Your Booth is a Story: 5 Lessons from Walking CES for Years

Key
Insights

THE PROBLEM: You’ve seen it happen: a trade show booth becomes an open square of “cool stuff,” and visitors wander through it like a museum without a map. Most teams design floor plans, not visitor journeys—so people jump straight to the flagship demo, miss the context, and leave without a clear story to retell on Monday morning.

This is Booth Drift—when an unstructured space creates an unstructured narrative, and your best innovations get reduced to disconnected features.

THE FRAMEWORK: Stéphane introduces The IKEA Blueprint: a guided-flow approach that turns your booth into a step-by-step narrative arc using a simple 3-zone model: Attraction → Engagement → Conversion. This structure builds understanding progressively, so each interaction earns the next one—just like IKEA’s showroom journey leads you from inspiration to decision.

Instead of “what do you want to see?”, your booth answers “what do you need to understand next?”