The Official Poken Blog

It feels great to be Green, and there are many advantages beyond the sustainability angle. When asked about their main reasons for going Green at trade shows, here are what businesses answer. There are many great reasons that align both your CFO and your CSR executives (budget & sustainability) !

1. Cost of Printing: When you think of $1

to $2 per brochure, do you factor in how many of those you hand out actually get read?What is the true cost per reader? It’s likely to be 5 to 10 times higher.  The cost of paper has gone up regularly over the past decade, while its effectiveness in passing a message has gone down.

2. Transportation contributes heavily to your printed collateral costs, but is often a hidden cost (both environmental and real). How much did your last carton of brochures cost to be Fedexed to the congress? Did you ship the remains back to your office as well?  Some event venues charge drayage fees, $100 or more per carton to be brought to your booth by a union worker. Factor that in, and you will realize the real cost of those hand-outs.

3. Recycling – If you are organizing an event, you’ve probably already been hit by the shock of those post-event costs.  If you’ve attended a conference or a trade show, you’ve seen the waste: Brochures, flyers, catalogs strewn all over the isles. Guess who pays to haul that away – it’s in your ticket fees.  We’ve seen 18-wheelers hauling paper waste from large trade shows!

4. A pocket full of Metrics is what awaits you when you digitalize your marketing approach. Have you ever watched as a nameless person walked away with your brochure? Do you know where it ended up? There’s an 85% chance it never left the city where you handed it out, most people don’t haul the paper weight on the plane.  Going Green comes along with digital means for distributing documents, making every Touch Point matter, as you know who picked up what, where and when.

5. Share, Send, Spread – all those “S”-words that sound great as there’s no additional cost involved in getting your material diffused past the initial person who picked it up: They can easily send it out to whomever they feel will be most interested in it. Paper documents completely miss out on the spread!

6. Last Minute Edits: Did you know that with Touch Marketing you can edit any mistakes or update the documents you’ve handed out, even after the fact?  Digital content stored online in a CMS (Content Management System) allows you to track who got it, and make sure they have the most up-to-date version of your document, any time they look at it.

7. Planning: What are the operational marketing costs of simple yet critical tasks supporting your paper-bound activities: Who plans the number of brochures to print for each of your products ? How many of each language do you haul over  on thousand miles to the exhibition? Could you save human resources by going digital?

8. Stress: Combining the worries created by shipping delays and forgotten prints, not to mention the critical eyes of your Product team if the tiniest mistake found its way onto a document printed in the thousands, this is tension you can do without.

9. Think Customer: Does your customer (trade show visitor, conference attendee, etc.) want to carry around a big bag full of brochures and catalogs? Definitely not.  Take a look at the guy in this picture: He’s collecting digital documents while holding his china cup.

10. Enhance your Brand, and increase your competitive advantage!  Being Green is simply put one of the most cost-effective ways to improve your company image, leading right down to enhanced employee satisfaction and customer retention.

These benefits and more are felt by the technologically adventurous customers daily. You can read case studies about Afflink, who experienced over 42% reduction in waste and associated energy consumption in one trade show, and about Smart City World Congress who saved over 42’000 conference slide decks from being printed.