Building for the Long Term
Part 3: Observations from Europe In my first article, I reflected on Europe’s healthier rhythm of life compared to North America, where hustle culture often […]
Insights
Trade shows are more than gatherings. They are concentrated environments of physical media — spaces where booths, conversations, objects, and hospitality become channels for credibility. In an increasingly digital-first world, they remain one of the most powerful ways to let customers literally feel your brand.
But trade shows are only one part of the picture. Offices, hospitality, and designed experiences all play roles in building trust face-to-face. Together, these elements form what can be called strategic physicality: the deliberate use of physical presence to deepen relationships, increase credibility, and elevate brand esteem.
In Part 1, I shared a failure story: how the wrong branded object damaged credibility. In Part 2, I showed the opposite: how the right object earned desk real estate and became a daily media channel. If a desk object is a billboard of one, a trade show is billboards at scale. In this final part, I’ll zoom out to the environments where physical presence scales — trade shows — and explain how strategic physicality turns presence into trust.
During COVID, trade shows vanished almost overnight. Their absence was revealing. When business lost physical presence, it lost more than handshakes. It lost the ability to connect, persuade, and accelerate trust in concentrated moments.
Today, trade shows are back — stronger than expected. Industry bodies like UFI (the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry) report record revenues in 2024. In fact, UFI’s 2024 report found that exhibitors continue to rank trade shows among the top three most effective B2B channels for ROI — second only to direct sales. Harvard Business Review has echoed the point, noting that live events compress months of relationship-building into days.
The reason is simple: our brains prefer presence. Research from Yale and MIT shows that in-person interactions trigger stronger neural engagement in areas tied to attention, memory, and social trust compared to video calls. Research confirms this: a Harvard Business Review piece summarized multiple studies showing that face-to-face conversations build trust and cooperation more effectively than email or video calls (Schroeder & Epley, 2016; HBR, 2017).
Trade shows compress these benefits into a few days. Buyers, influencers, competitors, and media all converge in one space. A strong presence can accelerate a brand years forward in a single weekend — if every physical cue reinforces credibility.
Trade shows are a form of media in their own right:
Neuroscience backs this up: multisensory environments are encoded more deeply in memory, making events like trade shows more “sticky” than digital impressions alone (Krishna, 2012; MIT AgeLab, 2022).
Seen this way, trade shows aren’t just events. They are large-scale physical media platforms — environments designed to deliver impressions, credibility, and trust.
Trade shows are expensive: booth space, design, travel, staffing, logistics. But the concentration of opportunity is unmatched.
I learned this early. At a futon convention in New Orleans more than 20 years ago, we arrived expecting to book meetings during the show. Instead, we discovered that the most valuable buyers were already spoken for. Golf games, dinners, and hospitality suites had been pre-booked weeks in advance. We couldn’t get time on the floor or off it because the real agenda had already been set.
That lesson has stayed with me: trade shows aren’t just about the floor. They’re about the experiences designed around the floor. The organizations that treat hospitality and pre-booked interactions as part of their strategy are the ones that win.
“Experiential marketing” is everywhere right now. Most executives feel they should know what it means, but many struggle to define it.
Here’s a practical way to think about it: experiential marketing is the deliberate design of physical or sensory encounters that make a brand real.
Sometimes it looks big and bold, like IKEA hosting overnight sleepovers in their stores or Nike Run Clubs that blend product trial with community. But it can also look small and subtle: the 20 minutes a client spends in your office, or the atmosphere in a hospitality suite at a trade show.
In all cases, it’s about physical media. The experience itself is the channel. And research confirms why it works: multisensory cues deepen emotional memory and build credibility in ways that slogans or digital impressions alone cannot (Krishna, 2012).
One of the most underestimated elements of trade shows and experiential marketing is the role of promotional products. Too often they’re treated as afterthoughts. In reality, when chosen carefully and executed well, they operate almost invisibly — camouflaged within someone’s daily routine — yet performing highly strategic work.
Specialists in this industry design objects that are reliable, tactile, and aligned with brand standards. Their work may not command the spotlight the way a keynote or booth architecture does, but it plays a crucial role in carrying the brand experience beyond the event.
These are the items that sit quietly on a desk, slip into a bag, or become part of a daily ritual — each use another subtle reinforcement of credibility. Their strength lies in blending in, being used naturally, while steadily building recall and goodwill.
At trade shows, think of them as continuity devices: tangible cues that bridge the in-person encounter with the long-term relationship. The goal isn’t volume. It’s placement. You’re trying to earn desk real estate with an object that is reliable, useful, and ideally better than what the recipient would buy for themselves.
Trade shows are back, but expectations are higher. Audiences are less tolerant of wasted time, generic booths, or low-quality items. Every physical cue matters — from the design of the booth to the reliability of the branded object.
For industries with intangible products — law, finance, consulting, advertising — this is especially true. Their only tangible cues are physical experiences. Offices, booths, and branded objects become their credibility carriers.
That is the real power of strategic physicality: it bridges the gap between invisible services and tangible trust. Trade shows aren’t just events; they are environments where physical media, thoughtfully designed, becomes credibility at scale. That’s why I think of strategic physicality as the bridge between promises and proof.
Over the years, our 6P Marketing team have collected a playbook of best practices for trade show preparation and success as an exhibitor. Some of it is tactical — pre-booking meetings, structuring booth flow, post-show follow-up. Some of it connects directly to the theme of this article: how physical credibility cues carry the relationship forward.
I’ve left those details out of the main article because they could easily fill a piece of their own. But if you’d like to see a future article focused on the nuts and bolts of trade show best practices, let me know. I’d be glad to share.
Part 3: Observations from Europe In my first article, I reflected on Europe’s healthier rhythm of life compared to North America, where hustle culture often […]
Part 2: Observations from Europe In my previous article, I reflected on Europe’s different rhythm of life compared to North America, where work is more […]
Part 1: Observations from Europe This summer (2025), I had the privilege of traveling across Europe, visiting Rome, Venice, Lucerne, Paris, and London. To me, […]
