FLOORING OPTIONS
 For years, my company has used standard rental carpet in its exhibits. But we’re considering purchasing a new booth this year, and I’d love to amp up our underfoot appeal. What are some new options available to make our flooring a little less forgettable?
 Think of your exhibit floor as the fifth wall of your booth. It’s more than just something you walk on: It can grab attention, pull prospects into your space, tie together all your exhibit elements, and reinforce your brand. Plus, good exhibit flooring can help set your booth apart from the crowd while matching your overall design and meeting your budget.
Fortunately, there are more choices available today than ever before. Here are six options to make your exhibit flooring a little more memorable.
1. Hardwood flooring, eco-friendly bamboo, or rollable flooring in a realistic hardwood or stone pattern provides an upscale look with functional benefits. Comparable to traditional wood flooring, new wood-flooring options are faster and easier to install and dismantle, and some are available for lease or rental. Many of the simulated wood- and stone-like floors install like carpet or interlock using tiles, and real wood floors now install on tracks. Plus, all options have the added benefit of providing easy wire management. With rollable-vinyl wood and stone floors, you can use a dense urethane padding atop the wires. Interlocking floors can be routed to house wires within them, and the tracks on wood floors raise the wood off the ground by more than three-quarters of an inch, allowing you to run wires beneath them.
2. Modular floor tiles are a versatile option because they are easy to install, dismantle, and customize. You can create patterns using different-colored tiles, or order tiles with custom colors, wood and stone patterns, inlays, or your company name or logo. Modular tiles are extremely flexible and cost effective because you can replace individual tiles if they become damaged, rather than having to replace the entire floor.
3. Printed flooring provides some new and eye-catching flooring options, thanks to advancements in wide-format printing and materials. You can have photo-quality, full-color graphics digitally printed onto carpet, vinyl, or floor graphics. In dye-sublimated and infusion-dyed carpet, the dye is imbedded directly in the fiber, so it is washable and extremely durable. FlexFloor and Floor graphics can be printed on flatbed printers with UV inks to allow for maximum quality and durability.
4. Carpet offers more than just the standard rental options. There are many more colors, styles, and textures available now, and it is customizable. You can have your carpet custom dyed to match your brand colors or the overall look of your exhibit.
5. Green products continue to be important to customers, and Green flooring shows them that you care about the environment. Natural flooring products such as sisal, sea grass, cork, and bamboo instantly add a Green look and feel to your exhibit. There also are more options available in eco-friendly carpet, including new fibers made from recycled plastic bottles and new styles of corn-based polymer carpet. A number of Green modular-flooring choices are available, too, including tiles made from recycled materials and tiles without PVC-based backing.
6. Inlays, which are created by setting a different color or material into a floor to create a pattern or logo, are another way to punch up your flooring, and combining materials and textures is a big trend right now. Consider inlaying your carpet with hardwood, rollable flooring, turf carpet, recycled rubber, or vinyl, or inlaying a wood floor with one or more contrasting types of wood. You can use inlays to draw people into your exhibit or to highlight a certain area or product.
Many of these more-memorable options are also cost effective. While carpeting ranges from $1 to $5 per square foot, inventive options such as inlays will only run you roughly $5 to $15 per square foot more, which is cost effective considering the added attention they’ll typically generate. In fact, you may be able to invest in a new floor for not much more — or even less — than you’re currently paying to rent exhibit carpet.
— Dave Walens, president, Brumark, Marietta, GA
AUDIENCE-PROFILE DEFINITIONS
I’m a newbie to target-audience segmentation and profiling, and I’m confused by the related terms. Can you provide quick definitions of some of the most common terms such as target market, psychographics, market segmentation, etc.?
I’m glad you’ve discovered the benefits of target-audience segmentation, as it can help you make better and more consistent decisions about how to efficiently and effectively market to your customers. Hopefully the following definitions of some of the common terms associated with audience profiling will help clear up your confusion.
Target Market — Your target market is anyone that is a potential customer for your business. In a business-to-business setting, your target market is filled with businesses and organizations that might purchase your product in the future.
Market Segmentation — This term refers to the process by which you break down your target market into various groups for more focused and varied communication. For example, you might segment your market by type of products purchased or the amount of products purchased.
Demographics — Audience demographics include a wide range of measurable statistics, such as age, geographic location, occupation, income, gender, etc.
Psychographics — Beyond demographics, you can also categorize your target audience by their psychographics — attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. Psychographic research might reveal your target audience loves country music, prefers to live in an urban environment, attends church regularly, and maintains a moderately active lifestyle.
Target Audience — A target audience is a distinct group or segment of potential customers within your target market. For example, let’s say your target market includes any company that buys windows. Within your market, you might identify three target audiences: retail stores, home-owners, and commercial businesses. You might segment your groups even further to identify two distinct groups of retail stores (maybe rural stores and urban stores), three groups of homeowners (those with children, retired couples, and singles), and two groups of commercial businesses (those on the East Coast and those in the Midwest).
Narrowcasting — The opposite of broadcasting, narrowcasting involves creating marketing messages for a specific target-audience segment. For example, while you might broadcast new product information to your entire target market, you might choose to narrowcast specific benefits of that product to a single target audience within your market. Then you might opt to narrowcast key messages about pricing to a different target audience.
— Todd Simon, director business development and marketing, MC², Chestnut Ridge, NJ
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