How to Stand Out at Industry Trade Shows: The Purple Cow Principle
You're at a trade show. You've invested thousands in booth space, shipped equipment across the country, and your team is ready to demonstrate your technology to qualified buyers. There's just one problem: so has everyone else.
Walk down any aisle at PRINTING United, Graph Expo, LOUPE, or NPF, and you'll see the same scene repeated dozens of times. Printing equipment at the front of the booth. Brochures stacked on tables. Sales reps waiting for someone—anyone—to stop and ask a question. Maybe a monitor playing a looping video. Equipment specs printed on banners overhead.
Every booth looks like this. Including yours.
At NPF 2025 in Nashville, we did something different. Instead of just displaying our variable inkjet systems alongside dozens of other exhibitors showing similar equipment, we printed money.
Not real currency, of course—but realistic prop hundred-dollar bills with unique QR codes, fed directly into a clear glass box with a fan blowing the bills around like a cash tornado. Passersby stopped. They stared. They pulled out their phones to take photos. And crucially, they stuck their hands into the box to grab a bill and scan the QR code, which could win them anything from a system discount to an actual hundred-dollar bill.
The printed money wasn't the product. The product was still our variable inkjet systems. But the money got people to stop long enough to ask questions—and that's when the real conversation started.
This is what marketing expert Seth Godin calls the "purple cow" principle. When you're driving past a field of cows, you don't look twice. Cows are ordinary. But if one of those cows was purple, you'd slam on the brakes, pull over, and take a picture. In a trade show hall filled with printing equipment, binders, laminators, and inkjet systems, you need to be the purple cow.
Why Most Booths Fail to Drive the Traffic They Want.
They all blend together. No one stands out.
Every competitor is doing exactly the same thing. When attendees see five, six, or ten booths showing similar equipment with similar setups, they all blend together. The human brain is wired to ignore repetition and notice novelty. If your booth looks like everyone else's, your booth is everyone else's—and attendees will walk right past.
Research on selective attention shows that people filter out information that doesn't immediately stand out as different or valuable. In a crowded, overstimulating environment like a trade show floor, this filtering is even more aggressive. You have roughly three seconds to interrupt someone's pattern of walking before they move on.
The Psychology of Standing Out
Pattern interruption works because the brain is constantly scanning for anomalies—things that don't fit the expected pattern. A glass box full of swirling hundred-dollar bills at a printing equipment show doesn't fit. It's unexpected. It's visual. It raises questions: Is that real money? Why is there a hole in the box? Can I get one of those hundreds?
Curiosity is one of the most powerful psychological drivers. When something doesn't make immediate sense, the brain wants resolution. That's what gets people to stop, approach, and engage. Once they're at your booth asking questions about the money, you have the opportunity to pivot the conversation to what you're actually selling—but you've earned that opportunity by first earning their attention.
Effective attention-grabbing tactics share three characteristics:
Visual novelty – Something that looks different from every other booth
Interactivity – An invitation to touch, grab, scan, play, or participate
Immediate perceived value – A reason to engage beyond curiosity (contest, prize, reward, or a compelling pitch of your product)
Our printed money activation hit all three. It was visually striking (glass box full of cash), interactive (grab a bill and scan it), offered immediate value (potential prizes). And it showcased the ability of our system and the printed QR doubled as a sample and demonstration of our variable printing capabilities.
Practical Purple Cow Tactics for Print Exhibitors
You don't need to print fake money to stand out, but you do need to think beyond the equipment-on-display model. Here are proven tactics that work for B2B print industry exhibitors:
Create a visual spectacle. Use height, color, motion, or scale to break the visual monotony. We've seen label converters use tall inflatable labels that slowly rotate above their booths—visible from across the hall and becoming landmarks attendees use for navigation. Other exhibitors project live printing output onto massive overhead screens, creating motion and scale that draws eyes from across the aisle.
Gamify engagement. Spin-to-win wheels, digital leaderboards, prize drawings, or skill-based challenges (Putting is one we see a lot of). The work well enough but they too are becoming oversaturated. You need to come up with simple yet, unique ways to set yourself apart from the rest. The key is making participation easy and rewarding. At NPF this year, we saw one exhibitor, who specialized in parcel sorting, running a interactive demo of their product that had attendees scanning out specific Lego minifigure parts that you preselected from one of their inventory tablets. Very creative and their booth was packed the entire show. Take a page from them and make your demo impossible to ignore.
Offer immediate, tangible value. If you have the booth space, free coffee bars, charging stations, and seating areas draw foot traffic, but they don't necessarily qualify leads. Combine comfort with engagement: print custom business cards on-demand, create personalized sample labels with attendees' company logos. Another way is to give them something they'll actually use that also demonstrates your capability.
Leverage the unexpected. The printed money worked because it didn't belong at a print show. What else doesn't belong but ties back to your value proposition? A packaging company could create an "unboxing experience" booth where attendees open beautifully designed packages to reveal prizes inside—demonstrating packaging quality while creating engagement. A direct mail printer could set up a vintage mailbox installation where attendees "mail" themselves a sample postcard that arrives at their office a week later, proving delivery reliability. These are just quick examples I came up with in a few minutes. I’m sure you all could come up with much better.
Converting Attention Into Conversations
Here's the critical mistake exhibitors make: they create the purple cow, draw the crowd, and then fail to transition attention into qualified conversations.
Your attention-grabbing tactic should create a natural bridge to your product. Our printed money did this perfectly—it demonstrated variable data printing (every QR code was unique), showcased print quality on challenging substrates (realistic currency details), and proved production speed (bills printed and fed into the box continuously). When someone asked, "How does this work?" the answer naturally led to a conversation about our variable inkjet systems.
Design your purple cow with this transition in mind. If your gamification involves printing samples, you're already demonstrating output quality. If your visual spectacle is a live production demo, you're showing speed and reliability. If your giveaway requires scanning a code printed with your equipment, you're proving barcode quality.
The Bottom Line
At a trade show, you're not competing on product alone—you're competing for attention first, then consideration. Equipment specifications, ROI calculators, and technical demos matter, but only after someone stops at your booth long enough to hear about them.
You need a purple cow. Something that makes attendees stop walking, pull out their phones, and ask questions. Something that doesn't look like the five other booths showing similar equipment. Something that creates curiosity, invites participation, and offers immediate value.
The product or service is what you're selling. The purple cow is how you get the chance to sell it.
After 40 years of exhibiting at print industry trade shows, we've learned this lesson over and over: the booth that stands out isn't always the one with the biggest equipment or the largest footprint. It's the one people remember, photograph, and talk about later.
What's your purple cow?