As the doors close on another fantastic edition of London Packaging Week, the floor at Excel London has barely emptied.
For two days the packaging industry touched the latest substrates, turned closures over in their hands, crowded round the Innovation Awards, and caught inspiring talks in-between meetings.
From the outside it looks effortless. A busy room doing what busy rooms do. But as teams like Easyfairs, the brains behind London Packaging Week, will tell you, that effortlessness is the result of hard work and sleepless nights. A show floor that runs smoothly is just the visible tip of months of graft that almost nobody in the hall ever considers.
Despite many years of industry movement, trade events remain one of the most vital tools in B2B marketing. We were told, not so long ago, that digital platforms would kill off face-to-face trade shows. Then, that Covid-19 would do it. After all, why fly a team to a convention centre when you can demo over a screen?
And yet here we are. In packaging especially, face-to-face events like London Packaging Week haven’t just survived, they’ve thrived.
Why packaging, of all sectors, still needs physical space
The reason is simple, and it’s the same reason packaging is such a rewarding sector to market.
You cannot feel a mono-material laminate through a monitor. You can’t test the hand-feel of a soft-touch varnish, hear the click of a well-engineered child-resistant closure, or judge how a metallic finish catches the light, until it’s in front of you.
Packaging belongs in the hand. It is tactile, structural, and sensory. It is a discipline where the difference between ‘interesting’ and ‘specify it’ is often a fraction of a millimetre that you have to touch to believe.
So, while the rest of the marketing world debates a digital future, the packaging industry keeps booking stands. This year’s London Packaging Week ran under the theme of discovery, and with the PPWR era pushing a tidal wave of innovation across the supply chain, discovery is precisely what the show floor is for. It remains where the industry goes to decide what happens next.
A campaign with a venue in the middle
Whether it’s a multinational behemoth or a more intimate supplier day, the best way to think about a trade event is not as an occasion, but as a campaign that happens to have a room in the middle of it.
And the print and packaging calendar is not short of opportunities. Alongside London Packaging Week sit Packaging Innovations & Empack and Paris Packaging Week, while the wider industry rallies around titans like LOUPE (formerly Labelexpo), Interpack, FESPA, PRINTING United, Fachpack, PPMA, and more. Different halls, different cities, and different specialisms, but every one of them runs on the same principle.
The value is created in the weeks of anticipation before the doors open and the discipline of follow-through after they close. The classic B2B trade show is where that value becomes visible, not where it is made.
Look at it firstly from where it's organised…
The job is enormous. Turning a floor plan into a destination is about building the right audience, curating content worth crossing a city for, and engineering a sense of occasion that draws thousands of busy professionals out of their offices and print shops.
It is a marketing challenge of real scale, but modern events don’t compete on square metres, they compete on experience. The shift over the last decade, from the trade show as a promotional platform to the trade show as a genuine business and knowledge platform, has raised the bar for everyone who puts one on.
We’ve had a front-row seat to that work. For several years now we’ve supported the fabulous Easyfairs team on the marketing around London Packaging Week. This includes elements such as the promotion, the coverage, the exhibitor spotlights, and the overall buzz. The event itself is theirs; they architect it, and they do it brilliantly. Our role is to help the story of it travel further and faster, before, during and after.
…Then look at it from the other side of the same floor.
For an exhibiting business, the challenge is different. When you’re one of 220-odd stands, the enemy isn’t your competitor two booths down; it’s being forgettable. And the antidote is, again, planning. It’s the pre-show noise that gives people a reason to seek you out. It’s a stand and a narrative that stops a visitor in their tracks and sparks that first conversation. And it’s the follow-through afterwards, making sure a hard-won pile of conversations don’t go cold.
Booked onto a trade show? Our Event Energiser package pulls the essentials together into one flexible, commitment-free bundle: stand and design, content, targeted PR, and the pre- and post-show engagement that converts footfall into follow-up. As a targeted standalone package, it’s the support you need with no contracts, monthly fees or hidden unwelcome costs.
Face-to-face is here to stay
For all the talk of digital disruption, the in-person event isn’t going anywhere. In a sector like packaging, it probably never will.
A screen can show you a product, but it can’t put it in your hands. It can’t recreate the impromptu conversation in a lift, the unplanned introduction, or the simple human weight of meeting a supplier face-to-face before you trust them with your brand. As long as business is done between people, the room it happens in will matter. Despite the rate of digital progress, trade shows aren’t a relic the industry is slowly outgrowing; they’re a fixture it keeps reinvesting in, year after year.
The catch is that a trade show only rewards those who treat it as more than a date in the diary.
Turn up cold and you’ll leave with a lanyard, untouched merchandise and a sore back. Turn up with a plan that starts weeks early and ends weeks late, and the same two days can underpin your whole year.
That’s where Think B2B Marketing comes in. Whether you’re exhibiting at a major show and need to be the stand people remember, or planning an event of your own, be it a launch, a roundtable, an open house or otherwise, we support businesses right across the spectrum.
Navigating a bustling show floor is the easy part. Everything that makes it worthwhile happens in the wings, and that’s exactly where we do our best work.
Thinking about your next event? Say hello. We’d love to help you make the most of the room.
