The Value of Promotional Gifts

Over the last month I have been thinking more and more about promotional gifts.  With the exhibition season nearly upon us, I always find it useful at this time of year to find out more about the latest devices and innovations from the numerous companies out there.

In my opinion, promotional gifts are an often misunderstood tool of the marketing mix.  They can, if used right reinforce an already strong brand and foster a sense of loyalty from the company’s customer base.  However, if you pick the wrong ones or do not think through the decision properly they can have the effect of undermining a brand strategy and result in a lot of wasted money.

But what constitutes a right gift I hear you ask.  How can I, on a limited budget, ensure that I find something which is appealing to my stakeholders?

As with so much of marketing, I tend to take a common sense viewpoint here.  For example, if your company operates in a technology-based marketplace and you’re trying to appeal to busy decision-makers in a business-to-business environment, then branded pencils and rubbers are potentially not the best thing to buy.  For your gift to have desk dwell time (how many of us have binned gifts that we were given but not useful the day after the exhibition?) it needs to have relevance to that person.  A little bit of novelty value also helps.  For the above example I would be looking at the every growing range of USB products or something slightly innovative which the recipient keep coming back to.

To be successful promotional gifts must be aligned to brand values – if your company stands for sustainability then purchase from the ever increasing range of sustainable gifts – but at all times the end user and dwell time needs to be considered.  Those gifts which are cheap to buy are usually cheap to look at and therefore either end up in a drawer or in the bin.  Is this where you want your promotional message to be? 

Therefore my advice would be to always look at the objective of the gift, decide who it is going to appeal to, what values it needs to uphold and make a choice from there.  It may be having evaluated the above that you decide you don’t need a give-away and that your objective can be reached some other way.

Finally, I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s experiences of promotional gifts – what ones do you retain and which ones do you throw away?

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