Six markets, one brand book, one pair of dates. A multi-country activation across West Africa is the same project six times only on the slide where it was sold. On the ground it is six venues with six rulebooks, six supply chains, two currencies or more, and one brand manager whose calendar does not care. We have run enough of these — the largest across six countries in nine weeks — to know where the schedule actually slips. This is the planning note we wish every client had before the kick-off call.
Lock these three things first
The design masters. One engineered pack, drawn once in Abidjan, with the country variants expressed as annotated deltas — never six parallel designs. When the Accra hall clamps height at 3.6 m and Dakar allows 5 m, both stands stay recognisably the same design because they deviate from one master, not from each other. This is the same logic that keeps one finish across eight cities, applied at the design level.
The date ladder. Sequence the cities with at least five working days between raise-days wherever the shows allow it. Not for fabrication — each stand is built by its local bench, in parallel — but for the learning loop: every raise-day surfaces one improvement, and a ladder lets city two inherit city one's fix instead of its problem.
The approval path. One person, named in the contract, who can approve a variant in 24 hours. Multi-country projects die by committee in exactly one place: when a per-country deviation (a hall rule, a substitution) waits a week for a sign-off that needed a day.
Leave these open, deliberately
- Local supplier substitutions — pre-authorised at drawing time, per country, within the finish standard. Chasing identical SKUs across six markets is how budgets drown.
- Furniture and plants — rented locally, specified by photo and dimension, never freighted.
- The last 10 % of graphics — printed in-country in show week, so late campaign changes cost a file upload, not a reprint-and-fly.