Putting on a show
William Reed Business Media
The client
William Reed Business Media (WRBM) owns a portfolio comprising many of the leading UK food & drink B2B shows. These include Food & Drink Expo, The Convenience Show, The Ingredients Show, Farm Shop & Deli Show, Foodex and The Forecourt Show.
The flagship show, Food & Drink Expo, takes place every two years alongside a selection of the other shows. They were collectively named ‘the UK Food Shows’. Over the years, individual identities had been developed for each show without a visual common thread.
The brief
We carried out a strategic rebrand, advising on how WRBM could better align its show portfolio, visually and through copy. This encompassed exploring a new way of collectively referring to – and visually presenting – their biennial show season, and rebranding and developing new straplines for their individual shows.
What we delivered
Our initial piece of work focused on bringing simplicity to the individual show identities, stripping them back to their names and reviewing the colour palette. We rebuilt them, keeping their core colours for consistency going forwards and treating them as one brand family. We kept brand elements to a minimum: one of the main purposes of B2B show identities is to act as a canvas for wayfinding and messaging at the shows themselves, and in a cluttered show environment, simple design tends to stand out more.
We then conceptualised ‘UK Food & Drink Week’. This acted not just as a new name for the biennial show season, but as a whole new concept and commercial opportunity for WRBM. We forged an identity for UK Food & Drink Week out of the individual show identities to create a strong and consistent brand family that was visually aligned.
Underpinning all of this, we created a set of straplines for UK Food & Drink Week and for the individual shows. As the live events industry looks to next year for the reopening of trade exhibitions, the show straplines are designed to emphasise the importance of doing business face-to-face with their ‘Where the… meets’ construct.
