CORPORATE PROMOTIONAL ITEMS

Ridiculous Promotional Items Of 2009

2010-01-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

One way to recognize what good corporate promotional items are is to see a collection of ridiculous ones from 2009 (seems so long ago). This collection of 27 of the worst was collected, compiled, and published by website A.V. Club, and although they seem to have some connection to one of our favorite tongue-in-cheek sites The Onion, the collection seems real enough, or at least we can easily imagine many of these being handed out by well-meaning but woefully misinformed "event specialists."

A few items on the list include a faux fox-tail tie (you wear it hanging from your neck) to promote the movie The Fantastic Mr. Fox; paper masks of the main characters from the game Plants Vs. Zombies; plastic vampire teeth for The Vampire Archives (I went through several pairs of these when I was in grade school. Grade school!); plus a plastic bucket, a plastic ball, another mask, a t-shirt, socks, etcetera. Details with pictures at the A.V Club site (clickable link above).

Sometimes a boring pen is the best corporate promotional item there is, although it wouldn't make a year-end list.

A Classic Corporate Promotional Items Idea: A Personalized Ink Pen

2009-11-28T08:35:00.000-08:00

Here's an old classic among corporate promotional items: the ubiquitous personalized ink pen. Now, the personalized ink pen has the double-edged reputation of being the perfect gift, as well as a useless goody-bag filler, something you put in there just to add to the content. In the worst case, it won't even be looked at for half a second before being thrown away or relegated to the back of the drawer.

Why is this? My guess is that it stems from the wide (and I mean wiiiiide) range of personalized ink pens available and the manufacturers and distributors who carry them. Remember, your company is investing top dollar for corporate promotional items because you want your name to be top-of-mind whenever an executive or a consumer uses that pen, so don't buy the cheapest rubbish ink pen you can get. You might as well grab things from the rubbish bin and print your name on that.

To repeat, there is a wide range of personalized ink pens on the net and literally hundreds of providers who will turn them in corporate promotional items for you. Please don't pick just the cheapest you can find, the difference between a pen that doesn't even write and a pen that somebody will be pleased to keep on his or her desk or pocket is literally just a few cents or even a fraction of a cent in wholesale. So don't cheap out on rubbish and keep the classicism of the personalized ink pen alive.

The Most Interesting Corporate Promotional Items

2009-11-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

Just an attempt to list down the most interesting corporate promotional items we could find on the internet...

Two things become apparent from the outset: one is that many, if not all, of the most imaginative freebies people write about are from companies who make computer games, and two is that they've come a long way (a looooong way) from promotional lanyards, while still including the classics (yes, like promotional lanyards). Maybe there's a lesson or two to be learned from this, but that will be the stuff of future posts. For this one we just want to make a list of the particular swag that caught our eye.

FOOD - Especially in tradeshows, food is good for drawing in the crowds, and once they're there at your booth, at least a few will cursorily glance at your products. Remember that once the hours pile on, most people at any tradeshow will be tired, hungry, and thirsty. We read about slices of pizza being given away (the Borderlands booth at E3, a computer game event), as well as crazy-colored cocktails and diet snacks (at the StyleFixx shopping party). For the promotion of the Simpsons movie, 7-Elevens were transformed into Kwik-E Marts, selling Buzz Cola and the like (for non-Simpsons freaks, the Kwik-E Mart and Buzz Cola are fictional brands that figure prominently in the show). I don't know if there were actual "freebies" per se in these brick & mortar Kwik-E Marts, but people did buy the merchandise and kept them as trophies, so in terms of merchandising, this was brilliance itself.

GAMES - The high-tech game industry is of course a phenomenon that keeps on going and growing, and everyone knows how addictive many of these games are. The companies seem to be thinking like classic pushers: know that as with drugs, all that's needed is a free hit or two for starters, and the customers will keep coming back with fistfuls of cash. That famous and extremely hyped game Spore gives away the "creature creator" component of the game which, although fun by itself, still begs that you use all those creatures you've created in the full game, which you have to buy. Granted they didn't give away the creator to just everyone, but they did give them away to the game bloggers, who will in turn make sure everyone else gets the vicarious experience.

WEIRD - Or just different, the edges are certainly blurry on these ones. Axe, the company that makes deodorant and whose TV ads often find their way into the video upload sites (which all modern ad agencies aspire to), sent out "Sexiled" kits to frat houses, men's dormitories, and other places where young men live in limited privacy. The kit is basically a sheet of black canvas with big, bold instructions on how to set it up as a tent, lending some privacy for those moments when one has private activities one wants to pursue with a consenting partner. Not particularly useful, but that is never the intent when you go to the weird side.

USEFUL STUFF - Some freebies are just too useful to ignore. You can't go wrong with things like soap, shampoo, dishwashing detergent and the like except if they don't work (example, dishwashing detergent doesn't remove grease) or work horribly (example, shampoo smells like pee). But even if they do work, the problem with things like soap and such is that they usually stay at home where they can't tell people about the product they're trying to hustle. Some useful promo items though, work better than others. Blizzcon, a convention by game developers Blizzard Entertainment, gave away hand sanitizer in nice carry-sized bottles with their own branding. A sign of the times perhaps, but it works, getting much more mileage than shampoo.

Traditional thinkers need not fear, a lot of t-shirts, stickers, button pins, lanyards, pens, mousepads, and all that usual stuff still make the large bulk of all corporate promotional items to exchange hands. Do make sure that you enhance the experience with something different though (and yes, loathe as we are to say it, in this instance sometimes "different for the sake of being different" works, at least temporarily), or at the very least give them designs that will make sure they get used.

A last word about making sure that the swag you give away is interesting: in these days of instant social networking and virtually everyone having a net presence, the most interesting items will find their way to the internet. Someone gave away giant sanitary pads at the aforementioned StyleFixx, and although we doubt anyone actually used them, they sure got blogged, vlogged, tweeted, flickred, and dugg about a lot. Something to think about when you make set out to order your new batch of corporate promotional items.

Favorite Corporate Promotional Items: Promotional Lanyards

2009-11-10T05:45:00.000-08:00

Promotional Lanyards are a favorite among corporate promotional items, both among the promoters and the market. These humble and utilitarian items have become a darling of the promotional industry. With people's increasing use of smaller gadgets like phones and personal music players, IDs, pens, pads, and other items that are very convenient to hang from the neck, corporations are turning to these promotional lanyards as a freebie that is almost sure to get some use, especially among young people.

You have an ID, you hang it on a lanyard. You have one of those new tiny mp3 players, you hang it on a lanyard. In my line of work that requires near instantaneous access to any of a set of pens, the best place for easy access is clipped on my ID lanyard.

In many places, lanyards aren't just being worn in the office or school, but it has become an acceptable, if not fashionable, accessory so that people no longer take them off when out of the office or campus. Therefore, aside from the small printing area (which is actually small only in terms 0f width but with a repeating logo, you can have much more coverage on it than say, a pen).

That is why promotional lanyards are so in right now when it comes to corporate promotional items.

A basic rule of thumb: if your market is young and hip, get bright or semi-bright colors, but not neon, and not pastel because they get dirty too fast. If your market is older, black, brown, gray, or white are always safe bets.

Also, not all promotional lanyards are created equal, semi-stretchy material like neoprene will be more comfortable than nylon webbing. Some are plain loops with a spring hook attachment, others go higher tech with detaching buckles that allow one to take the item hanging on the lanyard without taking the main loop off the neck, others have reflective material, etcetera. A good bet will be to go for something not too plain, but not so full of buckles and attachments that it becomes the new-century equivalent of the pocket protector.

Have fun shopping around for your corporate promotional items, and don't neglect the possibility of opting for ever-practical promotional lanyards.

Corporate Promotional Items Rule#1: Think Of Them, Not Of Yourself

2009-11-05T23:45:00.000-08:00

Yes, of course in the final analysis the point of the corporate promotional item with their bold logos and cheap wholesale price is that you want your company (or it's logo and tagline) to have maximum exposure. This means having more than handing out a paperweight or some doodad that will get looked at for a couple of seconds and then stuffed in a drawer, or worse.

There is a trick to getting a basic feel into what corporate promotional items will work for you, and which ones won't. That trick, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, is not to think of your company first, but instead to consider your target's needs.

Where most purchasers fail is to list "cost" first, shortly followed by printability (that is, the actual real estate on the item you plan to put your logo on, and the suitability of that space for screen printing, engraving, etcetera), and maybe color or looks (as in, does it look cute, or cutting edge, that sort of thing). Then, and only then, do they start looking for an actual item that passes those criteria. Notably absent from that list is the question of whether the item will actually be useful.

There is a reason pens and umbrellas are always being given away at promos and trade shows. That reason is that they are actually useful (at least seasonally, or for a span of time). Shirts are nice and useful too, but frankly, who would wear your company logo out where it can be seen? Most corporate shirts (and other items of clothing with large logos on them) get worn inside the house, or when raking leaves in the yard or mowing the lawn, not exactly the kind of exposure you want, unless you manufacture rakes or mowers.

Therefore, the first criterion should be "will they use it, and how often, and where?" Pens are good but small and have a finite life (until the ink runs out). Umbrellas offer huge logo space but are more expensive and often get limited use.

Get the idea? Keep this question in mind first, and all the other considerations afterwards, and you will get maximum value for the dollar with your next batch of corporate promotional items.

Welcome to the Corporate Promotional Items blog!

2009-11-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Corporate Promotional Items is a place where we will explore ideas and trends about, you guessed it, corporate promotional items. The ordinary man on the street may question the need for a blogsuch as this, or indeed any ongoing discussion on the subject, but creative directors, marketers, conceptual and art people, promo and merchandise specialists, and other professionals of the type understand the importance of these little gizmos and doodads that are given away in trade shows, during holidays and special occasions, etcetera.

There is an entire industry that exists on nothing but corporate promotional items (and in fact, several other industries get a large percentage of their business from it). To say that a company's success or failure hinges on its freebies is not always true, but it is often closer to the truth than you might think.

And just like all other products that find a market out there, corporate promotional items as a whole must move with the times and the trends. Last year's freebie may not work this year, and therefore there is always the need to develop Freebie 2.0, and Freebie 3.0 after that, and so on.

This blog is dedicated to those markets, the trends, and the cutting edge ideas that can often be found in the minds of the talented few who are good enough to develop the most sought after corporate promotional items, and who can thereby influence the rise or fall of your company.