t some time or other, we’ve all been asked to get our “creative juices” flowing, but my first introduction to these mysterious fluids came in fourth grade, under the tutelage of Mrs. Lunde. In addition to notebooks and pencils, Mrs. Lunde required all her students to come to English class with an unusual writing implement: a green pen. The verdant ink, she assured us, was the manifestation of our imaginative potential — our own inky, inventive au jus, if you will.
I’m not sure the green pens
really freed us from the confines of conventionality, but decades later, I’m encouraging exhibit and event professionals to grab their own green pens and start thinking outside the boring black-Bic box. Why now? Because that juicy creativity is exactly what we need to pull our face-to-face marketing efforts up by the bootstraps and out of the collective doldrums of the Great Recession.
According to brand-experience agency Jack Morton Worldwide, this year will see a healthy return to originality as a weapon for competitive differentiation. “At worst, it’ll be unbridled ‘for the sake of it’ originality. At best, ‘Let’s do something only our brand could do,’” said Jack Morton’s Ben Taylor in the company’s 2011 Trend Predictions report. “There may have been some recessionary caution and cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all thinking before, but marketers have seen the success of brands that dared to be different and (ironically) they want to get in on that game.”
Hallelujah! When marketing budgets universally imploded in 2009, innovation was deemed too expensive for our conservative corporate tastes, and the result was a boatload of blasé booths full of boring activities and demos that rendered brand experiences more like elementary-school carnival games than memorable, transformative, awareness-generating campaigns.
EXHIBITOR2011 heralded the marketing migration from been-there-done-that booths to outside-the-box exhibitry with creative concepts that ran the gamut from Derse Inc.’s invitation to step outside your comfort zone, walk through a pitch-black tunnel, and plop a squat on a bed of nails, to staffers at the 3D Exhibits Inc. booth who challenged visitors to evolve their thinking in unexpected ways inside a space that looked more like an ultra-hip hangout than a traditional trade show structure. Their message, sent loudly and clearly via their own example: Differentiate yourself by, well, being different.
Sadly, I fear that Taylor’s advice — and the examples on display at EXHIBITOR2011 — might fall on temporarily deaf ears, as many
marketers are still retraining their brains to think with reckless, creative abandon. I heard many attendees at the show use excuses like “our clients are too stuffy for that kind of activity” to justify their stagnant, status quo strategies
of setting up standard structures and hoping leads magically materialize by the time the show ends.
Sure, ignoring the norm is inherently risky, but isn’t standing out amid the aisles your first step toward breaking free of the boring old mold?
I’m not asking you to pepper your booth with stripper poles and booth babes (but that would certainly generate attention). Your risks still need to be calculated and appropriate given your objectives. But more often than not, the campaigns deemed successful on the trade show floor are the ones that introduce something different, something unexpected, something nobody at that show has ever seen before.
So pull out your green pens and get your creative juices flowing.
Take a risk, and zig where others zag. Identify the norms in your industry and defy them. Step outside your comfort zone and evolve in unexpected ways. Before you know it, your creative ideas coupled with bold execution will have you seeing green in more ways than one.e
t some time or other, we’ve all been asked to get our “creative juices” flowing, but my first introduction to these mysterious fluids came in fourth grade, under the tutelage of Mrs. Lunde. In addition to notebooks and pencils, Mrs. Lunde required all her students to come to English class with an unusual writing implement: a green pen. The verdant ink, she assured us, was the manifestation of our imaginative potential — our own inky, inventive au jus, if you will.
