After spending a great deal of time securing your marketing budget and defining the marketing plan you are now able to invite eager exhibition stand designers to pitch for your project. Now that you have an idea of what you want, you write down a few notes and search the internet for a handful of likely candidates. This is really easy and you arrange to meet six exhibition designers. The exhibition companies are pleased to have been given a written document, at least one of them comments that they hardly ever get a brief and often have to work in the dark. They all have about two weeks to deliver some concepts, costs and you are starting to get excited. One company drops out, they say they are too busy. Still five exhibition designers left. This should give you a good range of ideas.
Film Club at The Education Show
Now five exhibition design studios across the country are busy working on your brief. They would prefer not to be pitching but recognise that it is fairly standard in this industry and have learnt to accept it. They have three pitches on at the moment, they should win one. Let’s hope it’s the big one. Time is precious, so much to do, everyone is scurrying around. The existing clients still need looking after, “Can anyone drop onto this pitch to help us meet the deadline?”. Creativity is hard when under pressure but somehow these designers deliver, the concept looks good, comes within budget and the team is confident. This one will be ours.
The day of the presentation, the exhibition designers are on the train, you are busy discussing another project, the 2009 brochure.
The receptionist calls through, the exhibition designers are here. Great, can’t wait to see what they have done…
The result ultimately depends on what has been written in the brief. The importance of the bried cannot be expressed enough and the project will fail or succeed by this document. It is incredible how hungry designers are for information on a project. Questions, questions, questions. Why? how? where? how may? what size? Defining the fixed parameters of the project is quite simple, details of products and services can be referred to examples can be presented and technical specifications made available. It takes time but allows the exhibition designers to explore the details of the products/services and immerse themselves in your world.
Source: Brocklander
Defining the direction is marginally harder but with imagination and conviction the project will be given a document that not only tells the designers how big things are but also tells them about the USP, the target audience, market sector and will really contribute to the success of the pitch process. Use existing advertising campaigns to help tell the story, describe what went well and what didn’t work. Define the audience/customers, what do they want to see. Don’t feel that this is giving the exhibition designers an unfair advantage, mutual understanding of clients and suppliers is vital to the success of the project and the success of this project will reflect well on you and your Company.
Ignition understands that writing a brief can be a difficult art to master and that the exhibiting process can be confusing. Help is rarely at hand but we have created an in depth guide to help you with this. Our exhibition stand guide is available on our website and can be downloaded as a pdf.