When you rent plants for your trade show event, you’re not just hiring pretty accessories. You’re hiring decorative features that can double as brand ambassadors, crowd management tools, and even health and safety features.
Ready to put your plant rental investment to work? Here are seven inventive ways to maximize their power during a trade exhibition.
7 practical reasons to rent plants for a trade event
In This Article
1. Stand out
Use plants and flowers as your booth’s defining feature to help people remember you. You could be known as ‘the exhibit with the living wall’ or ‘the exhibit with the amazing hanging floral display.’ This is especially helpful when you have as little as seven seconds to catch someone’s attention and make a good first impression.
Plants and flowers also make you easy to spot if people can’t quite remember where you are. This is a real problem at the larger shows with multiple floors and thousands of exhibitors.
2. Communicate messages about your brand
Different types and colors of flowers suit different occasions. One example is a red rose, which is often given to show love and warmth. During an expo, you can use plants and flowers to convey something about your company and brand. Crisp white flowers and greenery offer messages of modernity, efficiency, and wealth. Broad-leafed plants suggest comfort, while bright florals communicate vibrancy and youthfulness.
3. Boost visitor moods
A 2005 study showed that flowers are ‘a powerful positive emotion “inducer”’ that can create genuine happiness that lasts for days. And another (albeit smaller) experiment shows that plants can reduce stress. This can make them particularly effective at trade shows, which can often feel frantic. Renting plants or adding flowers will help your visitors stay positive, happy, and relaxed. Well, at least while they’re in your booth.
4. Create customer journeys
Just as a beautifully landscaped garden has plants marking its borders and walkways, you can create pathways and borders at your show or booth using greenery. Encouraging visitors to move around the venue in a particular way may alter their shopping habits. After all, there’s a reason stores invest so much in user journey research.
Keeping visitors moving in a particular direction is also a health and safety consideration. At larger shows, renting plants to create corridors and pathways can help indicate where (and in what direction) people should walk. For example, making one-way pathways can stop people from bumping into each other from opposite directions. And avoiding unnecessary contact is important these days as we move towards making shows safer during the pandemic.
5. Social distancing markers
While we’re on the subject of social distancing, those duct tape crosses you see on the floor at the local grocery store simply won’t do for a trade show. Remember, an event is supposed to make your business shine. So maintain that look by using social distancing markers that fit the rest of your theme and display. Three or four potted plants make ideal markers for people queuing at a payment or service area. And if you need to create a gateway for managing the number of people in an area, why not rent plants in oversized pots? They’ll make a refreshing change from the traditional (and boring) velvet ropes.
6. Bring the outside inside
Spending days in an exhibition hall under bright lights while breathing recycled, temperature-controlled air can leave you feeling pretty crappy. NASA have even come up with a name for it — Sick Building Syndrome. Symptoms include headaches, coughing, and dizziness, which are all brought on by the toxins found in synthetic materials. We know plants are natural air purifiers, but it’s thought that indoor plants may also remove around 87% of air toxins in 24 hours. Pretty handy when you’re stuck indoors all day.
7. Hide the messy parts
To keep your booth running you’ll probably need cabling, extra stock, bags, paperwork, and plug sockets. And unless you hide them they can make your booth look untidy. Fortunately, a well-placed floral display can hide all those cables. And with a few tall plants — like ferns or a living wall — you can easily screen off an area to keep that extra stock out of sight. These are just some of the attractive ways you can hide those less attractive essentials without affecting your overall display.
Quick tips when using event flowers
- Avoid highly fragrant flowers. These are high in pollen and are more likely to trigger allergies.
- Decide on a focal point in your booth — the place where you want to draw the most attention — and position your plants there.
- To make sure you get the plants you want, pre-order them at least a month in advance.
Speak to us about plant rental for your next event
From standing out to managing visitor safety, plants can play a powerful role in your presence at a trade show. If you’d like to talk about renting plants for an event or commissioning a specially designed memorable floral display, we can help. Contact us and let us bring your trade show display to life.
