by Nick Drew | Sun 02 Jun 2013
Who fancies a nice big shiny joystick?
During my travels around the showground’s, I am often on the lookout for unusual items and promotional gimmicks, which attract punters onto the stands. A few things have caught my eye at the recent Bauma, Plantworx and MaskinExpo events, and I thought I would share them with you today.
Last Saturday during my visit to MaskinExpo in Stockholm, I was wandering away from the vintage machinery road building display area, when I was confronted by a giant joystick that was on display outside the Svab Hydraulic AB stand. This joystick was taller than me, I know, not difficult I hear you say, but I thought it was a great way to attract attention to the stand. This prompted me to take a look at the latest joysticks on offer from Svab, including the new Svab Grip L82, which is incredibly comfortable in the hand, and features a whole host of buttons and roller thumb controls for a wide range of applications. Joysticks have certainly come a long way from the days of a long steel bar coming up from the floor with a tiny round ball on top, which used to kill your hands by the end of a long working day!
Bucket manufacturers were all over the showground at MaskinExpo, and as I am rather partial to the odd sweet, this stand was fairly attractive to me. In amongst their display of regular sized buckets and attachments, Gotene Construction Equipment AB, had a small but perfectly formed miniature bucket which was fully loaded with local confectionary for the passing visitors to enjoy. I plucked out a couple of the chewy candies, but I gave the chocolate bars a miss, as the brand name of Plop somehow didn’t seem very appealing!
At Bauma, multi-faceted company the Nagel Group, displayed an old Liebherr excavator high up on a plinth overlooking the company’s impressive stand. This machine helped to signify Nagel’s 60 year partnership with the Liebherr group. I would have loved the machine to have been on the ground, so I could have had a good look around it and taken some better photos of the old classic.
On the Zeppelin Cat outdoor stand, an impressive Multi-Docker machine was casting it large shadow over this exceptional scale model of the machine.
As ever “top totty” on your stand is always sure to draw in the crowds, not to be outdone in those stakes, Chinese manufacturer Zoomlion, had a couple of young ladies taking turns to pose with a plastic Iron Man 2 figure. However, on what was a very hot day the poor girls must have been sweating fairly heavily in those costumes!
At Plantworx, our friend Andy Hair of Northerntrack fame, displayed a number of his wonderful metalwork sculptures, made from off cuts of steel from his bucket and attachment making business. These artistic metal creatures have become very popular for Andy, and what started as a little bit of fun, has quickly escalated into yet another aspect of the Northerntrack business portfolio. This dragon is posing in front of one of the company’s popular selector grabs.
As with many aspects of life, it’s the little things that can often make a big difference when trying to attract customers to your stand.