Making an Exhibition of Yourself

A day at Hospitality 2011 yesterday at the NEC provided me with some food for thought….


Most exhibitions don’t come cheap, yet it’s surprising just how many businesses fail to maximise their investment from a PR perspective:

Here are ten top tips:

1. Start early - remember deadlines may be months ahead of the actual event

2. Take time to read through the exhibitors’ manual, some are extremely informative and can save you lots of time

3. Find out which magazines are planning show/exhibition preview features and check editorial deadlines (remember ‘copy deadlines’ often refer to advertising deadlines, which will be a lot later than editorial deadlines)

4. Prepare your show preview press release highlighting what you will be exhibiting (ideally something new)

5. Distribute your release, along with a professional high res image

6. Spread the word – tell everyone you’ll be there. Don’t forget regional and social media!

7. Invite key journalists to visit your stand

8. Prepare a press pack for the show – a journalist’s first stop will be the exhibition press lounge, so make sure you have press packs available, summarising who you are and what you’re exhibiting

9. Unless you’ve got something really special to unveil/announce don’t waste your time hosting a press conference at the show – it’s usually better to work with the media one to one

10. Prepare a show follow up release – sing about your success!

Happy Birthday Apple

It’s just a year since mega brand Apple opened its fabulous, shiny new Norwich store – an event that drew massive crowds to Chapelfield Mall, with the first fans lining up just after 7am.

There were no special offers, no tempting discounts, no celebrities – just a store full of impressive technology – and highly-prized special edition t-shirts for the first 1,000 through the doors.

I was in the fortunate position of handling local media relations for the launch and I have to say from a PR perspective, working with such a mega brand was an extremely interesting experience.

As a rule, big names such as Apple let their products do the work for them - they barely need PR. Build it and they will come.

So, they probably weren’t prepared for laid back Norfolk, where a good chunk of local media seemed distinctly unimpressed with the imminent arrival of a global blockbusting brand. Clearly it would take more than ‘the opening of a new shop’ to rock their boat (to make matters worse, the launch coincided with the end of the Norfolk Food Festival and some journalists seemed to think I was talking about the opening of a new fruit and veg shop)….

Thankfully Norfolk’s core of Apple fans needed no encouragement to get up at the crack of dawn for this momentous occasion – giving the local press some great pictures. The t-shirts were gone in an hour and the store’s been packed ever since.

Well, the morale of this story is that there are no certainties in PR – especially when you’re dealing with the regional media. PR might sometimes look like a doddle, but in common with most trades and professions, there’s usually much more to it than meets the eye…