The much-awaited three-day clothes show at the NEC in Birmingham earlier this month was a celebration of new trends and bright colours in time for the festive season. With a constant stream of visitors, traders this year were noticeably sporting modern digital pop up display stands, large colourful backdrops and ambient lighting.

Leaving room for clothes racks and enticing displays of accessories, another trending strategy was to create an impression of height and depth. Linked display stands such as ISOframe Wave Display Stands provided strategic wall panels between one exhibitor and the next, and proving that less is more, information was kept to a minimum with large backdrops with key logos and tag lines.

Popular exhibition displays were ones with clearly visible banner stands and where consumer convenience played an integral part of the overall layout and design. At trade shows were personal preference, fashion style determines consumer spending over necessity, marketing is about visibility and creating a design that is practical yet a pleasing retail experience for the customer. Overcrowded stalls where space and layout were not given significant importance proved to deter, rather than encourage customers to part with hard earned cash.

Digital technology has clearly made its impact on marketing professionals. Whereas everyone likes a picture, a moving image is much more appealing to the eye and despite creating a focal point, has the ability to be able to hold people’s attention not just capture it. It goes without saying that attention spans are much longer where moving images are concerned compared to those which are static. Accompanied with an inbuilt sound system, the banner stands with LED plasma screens were an attractive, modern addition to the exhibition displays and kept organization to an all time high.

In such trade shows and fairs where exhibition space is awash with all-weather clothes, designer wear and an assortment of the latest must-haves, much of the marketing potential has to be focused on the back wall or back drop of the exhibition stands. Needing to boast big, bold discounts, brand names and fashion trends at a quick glance, investing in a Poster Rail and Rollable Graphic Pannel exhibition display often proves to be a great option. Good alternatives include the revolutionary new type of banner stand system, Curvorarma, which can free stand or be mounted onto common exhibition shell scheme walls or the versatile Linx Exhibition Stands, where the banner stand structure defines the exhibition space.