To buy or to rent? 

The question that field marketers, trade show coordinators, and marketing leaders have been asking themselves for decades. Conventional thinking about exhibits and trade show marketing suggests that the custom-vs-rental question is paramount. The question above all questions that must be answered before taking next steps in planning and executing your trade show and exhibiting strategy. 

Honestly speaking, most trade show companies and exhibit houses still think the same way. 

We believe that’s a mistake. Here’s why.

Thinking in custom-vs-rental terms necessarily misses the point of contemporary experience design: It assumes a binary choice, where the pros of one are linked to the cons of the other. 

In the build-and-burn days of old, companies spent $300,000 on custom exhibit displays, trotted it out three three times a year for two years, paid thousands more to store it, and then disposed of it in a landfill—only to spend another $300,000 on a custom exhibit and repeat the cycle. 

It’s easy to understand why rentals looked enticing in comparison.

However, it’s no longer the days of old. It hasn’t been for a while. Most trade show companies won’t tell you that because they truly want you to repeat that cycle. It’s good for their company, but it’s likely not healthy for yours. 

Contemporary event strategy, on the other hand, suggests that our clients are speaking to multiple audiences at many different events every year. Different events or shows require different environments with unique messaging, activations, and spaces. Designing and building one custom exhibit doesn’t work like it used to, constricting brands and eliminating modularity, flexibility, and the ability to go up or down in size, spend, or complexity. 

Buyers are understandably concerned that rental options look, well, rented. Used. Cheap. But the truth is that material advances and technological innovations have made rental exhibits far  more sophisticated than they were in the past. Previously, you could walk down an aisle at a trade show and call it out almost to a booth: This one is custom, that one is rental, that’s this system, that’s the competitor’s.

That’s simply no longer true.

At Triple20, we never start with how large your trade show floor space is. We never center our conversations around whether you want to build a custom exhibit or design an exhibit around a rented system. We will always start with who you are, who you’re reaching, and how we can get you where you want to go. Then, we design and build from there. 

We have a wide capability set that allows us to utilize all materials and techniques to find the right way forward that matches your budget, goals, and KPIs—far outside the false binary of buy/rent. 

This is why we talk about ourselves as world builders. Not exhibit producers or booth makers. 

We work with companies whose brands we truly believe to be world-changing, and as a result, we find solutions that solve your problems. We find the custom-vs-rental discussion to be short-sighted, instead informing and empowering our clients to make strategic exhibiting decisions with an expanded sense of their tactical options. 

At Triple20, we can make anything from scratch. We can offer rental solutions for everything. It’s not a binary; it’s a complementary system.

So why limit yourself to the options that exhibit houses offered their clients in 1989?