How many do you use?

You’ll have a use case for your promotional merchandise, but have you considered any of these?

Often people are very focused on work, and fail to see the connection of how we can help with the local charity you work with, or the boys football club, or dad’s bowling club, or the local tourist attraction etc etc.

1.Brand Awareness: Promotional merchandise is ultimately about brand awareness, an advert or an email or even a phone call comes into the conscious and is quickly forgotten. Merchandise, if it’s useful & well thought, is all about the long term constant drip feed of your brand or message.

2.Trade Shows & Exhibitions: yes of course the objective of a giveaway from the Trade Show is the Brand Awareness after the show, but a show or exhibition is also a bit of theatre.

Your stand needs to be different, stand out, engaging as you compete with a show hall full of exhibitors. This is where the merchandise strategy needs to be part of the design strategy, not a last minute panic.

Monterey Graphics has a completely different take on merchandise at exhibitions, we use QR codes to create engagement and deliver merchandise as part of the follow up away from the noise of the show. Browse our webstore.

3.Employee Gifts: we’ve seen a significant spike in the requests for employee gifts since covid. This has included wanting to engage with existing staff members who are now remote working as well as new employee welcome packs.

Employers want to show they care, but they also want to make the home working space feel like an extension to the company, so subtle brand reminders such as mugs, bottles, coasters, pads, sticky notes, pens, charging stations all help decorate the home deskspace with the company brand.

Recruiting & retaining staff is hard, the pressure is on employers to raise their game and show they are a great company to work for. New employee welcome packs help make a great first impression that introduce the brand and sense of belonging from day 1. For existing staff we are seeing thank you gifts, long service & performance awards.

4.Direct Mail: the amount of mail that any of us are receiving is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago. Letters would fight for eyeballs like emails do today.

While we must consider the cost of postage, our own experience is that Direct Mail delivers significant ROI, especially when that mail piece includes “lumpy mail” a gift or promotional product that adds intrigue and memorability which either generates action or recall on follow-up.

From cheesy strap lines using foam stress shapes, foot shape stress – “now that I have my foot in the door”, through to notebooks personally branded to show you care, to a chocolate bar (everyone loves chocolate!). A well thought out strategy that focuses on the Market (target audience), with the right Message, and includes a useful product (Media) and critically Follow-up will deliver fantastic results.

5.Conferences & Seminars: conferences are often grouped together with exhibitions, personally I separate them into two distinct categories. For me an exhibition is typically customer & prospect facing, through a stand, and the focus is on sales and needs a strategy to reflect that and what those goals are.

A conference on the other hand is often to employees, its more educational and information sharing than an exhibition. Even if the audience was customers and the goal is essentially sales it is done in a much more subtle and informative format.

The conference is therefore much more about brand, education, note taking, being sat rather than walking between stands & the promotional merchandise typically reflects that…lanyards, bags, notebooks, pads, writing, water, mints etc.

6.WebSite or New Product Launches: when launching a new product, service, website, social media channel etc. it’s all about creating some noise within your community, tribe or with prospects. Typically at events, festivals, locations such as train stations where you know your target audience will be.

As ever the promo item needs to be relevant for the target audience, be it a gadget or T-Shirts and Caps, the item needs to be useful & desirable for the customer or prospect.

With anything that is new, and trying to create noise & interest the Creative, the Design can be key to success….imagine a young audience, they receive a T-Shirt, one has a logo on it, one has an awesome creative print. Same product, one clear winner.

7.Retail & Charity & Fundraising: each should probably have their own section, but I’m stopping at 7! Merchandise that is suitable for the visitor, decorated with historical characters, cartoon characters, film actors, location photography, people photography, logos, crests etc etc.

People do buy, and whether a commercial retailer, a charity fundraising, or a school, sports club, association…if you get the right product for your visitors and supporters and decorate with the right imagery that they want on their product then you can create a revenue stream to support you or your charity / club.

Mugs, pens, magnets, sports bottles, notebooks, t-shirts, caps, stationery, bags, umbrellas, etc etc. the list is huge.