Cardboard Box

Trish Steed recently reminded me of the tradeshow cardboard box. So here is a reblog of my original article from 2014.

All little worlds have their “big” events. In the world of HR software, the big event every year is the HR Tech Conference in Chicago. That sounds like a fun day out, doesn’t it? Major software vendors spend a quarter of a million dollars each to have a dominant presence there: elaborate customer parties, carefully managed press events, huge multilevel booths with Cirque de Solei acrobats (I’m not making this up). The first year I went I wandered around the massive show floor like someone from a farming village magically transported to New York City muttering, “they sure don’t have buildings like this back home”.

Even the smallest booth – 10’x10’ – was more than we could afford that first year. Instead Mark, John and I went to all the parties, hung out in the press room and tweeted like crazy people. We wore and handed out t-shirts and stickers with slogans that poked gentle fun at HR practices: I met expectations. Should never have added my boss on Facebook. I heart HR Ladies. Before long our t-shirts and stickers were everywhere. We even posted mock job adverts in the bathrooms. We hadn’t spent any money with the actual tradeshow, but our presence was obvious.

We did get into some trouble. Before the show started we’d been tweeting about setting up our magnificent booth. It was early days for social media so the organizers had hired a consultancy to help build the show’s social media presence. These guys were re-tweeting everything - – including our posts about testing our laser light show. They started seriously hyping us, encouraging attendees to check out the Sonar6 booth. Which, of course, didn’t actually exist.

When attendees went looking for us and couldn’t find us, questions started being asked. The organizers had heard about us handing out t- shirts (without paying the handing-out-t-shirts show levy) and decided to track us down. They found us in the registration area, where John was swapping out the official sponsored pens with stacks of “I Heart HR Ladies” Sonar6 pens. John’s not a small guy, and he goes nowhere quietly; watching him being “escorted” off the show floor really is one of my favorite memories of the entire Sonar6 journey.

The next year, HR Tech rolled around again and we needed to be involved. Bill Kutik, HR Tech boss at that time, is (despite living in a very pleasant part of Connecticut), an archetypal New Yorker: fiercely intelligent, spiritually generous and grumpy-as-all-hell. He agreed that a bit of drama and intrigue, some character, was needed for a show like his to really work. Sonar6 fitted into this. But he also reminded us that we were a startup, not a bunch of upstarts. So we decided to play by the rules. Sort of.

We paid for a 10’x10’ booth. And in it we put a really big brown cardboard box.

Most people who buy a 10’x10’ booth do the same thing: put up coreflute signs printed with their company name; cover the table legs with a white table skirt; put a fish bowl on the table and offer you the chance to win an iPad if you put your business card in the bowl. They lay all of their paraphernalia out and then they try to make eye contact with everyone who passes. As soon as they make eye contact, they pounce. It’s awful.

We just put this huge cardboard box in our area. We’d cut a hole in the side of the box for people to go into. It was a pretty low opening though, so they had to duck to get in. Inside there was a video playing telling people just how damn fun we were. When anyone visited the cardboard box we handed them a marker pen and let them write and draw on the box. Someone wrote “Go Bears”. Before you knew it there were sports debates raging on the outside of our box. When people asked us why we had a box not a booth we explained that we were a software company and the best place to learn about software was on the internet, not at a tradeshow. Then we handed them a pen.

Eventually an organiser came up and told us we were making a mockery of the show. A very angry woman from another vendor chipped in, saying we were bringing the tone down. They looked like they wanted us to pack up our cardboard box and go back to New Zealand. John pointed out that, because of Chicago’s unionized workforce, even putting a cardboard box up had cost five grand. Eventually they left us alone.

Meanwhile, the box was creating a buzz. People were interested. They were coming looking for us and our big box. Our un-booth went on to win attendees’ choice for best booth. We generated more press and blog coverage than the big budget vendors who dominated the space. Sure, some people hated us, but others loved us. Hold that thought...

At HR Tech 2009, Sonar6 were disruptors! In startup world that is some kind of Holy Grail in itself. But, to be honest, confrontation makes me anxious.

The cardboard box idea belonged to Kai Crow. Mark and I had met Kai mountain-biking, right at the very start of Sonar6. Kai was a graphic designer who had recently moved from a small town to big city Auckland. We’d got to talking at the dirt jumps where Mark and I would hang out some evenings after work. Kai needed work, and we needed website graphics, so he came and did some contracting. We soon discovered that Kai is one of those rare people who can be both wildly creative and deeply analytical, often in the same sentence. He went on to become our marketing manager, and to this day is one of the most gifted marketing practitioners I’ve met.

Kai always speaks slowly and purposefully. I remember, during one discussion about “the cardboard box”, I told Kai that the whole concept made me nervous; I was worried about the possible negative reaction.

“Mike,” he said in his deliberate way, “if you want to be a disruptor, you are going to have to be okay with being disruptive.” In hindsight it’s so obvious. Game-changers change the game. If the game is ‘the vendor with the biggest tradeshow stand wins’, and you can’t afford to have the biggest tradeshow stand, then you need to change the game.

Tradeshow tables with skirts and fishbowls epitomize professional over interesting – and they’re a game you can’t win. As a startup, you need to get out of the skirt and into whatever is your version of a great big cardboard box covered in scribbles about sports teams. That’s a game you’re in with a fighting chance.