I had double cause to ponder the marketable properties of timber over the holidays (OK, so we had a quiet Christmas). Stripping paint off a window frame, due to the lack of anything on the telly, I was impressed by the nearly good-as-new quality of the resinous century-old timber beneath. Trouble was, I was so lost in admiration that I didn’t notice the stuff I’d stripped falling through the cracks between the floorboards until I saw a little heap glowing, thanks to a sliver of paint having hit the end of the heat gun. That’s when I discovered how durable and resilient a Victorian floorboard is. It wouldn’t budge until I’d nearly given myself a hernia. And, of course, when it did come up, the mini bonfire of paint shavings had gone out.
Now recovered from the strain, my experience strikes me as an appropriate start to a year when timber’s marketable properties will be demonstrated in the UK as, possibly, never before, with an unprecedented level of trade fair activity. First, in April there’s the Timber Zone at Interbuild; a concentration of timber and wood product company stands at the UK’s foremost construction exhibition. Then, in September, the Timber Show debuts in London with an audience of architects and specifiers in its sights. Hot on its heels in October will be the W6 Working with Wood exhibition, the new event that has grown out of the Woodmex and ASFI shows to target timber processors and their customers in a range of industries.
As our special feature this week highlights, underpinning these events, there’s plenty of ‘grass roots’ marketing activity and development going on among individual companies and industry organisations too. Wood. for good and AHEC lay out some of their promotional strategies for the year ahead, we have interesting external perspectives on timber industry marketing and a piece on the marketing merits of the business press, like your faithful TTJ!
And if anyone is interested in using my holiday experiences of the virtues of wood for promotional purposes, I’m open to offers, although, on reflection, I think they’d probably be more suitable for a health and safety video.
