I worked on the design of 4 years of CES trade show booths, 4 years of CEDIA trade show booths. I concentrated my value in the same way, overall concept, design theme, and direction. I then worked with a design/build shop that only worked on trade show booths. I felt like that was a good mix. My team also did all of the final graphics. A few things I learned from the many many mistakes I made.
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give aways, no one cares. The first couple of years I spent a lot of time on this and it doesn’t matter. One year we even had a coffee shop inside the booth. This proved incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and resulted in a line up the hall for shmoes who wants free coffee.
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develop an overall concept, and then work on the simplest, most effective way to tell that simple story. One year I did an installation of almost every sku Polk and Definitive made hung in a salon art gallery style. Very fun simple idea… until you have to ship 500 sky’s to Vegas and it takes the instal team 2 days to set it up, 2 days to tear it down, and no one cared because it didn’t tell a story other than we make a lot of stuff. The more successful years focused on a small portion of the product line, or better yet, a concept. One year we did “audiophile grade wireless home”… simple, and pointed out implicitly that the competitors were not audiophile level.
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go high. Seems simple, but make sure your booth has clear sight lines (picking the booth location is super important to the design) and make sure you have the appropriate size signage and messaging for the eyeline. IE up at the ceiling, giant logo for across the hall viewing. Midway up tagline and secondary logo for 50-100 ft away. Just above human height, key messaging for less than 15ft away viewing.
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have an instagram moment. One of our competitors came every year with a 10" pair of headphones you can walk between. I thought it was dumb, but then I watched people take selfies under the headphones for 4 days straight… for 4 years straight…