Communications is either a noun or a verb

After a blizzard of recent trade shows and conferences, I've seen two very different approaches to MarComs.

One treats communications as a noun – a department, a budget line, a set of deliverables, brochures and a website. What an ex-FD used to call "busy work".
That gets you activity: press releases, a stand, a campaign with a start and a finish.

The other treats it as a verb – a discipline continuously practised – a state of mind.
That gets you results. Not a one-off win. An ongoing programme. A beginning, yes — but no real end.

The difference isn't semantic. We've all seen both, even if it didn't register at the time. Maybe you've even presented the post-show dashboard that looks great and changes nothing.

This applies everywhere: product launches, thought leadership, media relationships. But let me use the trade show as one illustration — not the point, just a window into the principle.

Businesses routinely commit serious budget to exhibition space, collateral, and staff time – not to mention the landfill mugs and tiny notebooks. Yet ROI conversations almost always focus on the three days on the floor. Leads captured. Badge QRs scanned.

That framing treats the event as the programme — a thing with a clear start and end. A budget. A cost. A commitment to be delivered and closed. Once the stand comes down and the beers are gone, we're done.

But communications as verb doesn't work that way.

Effective comms before, during, and after a trade show looks different:

• Before: Priority prospects already know you're attending and why it matters. Not a "we're going to ABC" LinkedIn post – most will miss that. A published point of view makes your presence coherent, not just commercial.

• During: You're activating a warmed audience, not cold-prospecting strangers.

• After: Conversations map to a nurture sequence. You measure engagement quality and progression, not leaflets distributed. And then? You plan what comes next. Because there's always a next.

Here's the harder truth: your attendance at a trade show has to fit your wider ongoing comms programme — not the other way around. Don't bend your core message just for an event. Don't try to be all things to all visitors. The moment you dilute what you stand for to seem more broadly appealing, you've sacrificed the coherence that makes verb‑thinking work. A focused message that resonates deeply with thirty people is worth more than a fuzzy one that glances off three hundred.

A beautiful stand with no before/after programme is just expensive theatre. That's communications as noun: a thing you did, not a discipline you exercised. Your boss might have loved the stand. Your prospects? Your pitch had been overwritten by the next one; your card in a stack of "I wonder who that was?"

The trade show is just an example. The same logic applies to a white paper, a PR hit, a social post, a campaign launch. Each one fails when treated as an endpoint. Each one compounds when treated as a moment within something ongoing.

For SMEs, the stakes are higher, not lower.

Larger organisations can absorb the inefficiency of disconnected activity. The strategic advantage available to the focused, agile operator is the ability to build integrated programmes that a sprawling enterprise would struggle to match. But only if you choose to use it.

So the question worth asking is not "How do we get more from the trade show?" – or the campaign, or the content, or the event.

It's: "What role does this activity play in our ongoing communications programme – and are we structured to extract that value over time, not just for a moment?"

The first question treats comms as a series of finite events. The second treats it as a living discipline.

And answering the second makes the first considerably easier.