Building Brand Power
Strategic Marketing for Trade Show Exhibits
by Sara Pearsaul Vice | Published in March 2006 Focus on Event Marketing
Getting attention at an extreme bodybuilding show is no small feat. Between appearances by world-class bodybuilders, fitness models and Arnold Schwarzenegger, attendees encounter some serious distractions while walking the aisles. So the management of Optimum Nutrition Inc. decided they needed to take their exhibit up a notch to build awareness of their sports nutrition products and the new ON branding.
Optimum Nutrition Tradeshow Manager Bob Corbett wanted the new exhibit to attract its target market of serious bodybuilders and fitness experts, as well as regular work-out types. “We wanted to showcase Optimum Nutrition as a scientific brand with a classy modern feel to the booth,” Corbett says.
Corbett chose The Tradeshow Network Marketing Group for its strategic marketing approach to developing exhibits, which involved making both ON’s business goals and its brand identity central to the exhibit design.
What’s in a Brand?
“Many companies think their logo and their colors are their brand, but branding goes well beyond that,” explains Karin Roberts, marketing director of The Tradeshow Network Marketing Group. “You need to identify your business goals, marketing objectives and target markets and determine how to best portray your brand image and your products in a trade show environment.”
ON competes in the bigger-than-life market for nutritional bars, protein powders, sports beverages, and vitamin, mineral and herbal supplements. To capture its market, ON needed to motivate people to sample its products and understand its quality promise. The new 20-foot by 40-foot exhibit facilitated product sampling.
“The exhibit was the same size as before, but we made the new booth very inviting. Before, people had to walk around the perimeter to sample products. You couldn’t touch the products,” says Chris Roberts, president of The Tradeshow Network Marketing Group. The new exhibit design allowed for open traffic flows by using five kiosks to showcase different products. Each kiosk featured messaging and graphics related to ON advertising, with shelves to display products and a wrap-around table for sampling. The kiosks could also be used individually at smaller shows.
“The benefit of the new booth is that we can display more products – not just our newest products but our older standards,” Corbett says.
To convey the ON branding, the exhibit showcased the new ON logo all over the booth, including a 10-foot banner atop a 16-foot-tall metal structure. Although the exhibit appears very strong, in keeping with ON’s bodybuilding market, the materials used are lighter weight than the previous exhibit’s, netting savings in shipping and setup charges. The exhibit also has enough secured storage space to hold product samples and avoid off-site storage charges and hassles.
Beyond the Booth
The strategic marketing approach also extends to developing the marketing materials that can help drive qualified traffic to a booth and build brand awareness.
For Rite Aid’s pharmacist recruitment efforts, for example, the entire program was built on market research conducted into pharmacists’ career concerns and the messages that resonate with them. For the first time, the recruitment materials were designed to match the company’s consumer brand marketing. The new booth and its marketing strategy attracted 63 percent more pharmacists and pharmacy students than in prior years and helped Rite Aid appear more prominent than even its biggest competitors.
As Chris Roberts puts it, “We work with every client to articulate a measurable business objective for their marketing and how trade shows fit into that effort. Then we make sure we’ve met that objective.”