Blades of glory: Sikorsky Aircraft takes an exhibit airborne

Any trade show marketer who has ever been tasked with bringing together their company’s disparate product lines, business units and distinct marketing messages into one cohesive show floor experience knows the challenges can feel monumental.
Pleasing your many constituents, getting executive-level buy-in and making room to showcase mission-critical products while keeping attendees engaged, and yet not overwhelmed, requires months of planning, approvals and sometimes, round-the-clock management. So imagine doing all that—and building a new booth from scratch—in just five, yes five, months and you get a taste of what Sikorsky Aircraft took on when it scrapped its old trade show exhibit in anticipation of the biggest helicopter show in the U.S., Heli-Expo 2009.
In addition to a tight timeline, Sikorsky’s marketing team had other major challenges to contend with prior to Heli-Expo. The company, which had acquired several new companies over the past four years, had no unifying brand identity.
“The biggest challenge was to take a diversified group of companies and get us all on the same page,” says Lynn Leach, senior manager-trade shows and customer relations at Sikorsky. “And even though the businesses were very different, make us look the same and work together as a team and show the rest of the industry that we were now consolidated and truly one company.”
Leach says that while the company felt good about the energy it created in its old booth, especially how it used its stage throughout the show to recognize customers for their accomplishments (search and rescue teams saving lives using Sikorsky’s products, for example), the company’s displays and sparse meeting rooms lacked the upscale look and feel of its competitors.
Heli-Expo was evolving, too, and drawing an increasingly diverse attendee list of both commercial and military customers, each with different needs and interests. The venue (the Anaheim Convention Center) required the booth adhere to strict earthquake codes. Management wanted soundproof, high-end meeting suites and unobstructed views from every angle of four helicopters being showcased in the 14,400-square-foot footprint (ever try loading helicopters into a convention center?). And the whole shebang needed to feel cohesive, yet also be scalable for a growing list of new international shows filling up space on the “must-attend” trade show list.
“In years past we did very little in the Middle East,” says John Pacelli, vp-marketing at Sikorsky. “But the last few years, the Middle East has become a hotbed and our presence at trade shows there has become extremely important and they’ve been programmed now into our portfolio, in some cases at the expense of some other shows where the market is not quite as hot.”
At last year’s Heli-Expo show, the company rebranded and renamed its commercial business, Sikorsky Global Helicopters, and its entire after-market portfolio, Sikorsky Aerospace Services (SAS). As a last-minute attempt to unify the disparate groups under their new identities, the company purchased exhibit space along the aisles next to its main footprint to bring them closer together. The result was a hodge-podge of pop-ups and permanent properties, each with its own branding. The effect was inconsistent, segmented and dissonant.
“It wasn’t very well branded, it wasn’t very well aligned and it didn’t have a lot of synergies from a branding or marketing perspective,” says Pacelli.
For Heli-Expo 2009, a new, unifying theme would be in order. The winning line, developed early in the exhibit development process with the lead design team, Westport, CT-based McMillan Group, was “One Sikorsky. One World.”

Flights of Fancy
Confidence in its ability to build a new exhibit on a short timeline was not a problem for the 84-year-old Stratford, CT-based company. For over 50 years it manufactured Marine One, the President’s helicopter—and it doesn’t get more mission critical than that. “Working to develop a trade show exhibit is no different for us than putting a major proposal together or building an aircraft,” says Pacelli. “We’ve become used to working in a high tempo environment in order to make sure we’re able to deliver a quality product, so doing that for a trade show is second nature for us.”
Sikorsky created a set of criteria for its new booth in a statement of work in the summer of 2008. The brand wanted to keep the magic created by its stage events but transform its booth into a world-class showroom and meeting space. It also wanted to be sensitive to the economic environment and its growing cadre of government customers. “We wanted something that would portray a first-class image without being too ornate or ostentatious,” says Pacelli. “We wanted a classic look that showed we were a world-class company, but not something that would say, ‘hey this is way too opulent, what are these guys doing spending all this money?’”
McMillan Group started working on the exhibit’s concept and design in early September 2008. The design presentation was Sept. 26. Final design approvals were granted on Oct. 20. The exhibit builder bid process was conducted between October and late November. Toronto-based Taylor Group was selected and in early December, an accelerated nine-week engineering and fabrication schedule kicked off. The team negotiated a five-day installation (it’s normally three) and then packed up and went to Anaheim. With just five months from concept to load-in, Sikorsky was ready for takeoff. The three-day event opened Feb. 22, 2009.
The exhibit features four helicopters mounted on cherrywood platforms, each poised at an angle as if ready to ascend. A new lighting scheme via Woodland Hills, CA-based Exhibit Lighting Group gives the choppers the gleam you might find at a Rolls-Royce auto show exhibit.
A curved, cantilevered two-story conference room structure connected by a 32-foot bridge serves as the anchor for the exhibit. Its bold design conveys a sense of winged energy, movement and power. The structure is covered with more than 700 interior and exterior glazing panels, all laminated with digital graphics printed on perforated vinyl, plus 175 additional image panels for offices, hallways and stairwells. The floor-to-ceiling graphic scrim panels are opaque so staffers and customers on the upper level can see out but you can’t see in from the show floor. The graphic “skins” paired with the creation of a second set of lightweight modular structures means Sikorsky can make a quick change to suit its diverse portfolio of shows.
“We wanted to make the investment but also moving forward, realize the efficiencies,” says Leach. “We put aside, as part of the capital appropriation, [funds] to develop lightweight properties that mirror the look and feel of the original heavyweight exhibit and are already using it more so than originally planned.”
To help convey Sikorsky’s unified brand image in three dimensional form, the design team looked to colors and imagery featured on the company’s newly redesigned website for inspiration. Design iconography like meridian lines run throughout the exhibit, inlaid in wood platforms and featured in custom video spots running on LED screens. “We tried to find elements that are consistent across all the elements of the company and said, that’s where we’ll do everything the same so that someone walking through that space doesn’t have to work to do any translation of figuring things out,” says Charlie McMillan, president at McMillan Group. “Then we took those things that are unique to each of those sub-companies and showcased them.”
Heli-Expo attracts more than 17,000 attendees who are a mix of high-level executives, buyers, government decision-makers and pilots. Facilitating one-on-one time with these top customers and prospects was job number one for the new exhibit. The booth features nine conference rooms of various sizes that can seat between four and 26 guests. Each room comes with a custom cherrywood boardroom table detailed with meridian line inlays and 60-inch flat screen TVs controlled by touchscreens. Sikorsky’s sales people can use their own laptops or tap into a suite of product videos pre-loaded in the media center in each room.
“I think we were really able to have, because of the facilities, high-quality engagements and meetings with our customers, in a private environment that is deserving of the conversations you have with customers who want to buy your products and services,” says Pacelli. “It gave them a first-class experience, which is what we want to be all about here.”
On the show floor, and for the first time at any Sikorsky trade show, brand ambassadors engaged passersby from the aisles, entering them into drawings, asking short survey questions and funneling them to Sikorsky sales staff working an area called the Sikorsky Experience, featuring a touchscreen presentation that tells the history of Sikorsky Aircraft and offers deep dives into many of the company’s products (Live Marketing, Chicago, handled). The Experience, located on the opposite side of the main aisle, gives staffers a quieter, more dedicated area where they can talk about the company’s services division offerings in a one-to-one or one-to-many format. The Sikorsky Experience was so popular it’s now being retrofit to be portable so it can travel to other shows.
The new exhibit also ditches the big stage productions that used to steal the limelight from the helicopters and instead does its daily recognition events and contract signings with the help of a mobile stage and screen. A double-sided 16-foot by nine-foot LED screen lowers down to eye-level as the main stage rolls into position. When the presentation is over, each component goes back into place where it is hidden from view. Four double-sided, six-foot by 10-and-a-half-foot stationary LED panels run looped video presentations and smaller 42- and 60- inch LEDs give product information at the site of each helicopter. To streamline the experience and to further solidify the “One Sikorsky. One World.” message, there are no static printed graphics in the booth. All text and graphics are incorporated into the video screen media.
The new engagement strategy allows Sikorsky’s SAS sales people the time and context to have more customer interactions on the show floor. The movable main stage delivers on the company’s request to keep the helicopters the center of attention. And the executive level meeting rooms give the sales force the high-end venue they were looking for to host a top-notch VIP experience. As a result of the changes, at Heli-Expo 2009 79 percent of attendees surveyed asked to be contacted by a Sikorsky rep. Ninety-five percent left the show with a favorable opinion of the company.
“Our aircrafts couldn’t have been more beautifully displayed, the conference rooms were at full capacity, the events were extremely well attended and we got a lot of positive comments from customers, competitors and the press,” says Leach. “We’re already seeing we’re having a much nicer presence at a much-reduced cost per square foot.”