember a new word, phrase or icon and then repetition of that word, phrase, or icon to engrave it into the long-term memory. With that in mind, your brand should follow these 3 steps to maximise your brand impact:

Brand Attraction

This is possibly the most important step. If you don’t capture the attention of delegates across the show floor, the next two steps are worthless. Your space must embody your brand and attract the members of your target audience, finding a way to stand out from the crowd.

Brand Engagement

Reinforce your brand and brand message. Once you’ve got delegates onto the stand, you need to utilise the power of experiential marketing to maximise brand engagement. From technology to the classic face-to-face engagement, creative and disruptive engagement will guarantee your brand is heard amongst the competitive noise. Read more about the latest brand engagement trends here.

Brand Memory

When your brand delivers the quality same experience with every interaction, it’s reflected in your company profile away from the show floor. Key takeaways need to be given to your delegates to stick with them long after the show is over, follow up emails, meeting arrangements and even social media engagement are just a few of the ways to keep your brand in the mind of your delegates.

Want to find out how we can maximise your brand’s experience on the show floor? Head over to our contact us page to find out more.