Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to design BTL and activation material that works at the stall
Activation material is held in a hand, in a noisy place, by somebody in a hurry, and handed over by a promoter who will be off script by three in the afternoon. Design it to do that promoter's job.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Below the line material is the only advertising your customer holds in their hand while a person stands in front of them talking. That changes everything about how it is designed. The reader is standing, in a noisy atrium or a car park, with a child pulling at them, giving you six seconds. And the material is not really talking to that customer on its own. It is propping up a promoter who was hired for the weekend and will be tired by three in the afternoon.
Each piece has one job and one distance
The most common failure at an activation is that every piece says the same thing. The backdrop, the standee, the leaflet and the danglers all carry the same headline and the same four product shots, so the display tells a passer-by nothing at fifteen metres and tells a stopped customer nothing at one metre.
| Piece | Read from | What it has to do |
|---|---|---|
| Canopy or backdrop | 10 to 20 metres, across an atrium or a park | Say what this stall is, so somebody decides to walk over |
| Roll-up standee | 2 to 4 metres, beside the table | Carry the offer and the reason to stop |
| Leaflet or coupon | In the hand, 6 seconds | Carry one offer, a date, and a reason to keep it |
| Tent card at a counter | Half a metre, at the moment of payment | One line and a price |
| Sample pack or demo card | At home, days later | Say who gave it and how to buy more |
The backdrop is a signboard, not a poster
A backdrop is read across a crowd from fifteen metres, at an angle, with people walking in front of it. It has room for the name and the category, in type large enough to read from the other side of the atrium, and nothing else. "Water purifiers. Free water test today." A backdrop full of lifestyle photographs and small claims tells the shopper nothing they can act on from that distance.
The same logic applies upwards on a standee. Standard roll-ups are about a metre wide and two metres tall, and the bottom forty centimetres sit behind the table, the boxes and the crowd. Everything that matters belongs between one and a half and two metres from the floor, which is eye height for a standing adult.
The leaflet needs a reason to survive the walk home
Six seconds is the honest life of a leaflet, after which it goes into a bag or a bin. What gets it into the bag is not design quality. It is a reason to keep it: a code the counter will honour, a price valid until a printed date, a service voucher, a form the technician has to collect.
Put the offer on the face that is uppermost when it is handed over. A5 in the hand beats A4 folded twice, which is opened once and then never again. Print the address with the landmark. Nobody finds a shop by its pin code. And print a code, one code per activation site, because the redemption count is the only number this medium gives you.
What leaves with the customer is doing the selling
A sample, a demo card or a warranty slip goes home and gets looked at again in a quieter moment, sometimes by the person who actually decides. So whatever leaves the table carries the full address, the number, the QR code and the name of the person who handed it over. A sachet with only a logo on it is a free sample and nothing more.
For a demonstration, print a card with the result written on it by hand: the water reading, the measurement, the quotation. A piece of paper with your customer's own numbers on it does not get thrown away.
Design for the person handing it over
Write the promoter's page before the customer's leaflet. The opening line, the three questions that qualify somebody in ten seconds, the price, and the two objections you already know are coming. Laminate it, because it will be handled all day in the sun.
A branded t-shirt costs very little and does more than another standee. So does one thing on the table that makes people stop: the machine running, the fabric being cut, the water being tested, the dough being rolled. An activation with nothing happening on the table is a stall people walk around.
The permissions and the weather are part of the design
The apartment association wants a letter and a deposit, and it will tell you where the canopy may stand and for how long. A mall has its own activity licence, its own rates for the atrium, and its own rules about sound. A roadshow or a canopy on public land needs the local body's permission. That is the one people skip. It is why activations get stopped at two in the afternoon.
Then there is the sky. An outdoor canopy in Bengaluru between May and October is a canopy in the rain by four in the afternoon, so laminate anything printed, weight the standees, and keep the leaflets in a box rather than a stack on the table.
For example, a water purifier dealer runs a Saturday and Sunday activation in a Kengeri apartment complex. The backdrop says "Free water hardness test" in letters readable from the far gate. The technician tests water from the resident's own flat in front of them. Every household that tests gets a slip with a code, valid for fourteen days, and the count of codes redeemed at the showroom is what decides whether the next four weekends get booked.
What to do next
Take your last activation's material out of the cupboard and lay it on a table in that order: backdrop, standee, leaflet, form. Stand back five metres and read only the backdrop. If you cannot tell what is being sold, the display was never the problem with the leads.
Brand activation campaigns and BTL advertising cover the sites, the permissions and the promoter crew, which GullySales coordinates rather than employs. The part worth fixing first is what happens to the names collected on the Sunday, and that is what the free audit looks at.