How to choose promotional items people actually keep

Here is my honest opinion about promotional products: most of them are wasted. Not because the idea is bad, but because the item was picked in five minutes from the first page of a catalog. It gets handed out, it gets a polite thank you, and it is in a drawer by Friday.

A promotional item has one job. It has to stay in front of the person who received it. If it does not get used, it does not matter how good the logo looked on it. So before you choose a product, I would answer four questions.

Who is it for?

A gift for a client you have worked with for ten years and a handout for a trade show are two different projects. Treating them as the same order is the most common mistake I see.

For a small group of important clients, buy fewer items and buy better ones. One well-made piece says more about your company than a bag of small things. For a large event, the priorities change: you need something light, useful and easy to carry, in a quantity that makes sense for the crowd.

Where will it live?

This is the question that decides everything. The best items earn a permanent place in someone's day. A mug on a desk. A tumbler in a car. A notebook that goes to every meeting. A pen that actually writes.

Think about your customer's routine. Do they work at a desk, in a vehicle, on a job site? Pick the place where you want your logo to be seen every day, and then look for the product that belongs there.

Pick the place first. Then pick the product.

How will your logo look on it?

Not every logo works on every surface. Fine detail gets lost on a narrow pen barrel. A light-colored logo disappears on a white mug. A design with six colors may need to be simplified for some decoration methods.

Three things I would always do:

• Ask for a proof on the actual product and color. A logo on a white background in an email tells you very little.
• Have a one-color version of your logo ready. It will be needed sooner or later.
• Keep the imprint simple. Logo and web address are usually enough. Nobody reads a paragraph on a tumbler.

When do you need it?

Promotional products take longer than paper printing, and people are often surprised by that. The blank items have to arrive before they can be decorated, and popular products can run short at busy times of the year.

If you have a fixed date, such as a conference, an anniversary or the holidays, start early and tell us the date first. We work backwards from it. It is much easier to plan around a deadline we know about than to rescue one we just found out about.

Quality is part of the message

I will say this plainly: a product that breaks, leaks or fades carries your name while it does. A cheap item that fails is worse than no item at all, because the person now connects that experience with your brand.

This does not mean you need the most expensive option. It means the item should do its job well for a reasonable amount of time. If the budget is tight, order a smaller quantity of something good instead of a large quantity of something forgettable.

A simple way to decide

When a customer is stuck, I suggest starting with these four lines:

• Who is receiving it, and how many people?
• Where do we want it to be used?
• What is the budget per piece?
• What is the date?

With those answers, the list of products that make sense gets short very quickly, and choosing becomes easy.

From pens and notebooks to drinkware and branded apparel, promotional items are one of our five service lines, and we can produce them alongside the rest of your printed materials. Send us those four answers and we will come back with options that fit.