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ByLeo Victor

Get creative! Promo products with an edge

Looking for more attention? Your company’s promotional corporate gifts need an injection of creativity to help get your business off the ground. If you’re looking to market to a younger crowd who might favor branded tech items over the typical fare of promotional pens.

Find out more about your audience and get a sense for their humor and style before tailoring your giveaway items to them. Branded corporate gifts will always make an impression but truly creative items will be a crowd pleaser and conversation starter for years, giving your company more bang for its buck in the long run.

Lasting impressions
Promotional corporate gifts, obviously, have a longer shelf life than a lot of advertisements and marketing trends that the average person is exposed to, according to Arsham Mirshah, co-founder and technical director of marketing for Web Mechanix. A television or Internet ad only lasts seconds or up to a minute, while giveaways last the life of the pen, USB drive or shirt.

A Promotional Products Association International study found how influential promotional products can be with 94 percent of 1,000 people surveyed reporting they remembered a branded product they received in the past two years. Also, 89 percent also remembered the company name.

A television ad only lasts up to a minute, while giveaways last the life of the pen, USB drive or shirt.”

A shot of creativity
With that said, adding your own spin to a branded product can give you more of an advantage when it comes to word of mouth advertising, especially if it ties in with what your company does. Promotional T-shirts, towels and branded USB flash drives can become so much more with a creative spin.

Friends of Cancer Patients, a cancer awareness charity based in the United Arab Emirates, took its promotional campaign to another level by using branded black beach towels shaped like coffins in an effort to warn sunbathers about the dangers of skin cancer and lying out in the sun all day. Meanwhile, a pest control company went door to door slipping rubber cockroaches underneath resident’s doors with a tag on the insects’ abdomen reading: “See how easy it is to get into your house? D.D. Drin Insect Elimination.”

While it might give potential customers a fright at first, the marketing idea does set the company apart from other bug and pest control businesses who would usually just hand out fliers advertising their services.

Rubber roaches, strong dogs and erasers
An ingenious marketing and promotional campaign like the rubber roaches D.D. Drin used creates great word of mouth for a company by increasing the number of impressions. The amount of word of mouth is evident since even a search for the pest control business leads to websites lauding the idea for its originality.

However, other industries aren’t to be outdone.

An Iams dog food promotion in Australia combined a little creativity with adding a message to an item all dog owners use. The pet food manufacturer created plastic dog Frisbees to look like dumbbell weights as a giveaway for its strong dogs campaign.

Another instance of taking items that many people use everyday and putting a creative spin on it is Alzheimer’s New Zealand rubber erasers. Shaped like a gray and white school eraser, the hollowed-out item actually has a branded pen drive inside and includes the message: “Alzheimer’s Erasers: Your Memories. Save Them.”

All of these branded items show how influential and humorous promotional giveaways can be. With the right idea in place the item can make a much more powerful impression.