Promotional Products….Are They Really Worth It?

Absolutely! Promotional products provide businesses with the opportunity to take advantage of numerous competitive advantages.  Brand promotion, inexpensive advertising, and promising returns are three key edges that promotional products offer. Let’s take a look at these aspects in greater detail to get a feel for how important they really are.

Brand Promotion    

The quality of a company’s brand is arguably just as important as the quality of its products. Without a positive and trustworthy brand image, it is almost impossible to build a strong and lasting relationship with customers. Promotional products allow companies to expose prospective customers to their brand while simultaneously creating an intimate relationship with them. If you are able to get your logo on the coffee mug of someone’s morning cup of joe, you have the unique privilege of having this individual taste your brand on a daily basis. Try and get your logo one of the Frisbee’s tossed around at the neighborhood park. By doing so, who knows whose hands your brand will float into. Are you able to have your logo imprinted on a high-quality ink pen? If so, there’s no telling how many people will sign on to become a new customer of yours.

Inexpensive Advertising

Compared to almost every other advertising medium, promotional products lead in cost-efficiency by a large margin. Based on data compiled by The Nielsen Company, advertising media in the United States was analyzed in order to gauge the relative prices of the various options. In order to do so, each means of advertising was computed to reveal the respective cost per impression. The results were as follows:

• Prime Time TV: $0.018

• Spot Radio: $0.058

• National Magazines: $0.045

• Promotional products: $0.005

Clearly, promotional products run a bill far less expensive than that of the other forms of promotions. In fact, each dollar spent on promotional products will yield around 200 customer impressions – over twice the amount of impressions obtained through all of the other choice combined.

Promising Returns

Financial returns on promotional product investments come from a surprising array of sources. First, the connections created with prospective customers from your brand exposure helps build their propensity to seek your products when making purchasing decisions. Secondly, and a bit more interestingly, research suggests that promotional products profit by tapping into a core value that most civilized people share: no one wants to be a freeloader. By giving someone something of value, i.e. a useful product with an imprinted brand, that individual will typically feel responsible for giving something back. Research conducted by Dr. Robert Cialdini, a professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University, confirms this claim. While observing members of the Hare Krishna Society at an airport, he noticed that travelers were significantly more likely to donate money when given an origami flower produced by the members.  More, the Disabled American Veterans, a nonprofit group, found that they received twice as many donations when they send personalized letters requesting for funds as opposed to non-personalized ones. Explained well by Jerry McLaughlin, a president of a large promotional products company, “In every language and culture, research has found there are really pejorative words for people who get and don’t give back. We humans are hard wired to respond if we get something.”

Sources:

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/the-surprising-power-of-promotional-products/

http://www.staplespromotionalproducts.com/assets/pdfs/spp_PromoROI_smartpaper.pdf

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About Frankie Gashler

Frankie Gashler is the Director of Marketing at PromoMatting by Americo, a promotional logo mat manufacturer located in Cartersville, Georgia. In July of 2012, Frankie was named a part of Counselor's 2012 Hot List as a Superstar in Sales.