Objectives are essential. If you don't have an objective, you won't know if you have been successful or not. You won't have a bench mark against which to measure future success. The key to an objective is to make sure that you undertake activity that matches it. So for instance, if your objective is to meet ten key players in the industry and tell them about the new product you are launching, don't (a) complain when you didn't sell fifty of your products and (b) invite everybody else in the industry onto your stand. It is not how it is going to work. What you need to do is to then target those ten key players, invite them to your stand for a briefing and brief them. Objective and activity must be matched and in harmony and that means you can develop all kinds of activity around an exhibition stand above and beyond simple sales. Because then opportunity for the community to gather together, for the market to be represented and for you to exploit that, to match branding objectives, P.R objectives, sales objectives, channel support objectives, indeed anything you might normally set out to achieve through your marking is unmatched precisely because exhibitions are so flexible.
