On Point With Promotional Products

Experts agree that once a company’s brand is selected, it’s important to get the message out in as many ways as possible.
“You need to build your brand, and the way to do this is through public relations,” Ries says. “In its purest form, PR translates into magazine articles, newspaper stories and speeches. Promotional products are also a great way to get a brand’s message out.”
Ries cites an example where a traditional promotional product—a button worn by rental-car employees—produced dramatic results. “Avis very successfully positioned itself against the rental-car leader, Hertz, with the slogan, ‘We’re No.2; we try harder,” she says. “Part of the Avis campaign included a button with the words, “We try harder,” which all employees were required to wear. There’s nothing better than asking employees to wear a button that says ‘We try harder’ because the fact is employees will try harder.”
In Your Marketing Sucks., Stevens writes about the benefits of integrated marketing, which utilizes several different ways of marketing—not just one. He writes: “Create messages that are sent to the prospective customer/client through direct mail, e-mail, advertising or public relations—or, most powerfully, through a combination of these components unleashed simultaneously…you will have a far greater impact if everywhere a prospective customer looks he sees your message.”
In fact, Stevens’ company uses promotional products and recommends them for clients’ direct mail campaigns. “We have a client that sells backup services for computers,” he explains. “When the company representatives met us, they were selling their service as a commodity. In other words, they ha no real brand. We changed the name of the product to Red Boomerang because it was a metaphor for what the product does: You can toss away data and then retrieve it at the click of a mouse.”
“To launch the service—to make it a brand as opposed to a commodity—we bought lots of red boomerangs and imprinted the company’s URL on them,” Stevens continues. “We sent them to prospects and clients, and they opened the packages because no one gets something like that. We took a product from a commodity to a brand through the use of a promotional product.”