Ladies to the fore...

It seems like ages ago that we committed to exhibiting at Ifra Expo in Vienna, but it suddenly came home to us this week how close we are to the event.

And whether it’s in organisation, creativity or liaison, it’s a case of ladies to the fore as things begin to come together.

That’s been emphasised today as our formidable events manager, Michelle (the one in the middle), brought the team together for a trial run on building the stand for the first time since Publishing Expo at the start of the year. We’ve had plenty of planning meetings, but to start pulling things out of boxes and putting them together again literally makes everything more tangible.

The stand was designed by our Graphic Artist, Rachel (that's her on the left), to be flexible enough to fit into a number of configurations. Our location at Ifra – stand A651 – is big enough to accommodate the whole thing. It has three demonstration pods, a front desk and plenty of space to mingle.

It’s also flexible enough to allow us to customise it for whichever event we’re attending. Hence, for Ifra, we’re tipping a nod to our hosts and potential visitors by internationalising some of our marketing messages.

That’s meant a lot of work for Rachel in preparing new multi-lingual brochures with help from our friends at UKTI and one of our international suppliers. We’ve also broadened our overall marketing strapline to ‘Create Anywhere...Publish Everywhere’, which sums up our belief in providing solutions that break down boundaries and increase possibilities for any organisation that publishes information, whether that be in print or on digital channels.

For Ifra we’re planning to unleash our by-now not-so-secret-weapon, Rita (yes, the one on the right), a German intern from near Frankfurt who joined us a couple of weeks ago and is already starting to make an impact on broadening our horizons.

The other day she sat the exhibition team down in the PCS boardroom for a brief language workshop. She’s followed it up by turning the lesson into a video we can use for reference. As you can imagine one, shall we say ‘firm but fair’, German watching a group of self-conscious Brits in one room mangling her language was interesting to say the least. Still, I think we made excellent progress and Rita’s actually too polite to laugh out loud.

At the moment there’s a group of us walking around PCS muttering German phrases to ourselves in various English accents. It’s confusing everyone else in the office but at least Rita’s amused.

Rita’s also become part of the marketing team’s effort to build awareness of an event we’re running for an invited audience at the British Embassy early evening on Tuesday, October 11.  She’s been making some follow-up calls to invitees. The benefits of having a native-speaker making that kind of personal contact is obvious.

All three will be with us on the stand at Ifra, so if you’re there, come and say ‘hello’. Or ‘guten tag’ as we like to say at PCS.