Promotional Products: Food, Doodads, Thingamabobs

Added: 02/03/2006

Promotional products are a most excellent way to keep your company’s name on happy customers’ backs, in their offices, in their kitchens, and if creative, even in their stomachs. Promotion product production and distribution has become a major industry, growing to grab some forty million dollars in the United States alone. Now maybe it’s your company’s turn. Herewith are a handful of facts and ideas.

What better way to please your clients than by promotional products? It’s a win-win situation for any company, small, medium-sized or large. Everyone loves a free trinket and through promotional products, not only does the client receive a freebie, the doodad is emblazoned with your company’s name to act as a constant friendly reminder to your presence.

The concept, of course, is nothing new. Stores, banks and just about any business you can imagine have been giving away free pens and/or pencils seemingly since either was invented. Some clever genius in the 1980s came up with the “This Pen Stolen From Company Name” concept which caused laughs aplenty and real brand recognition for some time.

An interesting twist in the concept has recently arrived in the giving away of promotional food and beverage products. Imagine giving out chocolate and/or wine to clients: Now those’ll have them remembering your company name unless of course said client drinks a tad too much of the grape. So much more original than the aforementioned writing implements or just another T-shirt that no self-respecting businessperson would wear in public except perhaps when washing their automobile, food and beverage promotions are fun and still relatively unique in today’s business world.

One promotional product distribution company specializing in such items boasts some 750,000 promotional products possible, including a whole range of food and beverage items to be emblazoned with the name, address, phone number, email address, whatever really of your firm, nonprofit entity, organization or social group. Indeed, the century-old PPAI (Promotional Products Association International) connects 4500 suppliers in the promotional products industry and claims that the promotional product industry generates nearly forty billion dollars in revenue per annum. The Associate Resource Centre in Canada estimates the intake from the promotional product industry north of the border to be some 2.1 billion Canadian dollars, with almost thirty-two hundred distributors and more than one thousand suppliers on the books.

So what can the attention-desiring business get in the way of say, food and beverage items to distribute to customers? Wine bottles simply emblazoned with a label of fresh graphic design works quite well on the upper end, but most popular are candy wrappers. Small, convenient and portable, candy makes for a nice gift to clients who will be reminded of your company anytime they get that swell sugar rush from that junk food. Large corporations have gotten on the bandwagon here, too, and with the help of a proper distributor, you can score logo-emblazoned bags of Nestle and M&Ms (mmm…M&Ms). Nestle produces the straight-up chocolate bars but can also provide so-called “entertainment shapes” – blocks of chocolate molded in the form of a movie clapboard, for example, or a billboard shape. Dubble Bubble bubble gum is in the act, too, which might make board meetings more interesting, with CEOs trying to outdo one another in bubble size. Who said promotion couldn’t be fun?

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