Good day

I am looking for new ideas to market icf's at trade shows in my area.  I have never been to any of the big shows although I do plan on world of concrete this year,  but I have been to trade shows and entered them as well in my area, and invariably every icf block including the ones i worked for, have just built a wall, put in a buck, and have a bunch of flyers, and maybe a tv running on loop and just have a few guys telling you there block is better than the other one around the corner.  SO I would like to do things a little different, something that catches attention, provides usefull information about icf, something they can see, and maybe take people away from asking why this block is better and educate them more on icf in general, and reasons to build with ICF in general.  The ultimate goal being that I have taken them away from comparing my block to the others, and gotten them more into understanding ICF and, what our business can do for them, leading to a warm fuzzy feeling and a sale.

My thoughts on this are that we all know that the mainstream, blocks are all well built all have little differences and we have our preferences, but in reality when comparing the well known, well built blocks when they are properly installed they all have the same performance, most standard blocks have the same r-value performance.   So why are most of us, myself included wasting our time trying to compare our block to the others, why not educate,  show benefits of icf, get people to see what they are missing by not building this way, and sell our installation service or customer service if you are distributing only.  I may just be behind the ball here, and people in other areas may be doing this already.

So I would imagine that most of us are going to be entering or visiting or have entered and visited a trade show so lets exchange some ideas of what we have done, seen, considered.  some of you may have seen something that wasn't even anything to do with icf but they did something unique with their product to stand out from competitiors. 

At the same time for those who are not int he industry and are looking for icfs what would you think would draw your attention to a particular booth etc.

I will share my idea to start and if you have done it or seen it how did it work, or if you don't think my idea would work let me know how i could improve it.

So I was thinking of  making a small square box out of icf block, so a mini model of a house, with roof etc. taking the door off a freezer and putting plexiglass in front and plugging the freezer in put my model icf house with concrete and a thermometer inside connected to an external temp reader, and letting people see how it works.  Obviously I would test it first and see if that works, before trying, but that is one of my ideas. 

Lets hear some more.

Thanks