Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe
Dealer Meeting: Alicante
How do you fit a forklift ballet and a dealer conference into the same room?
You start with masking tape.
That’s not a metaphor. When Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe asked JKC to produce their European dealer meeting in Alicante — three days, three brands, dealers from across the continent, and a live truck show that needed to convert into a presentation venue mid-programme — the first thing we did was tape out the venue to scale on our office floor.
Then we made cardboard cut-outs of every truck. And we moved them around until we had a route plan that worked — that got each machine in and out cleanly, that gave the operators space to demonstrate what the kit could do, and that left the room in the right configuration for the presentations that followed.
What MLE needed
Mitsubishi Logisnext Europe runs three brands — Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks, Cat Lift Trucks, and TCM. Each brand had its own day at the event. Each day needed its own character while the overall three days needed to feel like a coherent programme rather than three separate events sharing a venue.
The live truck show was the centrepiece and the complication. MLE didn’t want a static display. They wanted their dealers to see the machines actually working — electric counterbalances, reach trucks, stackers, pallet trucks, and order pickers moving through a choreographed sequence. The kind of thing you can’t get from a brochure or a Teams call, which was rather the point of flying everyone to Alicante.
The constraint: the same space that would be full of moving forklifts for the truck show needed to be a presentation venue immediately afterwards. Same room. Very different setup. Hard deadline on the changeover.
There was also a product reveal built into the programme. The kind where nobody knows what’s coming until it’s in the room. Getting that right — the moment, the timing, the reaction — required the same level of choreographic precision as the truck show itself.
What JKC delivered
The masking tape floor plan was where the production thinking happened.
Everything that followed was built on top of it.
- Venue planning and logistics — mapping every truck’s route, timing every entry and exit, designing the quick-change from live demo space to presentation stage, and doing it all in a format the wider team could follow
- Presenter scripting — a tight script for a presenter we’ve worked with many times, written to keep the energy moving, tie the truck sequences to the wider brand narrative, and give the product reveal its moment
- Technical production — music and lighting cues synced to truck movements; every entry and exit hitting on beat; the kind of detail that the audience doesn’t consciously notice but would immediately feel if it were wrong
- Presentation graphics — covering new product launches, consultative selling techniques, telematics, and a global market update; content that gave dealers something to take home beyond a suntan
- On-site support — Cat flew out to Alicante to keep the programme on track across all three days, managing certain parts so the MLE team could focus on their dealers
The truck show
A choreographed live truck show has a lot of failure modes. Machines need to enter in the right order. Operators need to know their routes. The sequence has to flow — no awkward pauses, no near-misses, nothing that makes the audience nervous for the wrong reasons. And at the end of it, every truck needs to find a position where it can be inspected, which means the final configuration of the room has to be planned backwards from where you need to end up.
The cardboard cut-outs on the office floor solved this. By the time the team arrived in Alicante, the route plan had been tested, revised, and tested again. Everyone on the production side knew exactly where they needed to be and when. The operators had clear paths. The changeover to presentation mode was rehearsed.
On the day, it worked. The trucks moved. The reveal landed. The room changed over. The presentations started on time.
Result
Dealers from all three brands left having seen their products in action, sat through substantive presentations, and been part of a programme that felt — by the standards of European dealer meetings — genuinely worth the journey.
MLE got three days that informed, motivated, and connected a dealer network that doesn’t often get the chance to be in the same room. The event covered everything from the headline product news to the granular detail of consultative selling — and did it in a sequence that kept the energy up rather than asking people to sit through back-to-back slides.
For JKC, it was the kind of project where sector knowledge and event production overlap completely. Knowing how forklifts move, what dealers care about, how a live product reveal should land — none of that comes from a general events background. It comes from spending a long time in this industry.
And some of the floor tape is still on our floor.
