I’ve been to a lot of conferences and tradeshows recently, and as most attendees of those types of events know, you get a lot of freebies. The whole idea of many exposition halls is for companies to find ways to give away the right free crap with their names on it to that they can increase awareness of their solution among the right influentials and maybe even sell their solution or product to a few people as well. I have long said that the companies who get the most benefit from events like this are the ones that no one has yet heard of. For them, the awareness is often worth paying for, whether they can close any deals or not. Yet in a sea of sameness where everyone is giving away pens, flashy light balls, or USB drives, how can you stand out? One common way is to have the "uber bag" – which is larger or of higher quality than other bags. Then attendees use your bag to carry around all the other free stuff they get, and you get the free branded exposure as they carry these bags around throughout the event. That’s pretty obvious, I think, so doing a whole idea bar post on that is probably not going to offer you much.
Yet what if someone extended this idea to another area of difficulty – business cards. At most events, I collect lots of business cards, and usually I just create a stack and put them into my bag to sort out when I get home. What if someone could create an "uber business card" which acted like a folder to store all your other business cards? It could be expandable like a file folder, and sealed on 2 or 3 sides so you could slide in average sized business cards into it. Plastic or card stock could be used to create the cards and because of the wider profile, you would have several additional 3-D sides to use for relaying information or placing custom imagery. What do you think? Could this be the next kind of card that Moo.com (or anyone else) should offer?
Photo Credit: "Business card loot from Blogher ’07" from kerflop’s Photostream on Flickr (by Jessica, who also authors a great personal blog called Kerflop).
About the Idea Bar: Working in a creative team, the life of our business is new ideas. We come up with them every day for clients, but sometimes there are ideas that just don’t fit a client. They are too big, too different, or just not quite right. Inspired by John at Digital Influence Mapping Project, the IdeaBar is a category of posts that are meant to be "open source" and offer new ideas for marketing. Take them and use them … all I ask for is a link back to this post if you find these ideas useful and talk about them. Read more IdeaBar posts on this blog.
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