We wanted to ensure we stood out from the crowd at this year’s Exhibiting Show, that took place at Earls Court in London in June 2007. Now that’s not easy at an Industry show, when you’re up against your best competition! We knew the biggest threat would come from the custom build suppliers, who tend to really ‘up the ante’ for this show and we didn’t want them stealing the lime-light.

We had four key show objectives: we wanted our stand to be memorable, to really engage with visitors, to generate some good PR/media coverage and to collect at least 400 leads.

To help us achieve the ‘wow’ factor and since Nomadic Display is synonymous with the colour red, we decided the theme of our stand would be ‘Red is the Colour’. Our stand was completely red, from top to bottom! The layout was very simple, we used four 3 metre high Instand pop up frames in a symmetrical design and really enhanced the graphics with bright lighting. To add a final touch we placed two ‘Mae West’ lip sofas on the stand. In contrast, the Nomadic stand team was dressed from head to toe in black business suits, with red name badges that matched the stand graphics.

We took the theme of colour one step further. The distinct red colour of our stand prompted visitors to stop and engage in conversation with the Nomadic team and to participate in our ‘Colour Survey’. Since 98% of our senses are geared towards visual imagery, when you are designing your exhibition stand you need to think very carefully about the colours you choose. Most companies invariably feature corporate colours on their stand, so a high percentage of any show floor will be covered in the most popular colour. We wanted to find out what that was.

We asked visitors to tell us what their corporate colours were and what was their favourite colour. On completion of the survey, every visitor was given a trendy sticker in the shape of a pair of red lips to put on their lapel (it was great to see hundreds of visitors walking around the show promoting Nomadic wearing red lips stickers!).

16 colours appeared in the Corporate poll. Orange, purple, green, red and blue are the most popular corporate colours, whilst violet and pink are the least. However blue was the clear winner with 37% of the poll.

11 colours featured as personal favourites. Green and red feature heavily, receiving 14% and 19% of votes respectively, but again blue was the clear winner with 35%. Silver, brown and white were at the bottom end of the scale, receiving one vote each.

So the results give a clear message, in order to ensure your stand is memorable and sticks out from the crowd you need to use bright, striking, vibrant colours but most important is, steer clear of blue! Conducting the Colour Survey and compiling the results served several purposes. Firstly, we gained a useful insight into our potential customers i.e. the visitors we took the leads from. Then we used the survey results as part of our ‘follow up’ process and sent an email to all visitors giving them the survey data and design advise based on the results.

Plus the results from the Survey together with our strong show theme ‘Red is the Colour’, have enabled us to gain great PR and media coverage.

So, did we achieve our final objective of collecting 400 leads? I am delighted to say we surpassed our lead goal this year, achieving a total of 508 leads. Better still, at time of writing, we have already gained 42 appointments and are working hard to convert the opportunities!

Laura Moody
Managing Director
Nomadic Display UK