High-Tech Firms Are Big Showoffs, Booth Builders Say

An exhibit booth--just the booth, not the people--was once taken hostage by a New York trucking company in a dispute with an air freight firm over an unpaid bill. The kidnaping stunt worked.

The panicked company that owned the booth scurried to scrape together something--anything--else for the trade show that was about to open in Washington. Meanwhile, it pleaded for a settlement and, barely in time, the deal was made and the booth set free.

An exhibit booth can cost as much as $250,000, but its value extends beyond mere monetary considerations. For many companies, especially in the high-technology industry, a trade show exhibit is a matter of pride.

As much as a logo, and sometimes in lieu of advertising, an exhibit booth can establish a company’s image and help generate sales.

“The booth’s design is an intangible,” said Lee Knight, editor of the trade journal Exhibitor. “The image of a company is important, and it’s extraordinarily important, especially in high-risk industries like high technology, that the image is correct.”

Knight’s publication, which first made note of the booth-naping incident, takes a serious view of exhibits and the statements they make about the sponsoring companies.

The emphasis on image and booth design has been a boon to companies in the trade show supplies and services business.

Of the $21 billion being spent on trade shows by exhibitors and attendees this year, at least $2 billion will go for designing, building and refurbishing booths, according to the Trade Show Bureau, a research organization.

Knight believes that the booth figure is actually much higher--$12 billion--and adds in costs of shipping, storing and maintaining the booths. But there is general agreement that while the trade show business itself has blossomed (Knight said it has doubled in the last dozen years to more than 9,000 shows this year), the booth business has grown even faster.

Most industry observers credit that to the high-technology industry, which has taken to the trade show circuit like nobody’s business.

Its premier shows (the twice-annual Consumer Electronics Show and Comdex events) are second in size only to the National Homebuilders Assn. annual show. And for sheer numbers of gatherings, only the health-care professions seem to rival electronics companies in their zest for shows, conferences and exhibits.

More important for booth designers and builders, the high-technology industry has shortened the life span of the average booth.

A booth might last a conservative medical products company 15 or 20 years, but in the fast-paced high-tech industry, the companies generally “are ready after four or five years for a new booth,” said Donna Fletcher, marketing director at Blue Peter, a San Francisco exhibit design company.

It’s not because the booths physically give out in that short a time but because the high-tech products themselves have shorter life cycles and companies want to update the booths as products change.

“Technology has been the best thing to happen to trade shows and exhibit design in 20 years,” Knight said. “Historically the exhibit booth had been built to last 20 years.

“When the (personal) computer industry really was hot, products were obsolescing faster than the exhibits. In an industry where perception is reality, if (your company is) perceived to have an exhibit that’s not state-of-the-art, then it reflects back on your company’s products.”

Compaq, a Houston computer maker, is a case in point. When it exhibited at the spring Comdex, it centered its stylized booth on its then-latest product, the Portable II computer.

But by the fall Comdex, held earlier this month in Las Vegas, it had a new product to showcase, a machine based on the new Intel 80386 microprocessor.

Giant Replicas

Visiting the Compaq booth, designed by Southern Display in Houston, is like stepping into a techno-version of “The Borrowers” or the “Valley of the Giants,” where the characters are dwarfed by their surroundings.

Flanking the booth, huge diskettes stand like sentries, and the tables that hold the display products are microprocessors that somehow have mutated to a hundred times their normal tiny size.

At one end stands the giant replica Portable II. At the other, an even bigger “386” machine, with a giant screen, towers above the showroom floor. Where the keyboard should be is a mini-theater, allowing the seemingly doll-size visitors to view a video presentation of the company’s products.

Compaq’s wasn’t the only eye-catching booth at Comdex. The show was a veritable feast of innovation--in shapes, colors and materials. “Comdex is the leading edge of exhibit design,” Knight said.

Computer Associates, which last year nearly filled its booth with a $400,000 yacht and other nautical gimmicks to carry out its product-launch theme, this year sported a racing motif, complete with women garbed in jockey silks.

The Wyse Technology booth has high-tech written all over it, with gray grid backdrops lit by yellow neon and sleek display tables supported by bright yellow poles.

In such a setting, even the carpet substitute, webbed interlocking squares of resilient flooring called dek-matting, looks avant-garde despite having been borrowed from the restaurant industry, where it serves a spills-draining function behind bars.

Cream of the Crop

Knight said IBM, whose Charlie Chaplin look-alike mascot frolicked on a revolving stage during a giant video-and-laser show, was the cream of the crop in terms of effective presentation. But the Altos booth, designed by Blue Peter, was the most beautiful, he said.

With opaque white globes perched atop columns and joined by angled metal tubes, it creates “a truly magical” atmosphere, Knight said. “It is an exhibit that continues to hold up over the two or three years I’ve seen it, and in different configurations.”

Fletcher of Blue Peter said: “Comdex shows have a playful attitude in booth design. If you want to see something different, you’ll see it at Comdex or CES.”

One of the most important aspects of booth design, say the companies that build and use them, is versatility.

A company might occupy 160 square feet at one show and only 120 square feet at the next. So most modern booths are modular, allowing sections to be left out or added, depending on the focus of the show and its appeal to the company’s targeted audience.

Siemens’ new booth is the latest in modular design, with octagonal support poles that allow section pieces to be attached at eight different angles--meaning the booth can be taken apart and put back together in countless configurations.

One of the most unusual booths making the high-tech trade show circuit these days belongs to Tallgrass Technologies, a Kansas firm that makes mass-storage devices for computers.

Its jungle theme started out as an inexpensive packaging design concept, the brainchild of co-founder Steven Volk, a zoologist who used his pet scarlet macaws as photographic models. But the theme has become one of the best-remembered images in the business.

Tallgrass’ booth, designed by Chicago-based Echo Designs, is modular without the stark look that characterizes many of the others. It is replete with coconut-laden palm trees and jungle foliage, fake birds and monkeys (and sound tracks as well), bamboo work stations, a babbling brook and a temple a la the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” movies (it calls it Kansas Jones’ Temple).

Corrine O. Smith, Tallgrass’ manager of public relations, who donned a khaki safari outfit for trade show duty, said the booth is like an “oasis” amid the hubbub of a thousand or more exhibits. And, she said, the serene setting “is very conducive to sales.”

Large companies with several divisions that will be exhibiting at different trade shows may own several booths. The booth Panasonic uses at the Consumer Electronics Show “is like a city,” said James Cullen, who was staffing Panasonic’s smaller, computer-oriented booth at Comdex.

And, while Comdex and CES have historically been the staging ground for booth design innovations, some of the smaller, more specialized high-tech shows are sparking a new wave of booth creativity.

Trade shows for the robotics, artificial intelligence and graphics segments of the industry are particularly design-oriented.

The most recent National Computer Graphics Assn. show, held in Anaheim this past summer, was a true case of sensory overload, with glitzy booths housing even glitzier displays of technological wizardry.

There, popeyed attendees were lured from one booth to the next by video shows and demonstrations, often involuntarily ooh -ing and ah -ing at the sights.

Set the Standard

The high-tech industry has “an inherent interest in design. . . . When they describe good computers or software, they use words like ‘elegance,’ ” said the Exhibitor’s Knight, who credited Apple Computer and its aesthetic-minded former chairman, Steven P. Jobs, with setting a design standard for the industry with its introduction of the Macintosh in 1984.

“Also, it’s a high-risk business. The people in it take more chances, and also with exhibit design they take more chances.”

But all this attention to state-of-the-art design has had a sobering side effect. Years ago, trade shows were thought of as a good marketing gimmick that brought the buyers to the sellers, transferring some of the costs onto the buyers as well.

But trade shows are not cheap for the companies that exhibit. Now, many of them are paying closer attention to their participation at trade shows, balancing costs against results.

Panasonic calculated that sending 20-some sales people to staff its 50-by-100-foot booth at Comdex cost $17 per person per minute.

It cost Xebec more than $250,000 to take its booth to Las Vegas and participate in the show, said Darrell Echols, president of the company’s peripherals division.

Its two-level booth, made by Exhibit Group in San Francisco, initially cost about $150,000. At Comdex, where floor space cost $24 a square foot this year (it will increase by $3 next year), Xebec paid $63,000 just to get into the hall.

Then, in addition to personnel costs, there are added costs applying specifically to the booth, such as $22,000 to set it up and tear it down, $6,700 to ship it, and smaller items, such as $1,500 in cleaning fees, $500 to rent plants and $300 to run an electrical line to the booth.

“It does pay for itself but, unfortunately for the smaller companies, at about $250,000 for a show this size, not as many can afford it,” said Echols.

The long list of expenses has led many companies to reevaluate their attendance at the larger shows, with many preferring to spend their dollars on more segment-specific events.

For instance, this year Apple put on its own dealer-oriented events and attended shows devoted to desktop publishing but skipped Comdex.

Allows for Sidestepping

As trade shows become more prevalent and more costly, they have taken on greater importance in a company’s overall marketing strategy, especially in high-tech, where they allow vendors to sidestep slower-moving distribution channels and bring products to the consumers’ attention in a timelier fashion.

“The real revolution (in exhibit booths) is not in design,” said Knight, “but in the emphasis on marketing strategy.” What the companies that attend trade shows are just now learning to do, he said, is to make the transition from presenting to selling.

It’s a case, perhaps, of function following form. “I love exhibits,” he said, “but I have a lot of complaints.” Knight said that many companies fail to set goals for developing solid business from the potential customers who visit the booth. “And in that,” he said, “design is important, but not critical.”