Building up success in stand construction
The right positioning is what matters. Four steps will help general exhibition service contractors set themselves up as a unique corporate brand.
Practically all exhibition construction companies know from their clients shopping lists that the right positioning is what matters. But what the industry contractors practise for their customers - market communication serving to shore up their positioning - seems to be neglected when it comes to their own strategies.
The findings of the current market and industry review "Exhibition and Communication Building in Germany 2005" show the exhibition construction industry battling with image deficits as persistent as they are unjustified. In some cases, though, these are also self-inflicted.
All too many exhibit builders are still not clear enough on their own positioning objectives and the strategies to achieve them. They run danger of giving themselves the wrong image, causing them to miss market and growth potential or to forfeit it to more clearly positioned rivals.
Reducing these risks and turning them into opportunities is not a black art. The following four steps will help exhibition service contractors position themselves as a unique corporate brand, regardless of the content that they put into that brand:
Step 1:
Identify and activate image capital
Step 2:
Cultivate core competences
Step 3:
Specialise, with the focus on the customer
Step 4:
Become a "brand understander" in order to be a "brand maker"
Credible positioning must be underpinned with content suited to a constructive, target-oriented image build-up. To tap into potential of this kind and gain communication capital, all spheres of activity should be explored systematically and with reference to strategic criteria.
The anchors of image positioning are always the constant features that lend the company its unique identity. Exhibit builders should therefore perceive their core construction competencies as a value and make self-confident use of this to build up their image. The study finds that denying onés own beginnings is unhelpful: Two-thirds of marketing decision-makers find would-be positioning based on such branding vocabulary as "brand stager" implausible or untrustworthy.
But for that, 82.2 % of respondents consider it extremely important that the overall contractor possess construction expertise. This suggests that marketing executives are well aware of the value of exhibit building competence. Indeed, 42.9 % of them are prepared to pay for special technical counselling expertise.
However, this presupposes that the exhibition construction firm specifically trains special skills and develops them into marketable offers. But rather than being done - as so often - from a purely insider perspective, this must focus strictly on the customer instead.
More than ever before, exhibition contractors must themselves become "brand understanders". The study shows that 84 % of decision-makers set store by their suppliers being able to demonstrate marketing and brand expertise. They evidently believe that the company with the best understanding of their brand is also best able to "build their brand". Suppliers of exhibition construction services that have themselves become brands as a result of deliberate market positioning have a clear competitive edge not only in this respect. Jochen Pett
m+a report Nr.8 / 2005 vom 08.12.2005
m+a report vom 8. Dezember 2005