Promo Products Tips - Define Your Brand

Here's the 2nd of my ongoing series of promotional product buying tips - which hopefully will make the buying process a little bit easier.  These should apply to any size business but can be particularly helpful if you either don't have a lot of experience buying promo items or if marketing is just part of your overall job responsibilities.  

One of the most important things to keep in mind when planning a project involving promotional items is knowing your own brand.  Understanding your brand - that set of values, symbols or ideas that identifies and differentiates your product / organization -  gives you the perfect starting point from which to launch any promotional project.

A promotional item that you hand out should be considered an extension of your brand and thus should reflect what that brand stands for.  If your company sells a luxury product, handing out say, a plastic pen probably, probably  isn’t going to work.  Whereas if you provide a great value product, focusing on something inexpensive, yet well made, might be a good way to go.

Facebook is certainly considered a hip, trend-setting company. You expect cool swag from them, not some generic stuff that everyone else hands out.  As an example I recently attended an event that they put on and among the items in the ‘swag bags’ that they handed out were EOS lip balm and a brand new phone charger.

  

Some companies, in fact many small businesses, may encounter difficulty defining their brand mainly because they haven’t given it a whole lot of thought given the challenges of operating a business on a day to day basis..  If that’s the case for your company, try writing down exactly what you consider your brand to be.

Every marketing piece an organization hands out should reflect its brand. Knowing exactly ‘who you are’ - i.e. understanding that brand - is often a great way to begin the task of coming up with great promotional items for any project.