Wikipedia defines promotional items or promotional products as articles of merchandise that are used in marketing and communication programs. Simply put, these items are usually imprinted with a company’s name, logo or slogan, and are given away at trade shows, conferences, and as part of marketing campaign.
Most important use of promotional gifts are fostering customer goodwill and customer retention. When the customers see your products they remember you and somewhere a connection of recognition and trust is established. This helps you to retain our customers and get new customers as well because the one who gets a gift surely shows it to other.
Somewhere it is a kind of viral marketing too.
Other common uses in business industry are traffic-building, brand awareness, public relations, new product introductions, customer referrals and marketing research.
Pharmaceuticals distributing the complimentary gifts to the doctors work on the same principle. Corporate gifts are well known. You must have encountered them surely at some occasion.
It is one of the methods used by guerrilla marketers.
I find it a very good brand building and value creation activity.
What To Give?
Almost anything!
Yes! You can brand anything with your company’s name or logo. Common items include t-shirts, caps, keychains, bumper stickers, pens, mugs or mouse pads.
Promotional Umbrellas and Promotional Mugs are very popular and cost effective gifts used by promotion.
Most of the promotional items are relatively small and inexpensive. This enable the advertiser to produce it in large number. Higher end products are offered to high profile people like celebrities because they have their own influence.
Promotional product industry is on rise. The industry is growing at a faster rate than newspaper or radio advertising and is larger than Internet advertising, cable television, Yellow Pages advertising and outdoor advertising [Wikipedia]
One of the supplier company is ideabynet.com.
Ideasbynet.com was established in 1985 and is one of the market leaders in UK. If you are looking for products for your campaign, they offer more than 5000 products and the prices are very competitive. You can order through their website, let them know how to brand your gifts and the product would be delivered to you, completed and ready to be served.
Their prices are based on the quantity you order. More you order, lesser would be the cost per unit.
If you want to know more about promotional gift campaigns, their blog is a good place to have an idea.
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Tags: business promotion, marketing, promotional gifts
Hi Arun, strange that you chose to write about this today as I was discussing the issues of gifitng and its relevance with my marketing team. Every year we identify our valuable clients and gift them a unque gift. We do a lot of planning about the gift, the time and the mode of delivery. The sequence of events is throughly planned to give the most happiness to our clients. For example last year we gave portable/insulated Coffee Mug – very handy to rush out with the morning refresher. Our clients still mention how useful and innovative it was. This year there have been many suggestions like – memberships to health clubs, table tops organiser, software books, subscritpion to forums but Apple iPod has received the maximum votes. It would be easier too I guess, as Apple Company (http://www.ipodyourlife.co.in/?channel=blog7) will do the needful in terms of personalizing it, delivery etc.
Company gifts are really a great thing to do. They remind clients from time to time. Like Snaglesh said Coffee mug is a great thing. Just sitting in the mornig, thinking, sipping coffee and than you notice the logo. Too bad you can only have one mug
In your blog, you have given some uses of promotional gifts, the most important being customer retention and to boost any business. You are absolutely true.
Promotional items are one of the best ways to promote your logo and message .Keep up the good work!!