Spell Check your Trade Show Display Graphics!
For a small company, getting your name out there is the most important task in order to attract potential customers. A great way to do this is to participate in one of the larger trade show events, especially one of the shows that are popular enough to bring in thousands of people in just a few days.
A certain small company signed up for their first really big show, were officially assigned a booth, and started working on all of their preparations. They designed some of their own smaller graphics and outsourced the creation of their trade show booths.
Everything seemed to go smoothly, right up until ten days before the actual exhibition, when Murphy’s Law suddenly reared its head. Nobody knew who noticed it first and nobody wanted to be the first to point it out, but in the excitement to prepare for the trade show, somebody had forgotten to use a spell checker and the small company’s name was misspelled on almost all of their literature and trade show display graphics.
Several workers stayed overtime that day, in order to make sure that everything else, including their brochures and posters, was spell checked and grammatically correct. (Everything else was actually fine, which begged the question of how the misspelling occurred in the first place.)
Luckily for the small company, the exhibition was still ten days away and that left them with more than enough time to have replacement graphics printed.
On the day of the actual exhibition, thanks to the scare and all the double and triple checking that had taken place, everyone was confident they were fully prepared and ready for the show. Naturally, the show went well, and today they’re a much larger company – thanks in part to the confidence they had and the effort they made to advertise and ensure their own success.
What does this story tell us? Other than always adding your company’s name to your word processor’s spell check function, there’s no harm done in double checking your trade show display in order to make sure that everything is just as it should be. The simplest mistakes can be the most painful ones.
It’s always much better to spend the effort. Start the planning early, not 2 weeks before the show! Make the time to receive all of the display hardware and trade show signs and banners, and then set it all up! Yes, set up the entire display, with your brochures, turn on the lights and demo video – and then have a 3rd party come check for you. Ask your buddies and your mom to look! Just get it right!