International Furniture Show: Guerrilla Marketing for TradeShows & Events
From 5th to 9th January 2006, the Paris Furniture Fair (‘Salon du Meuble’ in French) – a major European Fair and first Fair of the year – welcomed 1,000 companies from 40 countries and 40,000 international visitors in the chic, French capital.
Benefiting from the network of one of his colleague (network is everything! Thanks Muriel), Doctor Marcom was able to get a free invitation and go and drag his feet to this fair for his well-earned week-end. My initial objective was to find the very special pieces of furniture I have in mind and I still miss to furnish my newly renovated flat, while collecting original ideas to decorate my interior. Once there, my marketing-perverted eyes immediately saw opportunities to write a post for this blog.
Exhibitors’ offers concerned all items related to furniture and home furnishings and interior design. Three major sectors awaited visitors:
- The Wide Market welcomed manufacturers of modern and classical furniture, large distribution and bedding.
- The VilleAge regrouped classical furnishing products adapted to todays needs in a specially adapted scenography and presented the market’s trends.
- The Metropole brought together industrial firms and editors dedicated to contemporary furniture (kitchen, bathroom, lighting…) and working with designers.
From a marketing standpoint, my visit was both eye-teasing and refreshing. Compared to high-tech fairs or other IT tradeshows where all companies’ booths look the same (basically demo screens + demo makers + sales reps + meaningless goodies + big logos and posters displayed everywhere on the booth panels), visiting the Paris Furniture Fair was a bit like walking though cinema studios.
Even if some exhibitors’ booths poorly displayed dozens of furniture pieces next to each other, some others had developed unique, conceptual booths. While the former used a stone-aged marketing method known as cataloging (which may make sense according to the brand positioning), the latter showed their pieces of furniture in meaningful contexts, placing the products either in real-life use situations or in showcase environments reinforcing their brand values.
For examples, you could test the user-friendliness of modern kitchen furniture in a booth resembling an ergnomic lab, and then walk a few meters away into a jungle-like booth to enjoy exotic Thai furniture. Another example was a huge box-shaped booth that was all covered with the feathers normally used to fill in quality pillows. Penetrating the obscurity of this ‘house of feathers’ – entitled ‘The dreamy life of a bed’ (in French: ‘La vie rêvée d’un lit’), you could see a video explaining the life of a bed being projected on the walls of the room, but also on the screen-white bed sheets, sofa and curtains. Being also a good example of partnership marketing, the initiative was co-developed by the following brands to promote their bedroom products: Zoltan, Calligaris, Sciae, Rossini, Celio, Roset Contract, Dunloppilo.
Be it for their ergonomic, educative, esthetic or poetrical qualities, all those guerrilla marketing initiatives promoted a form of direct product experience by the visitor and possible future customer. When marketing is at the cross of education, entertainment, and arts…
