2025 is another milestone year in Singapore’s history. It marks our nation’s 60th anniversary of independence.
Like for SG50 in 2015, Singapore is celebrating SG60 with a year-long series of events, from large-scale ones to community-based activities, amid increased interest in our country’s history, achievements and shared values.
If your brand is looking to join the festivities with a unique and memorable celebration, I have an idea for you: an SG60 exhibition.
An exhibition for SG50
In 2015, HOL curated the exhibition Singapore’s Economic Miracle (hereafter referred to as Miracle) for SG50. Spearheaded by the SG50 Economic and International Committee, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, the exhibition told the story of the nation’s economic development. It also paid tribute to the Singaporeans and companies that had contributed to Singapore’s growth.
Although a decade has passed, exhibitions are still excellent brand experiences for marking a momentous occasion like SG60. In this article, I explore why exhibitions remain relevant for your brand to connect memorably with your audience and share how you can tell your brand’s story in an SG60 exhibition.
Exhibitions provide unparalleled brand visibility
Exhibitions are brand experiences that can potentially reach a large and diverse audience, especially if they are set in public places with high foot traffic.
An exhibition’s physical presence creates buzz and excitement when held in venues like shopping malls, public libraries and MRT stations. The heightened public attention gives brands high visibility and reinforces their messages.
The Miracle exhibition, for example, was held at two of Singapore’s biggest shopping malls and the Changi Airport. It was anchored in heartfelt stories about the determination, resilience and resourcefulness of Singaporeans and Singaporean companies, and complemented by a visually arresting design.
Miracle stopped over 200,000 people shoppers and travellers in their tracks, drawing them into Singapore’s economic trials and tribulations and exposing them to the stories of 50 iconic Singaporean brands. The exhibition also initiated a ripple effect beyond its physical exhibition venues, as visitors shared the buzz through their photos and reflections on social media.
All that said about Miracle, your SG60 exhibition does not need to be a large-scale set-up like Miracle or be staged in a high-footfall place like a mall. The Char Kway Teow Legacy, an exhibition aimed at inspiring young people to pay it forward through a Singaporean philanthropist family’s story, travelled to Singapore’s tertiary institutions because its target audience was youths 18 to 35.
Importantly, your exhibition needs to reach your audience where they are, even if they are a niche and smaller audience. This ensures you can raise your brand’s visibility among the right-fit audience who matter to your brand.
Exhibitions help build credibility and trust
The saying “Seeing is believing” rings true for exhibitions. Simply put, their tangible nature builds credibility and fosters trust. Planning and executing a high-quality, engaging physical exhibition takes time and resources – this is obvious to anyone. So, when your audience sees your SG60 exhibition done well, they also see the investment you have made and recognise your commitment as a brand to Singapore and Singaporeans.
Additionally, with the prevalence of online scams and consumers becoming more wary of digital transactions, “seeing is believing” has become more important than ever for brands. Through an exhibition, your brand’s physical presence can build a sense of comfort and familiarity with your audience and demonstrate that you are not a fly-by-night business, giving them the confidence to interact and transact with you.
You can add even more credibility and increase your audience’s trust if your brand works with other businesses, public agencies, cultural institutions or Singaporeans on your SG60 exhibition, and you communicate this collaboration to your audience.
The Miracle exhibition, for example, was a collaboration between public agencies and businesses. They worked to put together stories around milestone events that shaped the Singapore economy and stories of Singaporeans and Singaporean brands that made our economic success possible. The exhibition uplifted the featured brands as reliable partners of the community and increased their brand trust among Singaporeans.
Exhibitions create lasting memories
Exhibitions are the perfect vehicles for sharing stories in various formats. From panel texts and multimedia installations to digital interactives and physical artefacts, these storytelling formats can engage multiple senses – sight, sound, touch and even smell and taste.
When your audience can see, touch or interact with the exhibits in other ways, they are more likely to connect with the content on a deeper, more immersive level. This connection creates a lasting impression and helps them remember your brand for years to come.
The Miracle exhibition, for example, featured life-sized, social media-friendly replica artefacts like Khong Guan biscuits and Raffles Hotel doorman cutouts that visitors could experience, take photos with and share online. These interactions took visitors down memory lane and offered opportunities to make new, lasting memories.
At the same time, exhibitions can deeply resonate with their audiences through the stories they tell. For the Miracle exhibition, for example, we wanted to tell Singapore’s economic success story so that Singaporeans would feel proud. We also wanted the audience to feel they too possessed courage, determination and commitment – like the Singaporeans who had come before them.
To achieve such emotional resonance, we told the stories of ordinary Singaporeans and iconic Singaporean brands, recounting their setbacks, resilience and successes. When the audience saw themselves in these stories, they left the experience proud and confident that they could shape Singapore’s economic future too.
When your exhibition connects emotionally with your audience, they are more likely to like, trust and remember your experience and your brand.
How to tell your brand’s story in your SG60 exhibition
Your SG60 exhibition allows your brand to align with and resonate with Singapore’s spirit and shared values. For example, your exhibition could:
- Showcase the growth of your brand and its contribution to the Singapore Story, aligning your milestones with Singapore’s key moments and achievements.
- Celebrate the values your brand and Singapore share, whether the shared values of SG60, such as boldness, resilience and openness, or the universal courage, determination and commitment often said to have defined Singaporeans during the nation-building years.
I recommend using a story-first approach to tell your brand’s story in your exhibition within the SG60 context. For this approach, you can take inspiration from HOL’s strategy framework, CRM, which stands for Communicate, Resonate and Motivate.
Before designing your exhibition, you can follow these three steps:
1. Communicate: Gather and curate the information you want to communicate to your audience.
2. Resonate: Identify the emotions you’d like to evoke in your audience.
3. Motivate: Determine the actions and changes you want to bring about through the experience.
Then, with your goals clearly defined with the above, pull it all together by choosing storytelling methods that can effectively communicate your messages to your audience, resonate emotionally with them and motivate them to the action you want them to take.
Final thoughts
An SG60 exhibition creates the perfect stage to link your brand story with Singapore’s story. Such an exhibition adds trust and credibility to your brand and helps it resonate with Singaporeans.
Physical exhibitions can also be digitally archived, ensuring a legacy that future generations can access. For example, a virtual version of The Char Kway Teow Legacy exhibition was also created because the physical exhibition would eventually end. The virtual experience not only met its audience where they are – digitally savvy young people who are always online – but also preserved the exhibition digitally for legacy.
So, seize the moment – or, shall we say, the year – and join the SG60 celebrations with a brand experience in the form of an exhibition. Planning, designing and implementing a small- to medium-sized exhibition takes four to six months, so your brand still has time to make its mark on Singaporeans’ hearts and minds during this historic year.
