A trade show display has to do one thing in about half a second:

Allow passers by to decide if they should stop at your booth. That’s it.

To do that, it should be visually striking, and informative. The information should be in bold, short, jargon-free words. As someone is walking by, without slowing down, they should be able to turn their head and read:

• Who you are
• What you do
• Why they should (or should not) stop

The should not’s are just as important as the shoulds. You don’t want to waste your time on the wrong folks – or worse, have the so booth crowded with the wrong visitors that you don’t have time to spend with the right ones.

The display type I’m showing you does this (if you design it well). It also has the benefits of being:

• Cheap – less than $300 to produce (exclusive of design costs)
• Fast to set up. Because anyone can do it in 5 min – no need to pay union wages for help you don’t need, or pay for shipping and storage costs at inflated prices, or fly in the night before to set up.
• Easy to transport. We carry ours in a surf-board bag. It has straps like a back pack. We can check in on an airplane, and walk it right into the show.
• Looks great. It’s not huge and overwhelming like those WALL O’ VELCRO displays, but it does look professional. And most of those wall displays have so much jargon and fluff in them they don’t do what they’re supposed to anyway.

It’s made of 3 posters. Each 24×36 inches mounted on sturdy plastic or foam core. Once your designer comes up with a PDF file, Kinko’s can print and mount them for about $80 each. Put a table across the back of the booth (a high table gives more visibility) and mount them on small easels. That’s it.

We use another table across the side of the booth to lay out literature. We try to get a corner booth so people can see it from two angles.

Takeaways:

• If the show is a buying show where people come to place orders then you probably want to highlight the merchandise, and a cheap display is not what you want.
• If it’s not a buying show, at least half the benefit comes from what you do after the show with the contacts you made there. If you don’t do that right you should evaluate whether to do the show at all.