Going into the 2019 International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition (IACP), Federal Signal Corp. wanted to demonstrate the particular and defining advantages of its new Pathfinder system for police cars. Consisting of siren and light controllers, the Pathfinder can oversee everything from a vehicle's siren tones and perimeter lighting to its public-address microphone. The do-everything product even governs a series of prerecorded digital voice messages (e.g., hurricane and no-loitering warnings) in English, Spanish, and Canadian-French, and integrates with an alarm-monitoring system that alerts an officer if the temperature in the car's K9 container starts to reach levels detrimental to any police dogs riding along.

The problem it faced wasn't presenting the Pathfinder's easily noticed light and sound capabilities to the expected 16,000 attendees at the IACP expo. Showing off bright lights and blaring sirens meant to help subdue criminals and secure accident scenes, for instance, would be easy enough. Instead, the challenge was in displaying one of Pathfinder's key benefits: its simplicity of installation – that is, it requires just one main control panel for officers to operate its numerous features as well as an optional expansion module. In contrast, rivals' systems might require three or more devices, potentially adding hundreds or even thousands of dollars in installation costs for a more convoluted system that, by virtue of its increased complexity and additional installation points, might break down more often, too. Significantly, with just one control device for officers to work, police have fewer things to distract their attention during the never-ending stressful operations they face, from high-speed pursuits to emergency calls. But the main challenge in differentiating Pathfinder via this key benefit was almost hard enough to make Federal Signal call in a SWAT team for help. On their own, the system components look similar to competitors' products and, once installed in a vehicle, the wiring part of the apparatus is hidden, its innovation and utility thus completely invisible to the naked eye. That meant, at shows such as IACP, the company would have to rely more on staffers' sales pitches and oral descriptions, along with physical or electronic collateral describing the lighting system and touting its benefits, neither of which was particularly exciting or eye catching. "We needed to think of something unique that could cut through the visual noise on the show floor," says Dave Caswell, creative director for Evo Exhibits LLC, which designed and fabricated the Federal Signal exhibit for the expo.

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The company started by brainstorming ideas it ultimately discarded, including building a stand-alone cross section of part of a police car with the lighting technology embedded inside it. While such a construction would be able to display the product to some degree, it didn't seem to pack the visual punch Federal Signal wanted. Then, in the course of discussing various options, the company learned of a similar project Evo had executed for another client, one where it built an entirely transparent vehicle for a maker of electrical and fiber optic interconnection systems.
The notion struck a nerve with Federal Signal, which glommed onto the concept immediately – after ratcheting it up a notch, where it would be not a generic auto but a crystal-clear police cruiser – for two reasons. First, it could show exactly how the wiring system appeared inside a police car instead of relying on staffers' abstract descriptions and attendees' imaginations to visualize what the product looked like in action. Second, shows like IACP typically host a veritable fleet of law-enforcement and emergency vehicles, but a translucent transport would stand out like a Humvee in a Prius showroom.

To Federal Signal, having such a compelling traffic builder that displayed the Pathfinder system inside the car was just one half of what would make for a successful product demonstration. It wouldn't get much mileage from attendees if the demo didn't also offer the ability to show how Pathfinder actually works in real time. While most companies might opt, understandably, for staffers conducting such demos, the company took it a step further, directing a more customer-centric approach by allowing the audience of law-enforcement officials to try out various aspects of the system themselves. After all, the safety of the officers under their commands might depend on how well Pathfinder worked, and the best way to build confidence in the system was to let the potential buyers try it out in several scenarios to see how well it responded.

To further that end, the company would also trick out the car with a total of 28 of its other products, including perimeter lights and a rugged push bumper. Besides the novelty vehicle, there would be three product display kiosks along with a normal police cruiser in Federal Signal's exhibit.

Drive Time
In the automobile industry, the time between when a car is conceived and when it appears on a dealer's showroom floor can range anywhere between two to five years. While developing its transparent-car concept was admittedly on a smaller scale than, for example, engineering the latest Tesla, Evo nonetheless required a lengthy four-month process from the drawing board to the IACP show floor. And there were a few speed bumps along the way.

First, Federal Signal settled on modelling the see-through sedan after the Dodge Charger Pursuit, a popular model of police cruiser. That meant the company had to approach Dodge to acquire the carmaker's imprimatur for the project. Once the company got the green light from Dodge, it collected a wide variety of photos and data about the Charger Pursuit from auto websites and car dealers, among other sources, to make its model more precise.

But even with a trunkful of visual references and vital statistics, getting the model car's look right proved a painstaking and occasionally frustrating task. For example, using 3-D modeling software, Evo first crafted a series of cross sections of the proposed car as a starting point. Once they physically churned out these early prototypes made of MDF panels on a CNC machine, though, Evo's designers and production team found they looked "off" even to the naked eye. Indeed, their initial reaction was right on the money because subsequent fittings of other parts such as the push bumper, side mirrors, and front and back windshields into the sections proved difficult. The Evo team grabbed old-time analog tools (i.e., Sharpies) to mark up the MDF panels in the places where they thought adjustments were needed. Once they fed the hand-made measurements back into the 3-D modeling program, they cranked out the new shapes and tried again – and again, laboring through no fewer than half a dozen iterations until all the parts finally looked exactly right and fit together as snugly as Lego blocks. Then Evo was able to move to the next step: printing the car's pieces in clear acrylic.

The finished auto comprised four transparent sections, each weighing approximately 500 pounds. Ancillary parts, such as windshields, roof pieces with a roll bar, and other miscellaneous items, brought the total weight of the car to 2,400 pounds, all of which could be neatly packed into six crates. Furthermore, Evo added a lift-and-caster system to the four main segments so that they could be raised a foot off the ground, which would help with installation by allowing workers to easily slide under the auto to attach wiring and other items. Last, it built a standalone control console that would enable attendees to test the Pathfinder and other products.

With the car ready to roll a few weeks before the expo started, Federal Signal began its pre-show promotion. Because it didn't want to risk weakening the impact of the novelty vehicle by releasing information about it before IACP opened and thus ruining the element of surprise, it ran no-frills posts about the exhibit on Facebook that gave nothing away about what awaited attendees. Included in those posts was an animated video highlighting the main features of the Pathfinder system but nothing that hinted at the unusual, even tantalizingly peculiar, vehicle that would be the core of the exhibit.

Start Your Engine
Even before the show officially started, Federal Signal quickly learned that its chief attraction was going to become the kind of draw almost every exhibitor wants. During show setup, a constant flood of other exhibitors took time out from minding their own booths to witness the eccentric car being slowly put together. That kind of spontaneous reaction among experienced exhibitors accustomed to clever traffic builders and ingenious displays thrilled Federal Signal – except for the part where the overly enthusiastic visitors kept rubbing their hands over the clear body, leaving dozens of conspicuous fingerprint streaks and smears on the acrylic surface. To prevent the scrum of inquisitive exhibitors and later, it reasoned, curious throngs of attendees from defacing the car, the company decided to place several stanchions all around it, hoping that would keep viewers at a safe distance and thereby solve the smudge snafu.

That fervent pre-show reaction proved to be an accurate foreshadowing of what would occur during the expo itself. Shortly after IACP opened its doors in Chicago's McCormick Place, word of mouth about the luminous car spread with the velocity of police responding to a 911 call. All day long, throughout every day of the expo, hundreds of showgoers crowded into the 40-by-50-foot island booth to see the transparent vehicle for themselves. And no wonder it stood out to them: Teal-colored LED edge lighting outlined the chassis and wheels, giving the acrylic auto the look of something expertly hand drawn that impossibly came off the page into real life. It was so mesmerizing that attendees still tried to reach over the stanchions to touch the vehicle because it appeared as if their hands would pass through the object that seemed to their eyes to possess no more actual substance than a hologram. Reacting to the vehicle's magnetic drawing power, Federal Signal employed a staffer as a dedicated cleaner who kept busy rushing to wipe off streaks left by visitors unable to resist touching the curious car.

Of course, the display was meant to do much more than just build a gridlock of rapt onlookers. When visitors came into the booth, a Federal Signal staffer would greet and qualify them, then ask if they would like to get in line to test the Pathfinder system. If so, when it was their turn, the guests approached the 17-by-12-inch control panel, which rested on top of a 45-inch-tall pedestal. After receiving a few quick instructions from the staffer, attendees could try out several scenarios.

Here was a key and often overlooked aspect of demonstrations that Federal Signal put to good use. Instead of a spiel about the Pathfinder's features – which recipients of such marketing patter tend to slough off because that approach is more abstract and less focused on their particular challenges – booth staff highlighted its many relevant benefits. In other words, they directly addressed given problems that the product solves. Then, guests could see for themselves if the Pathfinder system was the solution they needed.

For example, a commonly recurring perilous situation is when, in responding to a call, officers immediately activate a police car's familiar flashing lights – which can blind other drivers and easily lead to an accident. By using the "Headlight activation" scenario button, attendees could trigger a mock nighttime scenario in which the headlights and taillights on the display car turned on, then any flashing emergency warning light dimmed slightly and moved to a slower flash pattern, which would be less likely to disorient traffic in front of or behind the cruiser.

By contrast, the "Reverse shift" button simulated another risky circumstance police frequently face when they need to back up, often quickly and without much time to check their surroundings. Working this button activated the reverse lights and changed some of the flashing rear lights to a steady white floodlight, providing more illumination for drivers to safely move in reverse. Hitting the "Driver door open" button simulated, just as the name suggests, a driver opening his or her door. The problem addressed here is that officers' eyes need a number of seconds to adjust from the relative darkness of the squad car's interior to the burst of illumination from the vehicle's lights. For ordinary civilians at the wheel, this would be an annoyance at worst. For police officers, this might leave them unable to see their surroundings for several crucial seconds that could spell the difference between protection and peril. Thus, pressing the button caused the driver's-side end of the light bar to turn off, preventing an officer from being affected by it when stepping out of the parked vehicle.

If the demo dazzled attendees with Pathfinder's light capabilities, it swayed them just as much with its sound powers. Participants could also test the Rumbler, a device that adds up to 10 decibels of low-frequency tone to the high-frequency sound of a standard siren. Because low-frequency tones penetrate into other vehicles' compartments better than high-frequency ones, the Rumbler provides additional and improved warnings to others on the roadway. Another sound-related scenario enabled attendees to activate the K9 release message cautioning a suspect that a police dog, whose bite would definitely be far worse than its bark, might soon be unleashed. Additionally, running through the various scenarios allowed guests an opportunity to view nearly 30 of Federal Signal's other products – light bars, siren speakers, perimeter lights, and so forth – at work in the simulated field.

Vital to the company's overall goals for the expo, the various scenarios showed off the Pathfinder's simpler, streamlined wiring system and its duo of installation points. Literally thousands of times throughout the show, whenever guests pressed a button on the console, the actual wiring in the car flashed like colored streaks of lightning, showing how the signal would be transmitted to the various products inside the car. Prompted by the visual cue, staffers could then reinforce the marketing message that the Pathfinder system, with its reduced amount of wiring and number of control modules, meant lessened installation time and fewer failure points because of that very simplicity. Again, the demonstration's impact was likely multiplied by the visitors themselves having the opportunity to select whichever scenarios most interested them and were the most relevant to their particular needs. Highlighted by the car's LED lighting elements, the Pathfinder's attributes became instantly and literally visible to rapt onlookers faster than you could say "Book 'em, Dano!" "This is a beautiful solution for visualizing the competitive advantages of these products that would otherwise be hidden," said one Sizzle Awards judge. "The execution and display really had stopping power."

Capturing Results
When any of the hundreds of visitors to the booth departed, staffers handed them a brochure repeating the essential points about Pathfinder's benefits and a transparent acrylic keychain as a reminder of their visits. With some guests spending up to 10 minutes or more on the control console and sometimes making return visits, the clever tchotchke was probably superfluous. Indeed, for the duration of the show, attendees turned the aisles around the booth into high-occupancy lanes that resulted in a 60-percent surge in qualified sales leads from the last IACP, twice the goal the company had originally set.

Confronting a show floor where police vehicles of many types are standard to the point of being barely noticeable, Federal Signal turned what could easily have been a potential handicap into a one-of-a-kind advantage. Creating a police car that was a type used by thousands of potential customers at IACP, but in a version that was more exceptional than everyday, earned it a well-deserved badge of honor. What the company so ably proved was that an ingenious traffic builder coupled with an outstanding demo could illustrate the advantages of an otherwise intangible product more profitably than it had dared imagine. Further, by focusing on the Pathfinder's specific benefits, Federal Signal found a way to convince budget-conscious attendees its product was as superior to competitors' as it was striking to see in action. To invoke an old marketing maxim, it sold the sizzle and the steak.

The car's drawing power was such that, while no official count was kept, Federal Signal estimates that thousands of images and videos featuring the vehicle at work sped over social media. Faced with a difficult challenge, Federal Signal came through in the clutch with a remarkable demonstration that made the company a clear choice over the competition. E