Promotional Industry Misses the Boat Even after the tech meltdown of 2000-01, overall marketing budgets fell by less than the decrease in sales in the promotional industry. And then when marketing budgets started to recover, the promotional industry lagged behind. Why is that?
Well, frankly, the promotional industry missed the boat, that’s why. Companies think about promotional items last. After, say, they have designed a marketing program for the quarter or the year worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, somebody says: “Oh, yeah, don’t forget to order a few hundred pens, mugs and key chains for us too.”
Well, that isn’t the future for this industry and if it is, we should all be looking for new jobs. The promotional products industry has to move up the food chain and embrace marketing solutions.
Marketing solutions is all about intricating promotional products into the very fabric of the organization’s marketing plan. Why, so the industry can make more money? No, so the industry’s clients can be more effective in their marketing and they can make more money (an coincidentally, the promotions industry can too).
People love to receive FS (Free Stuff); they’ll go to ridiculous lengths to get stuff for free. When you reward a high-performing employee or a valued client with a cash bonus or cash back incentive, almost half of it can be eaten up by the taxman (in the case of the employee) or it is just spent in a few days anyway on something else. Give that same employee or client a company-branded DVD player and every time she turns it on, she is reminded of what a great employer or supplier she has… for years.
And the company’s brand on the DVD player is visual and permanent and can’t be zapped like people zap TV commercials or flip radio stations when a commercial message comes on. And unlike a newspaper ad, it keeps on working for years, not 20 minutes.
There go your Marketing Dollars Marketing solutions means doing more Agency-style work, like making sure that the right promotional items are selected reflecting the demographics of the target group, like making sure that the delivery solution is in place (no one needs a warehouse full of undeliverable FS), like having some type of call-to-action so you can track and measure the efficacy of the campaign and its ROI (Return on Investment) too, like doing some follow up study and research so you can constantly improve what you do.
Warren Gencher, President of Brymarkpromostore.com, one of North Americas leading providers of TQA marketing solutions in the promotional products space. warren@brymark.com
Promotional Industry Misses the Boat - To learn more about this author, visit Warren Gencher's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
 |
Related Articles |
|
 Promotional Industry Misses the Boat
|
| |
People love to receive FS (Free Stuff);
|
|
Boat franchises
|
| |
Running and managing a boat franchise could be an ideal way of tapping into the growing demand for leisure pursuits and outdoor activities among wealthy consumers.
|
|
5 Tips on How to Choose Which Wholesale Promotional Products to Offer
|
| |
Promotional products are given away primarily to create and sustain interest in a company’s products and services. They can be the products itself or, and this happens more frequently than usual, specially made prod...
|
|
A Basic Guide to Promotional Products
|
| |
Running a business requires you to use various marketing strategies and determining when it’s best to use which. One marketing strategy that you’ll no doubt use often is giving out promotional products, and if you h...
|
|
Key Results of the Marketing Challenges Survey
|
| |
My thanks go out to the business people around Australia and New Zealand who responded to my survey during October and November 2002. In some ways the results are quite surprising.
|
|
|
Warren Gencher's
Complete
List Of
Business-Coach
Articles
|
|
|
If you enjoyed this article, get Warren Gencher's Complete List of Business-Coach Articles For FREE!
|
| |
|
|
|
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
