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.