Food Brand Trade ShowBoost Food Brand Trade Show Impact with These 3 Tips
Beyond Meat made a HUGE impact at the 2019 #NRA (National Restaurant Association) show.
Have you ever been stopped in your tracks by an incredible display or exhibit while walking a trade show? I know I have.
It happened to me at the 2019 NRA (National Restaurant Association) trade show in Chicago. The Beyond Meat open booth design, coupled with a branded central tower made it impossible to miss and inviting to enter—no matter how crowded the space about the booth was.
It said one thing: We are THE NEXT BIG THING.
A simple, clean, clear food brand trade show statement that communicated more in one visual than a thousand words could do. If that was the intent, the Beyond Meat exhibit show rocked.
Most trade show exhibits (like this one) look like a brochure reconfigured on a wall.
Your company will spend a lot of money getting there (renting the space, display costs, shipping costs, travel costs, accommodation costs, etc.). The last thing anyone needs at a trade show is a presentation that does not do the heavy lifting and invite a conversation or business opportunity.
So when NewPoint clients are looking for trade display content solutions, the NewPoint team is primed to create an impact by adhering to 3 simple things:
1. Identify the top message hierarchy your company needs your primary audience to know
This should be a no-brainer but sometimes gets forgotten in the pursuit of any and every sale. Your company is spending a lot of money at the trade show, so invite as much business as possible. I agree that is true but keep in mind—that is why we recommend a message hierarchy. The most powerful food brand trade show message and space should are for the audience or prospect that is the best fit and highest margin sale for the exhibiting company. Reel them in, and the rest is gravy.
2. Keep it Simple
One of the hardest things about food brand trade show development is realizing that regardless of how ample or impressive a company’s exhibit space is, the message may be missed if the presentation is cluttered and not easily seen. It doesn’t help that trade shows themselves are a big mess of noisy, messy clutter all competing for the audience’s attention.
The simple fact is, like the exhibit shown above, most trade show exhibits have a lot more in common with billboards than brochures. Like billboards, trade show exhibits have very little time to communicate a message to the target audience. A car zipping down the highway at 70 mph cannot read the fine print on a billboard. That billboard has one shot at getting a straightforward message to the audience.
After the message hierarchy is in place, it’s time to develop that special, simple, strategically crafted message to draw in the company’s coveted target audience.
3. Don’t Be Boring
When planning a new food brand trade show exhibit, try to picture all the booths at the last trade show your team visited. Is there one that stood out? How about the competitor? Did they have anything special that warranted a second look or conversation? Chances are there are very few exhibits that make a person stop and take serious notice as the Beyond Meat exhibit did to me all those years ago. And if most exhibits are boring to you and me, just imagine what the target audience must think.
Simply put, if at all possible, do not take the safe option that probably mirrors the competitors and does not stand out in the clutter.
These three simple steps for trade show exhibit design are not easy to achieve. Like any impactful marketing message, it takes focus, discipline, and, most importantly, the blessing of the stakeholders to get there.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.