Cheap tradeshow swag is the mother of invention

Constraints are good. They force you to focus and prioritize. The Americas team at Visiopharm needed swag items for the most important tradeshow of the year, the American Academy of Cancer Researchers (AACR) annual meeting. The criteria: it needed to be cheap, demonstrate our brand, and stand out from the crowd (especially the growing field of fast-follower competitors). Time was also a factor - the tradeshow was less than a month away. So I made a quick pitch: buttons. Buttons with pithy, tongue-in-cheek phrases related to what their core product does that would made the target audience of lab directors and research scientists chuckle. I created a digital mock up of what the buttons could look like and proposed 5 phrases I felt would land well and sent it to the core Americas team asking for their feedback and to propose additional phrases. The team loved the concept and provided some excellent phrases back. I took what I felt to be the top 10 best phrases we all came up with and created a survey to send out to the entire Visiopharm org asking all to choose their 5 favorites. With the top 5 phrases selected from the survey results and a little graphic design magic from my colleague, the buttons were born. They were a smash hit at the conference, and the team later expanded them for the Europe and Asia events as well.