Featured Promotional Item Friday! Beer-flavored chapstick

I've seen a lot of bizarre promotional items during the almost 3 months I've been working in the industry: snuggle blankets, before-and-after holograms, jelly beans... people have found ways to put their logos on almost anything. And now, beer-flavored chapstick joins the list of "unique" promotional items.

Oskar Blues, the brewery that gave us Old Chub ale -- probably the best beer being served in a can -- has released Old Chub-flavored chapstick, which claims to be "the world's first beer-blessed lip balm." And it can be yours for only $3, about the same price as Burt's Bees. It's even SPF 15!

Taking stock of promotional items

As 2009 wraps up, you should be taking stock. Look around your office. What has changed in the past year? How have you gotten better at your job? How have you launched better marketing initiatives? How has your promotional items campaign changed? Has it become more sophisticated, or more targeted and simple? If your promotional items are the exact same as they were a year ago, is that because they are working? Or because you have been to complacent to adapt them? What are your hopes and goals for your company in the next year? And how will you implement those goals in every aspect of your company, including your promotional items?

Promotional items as rewards

Every month at Pinnacle we have sales goals accompanied by rewards if they are met. Usually the reward is a catered meal or party, but last month as a marketing department we decided to offer promotional items as rewards, custom blankets to be exact.

Promotional items act as great rewards because they are tangible and lasting. Who doesn't love getting a free gift? In the past we've also used promotional items to get people to engage with our brand. We sent out direct mailings announcing that customers could visit our website and enter a code to get a free gift. Products that are very inexpensive to our company act as significant motivators to customers and employees.

Use promotional items as incentives

When NPR was slugging through their quarterly fundraiser several weeks ago, they offered promotional items to entice would-be donors. Even though the promotional items were obviously worth less than the donation required to get them -- you got an NPR travel mug for donating something like $75, and an NPR iPod for giving $1000, I believe -- they were still effective incentives. I couldn't afford to give even $20, but the travel mug had me thinking maybe I could splurge. Of course it doesn't make sense to spend $75 on a mug I could easily find for $10, but if you've cultivated a desirable brand -- and NPR has -- your promotional items will make your brand champions follow their gut, not their head.

Promotional items lead to “pre-purchase transactions”

Seth Godin (sethgodin.typepad.com) had an interesting blog last weekend about “pre-purchase transactions.” Pre-purchase transactions, he says, are the first, second, and even third “dates” between your company and a consumer, before the relationship is consummated with a sale. For example, the customer gives you her time and attention to read an email blast. Transaction 1. She gives you the effort it takes to visit your website. Transaction 2. Then, finally, she purchases your product.

Promotional items do much of their work during this pre-purchase transaction period. Promotional items act as a gift from you to the consumer and give the customer a reason to give back… by visiting your website or signing up for your newsletter. How can you use promotional items in your marketing campaign to directly incite pre-purchase transactions?

Put the right logo on promotional items

What's the point of promotional items? To convey your brand. So you'd better make sure you have your brand figured out before you start slapping a logo on a thousand promotional items.

For starters, get a professional graphic designer to create your logo if you don't already have one. A good designer will talk with you about what you want your brand to communicate, then present to you a few different options as well as a visual explanation of his or her design process. The non-profit gallery I work with just finalized our logo, and we ended up having to change the name to suit the graphics. Be flexible.

Promotional items are a blank slate. You need the right visual message for them to work.

Keep it simple when it comes to promotional items

The great branders, designers, writers and chefs all have one thing in common: they keep it simple. Last week's episode of Glee showed us that hairography ("It's like cool epilepsy") is just lights and mirrors, and that sitting on stools and singing a pretty song is really where it's at.

So what does keeping it simple mean when it comes to promotional items? Well, sometimes people just want a free coozie, not a smorgasbord of kitschy promotional items in all the colors of the rainbow. You may love yellow and silver, but the simpler your color scheme and the simpler your logo, the more readable it will be on promotional items.

Promotional items on Facebook?

The New Oxford Dictionary recently declared "unfriend" to be the word of the year. Even as I am typing this, spell check is ironically underlining "unfriend" in red. Working in marketing, I hear a lot about how BIG and IMPORTANT Facebook is, and we as a company are trying to figure out how to make Facebook work in the promotional items business. Do we use Facebook to advertise deals on promotional items, throw contests, get contact information, or simply develop a community? Social media is uncharted territory for everyone, us included.

So how can Facebook work in the promotional items industry?

Promotional items for Animal Collective

We've been talking here about bands and record companies that use promotional items to sell albums. In this case, it's not the band selling promotional items but the graphic designers who created the album artwork. The A.V. Club reports that Seen Studio of Brooklyn is selling silkscreens of the artwork they did for Animal Collective's latest album, Animal Crack Box. The silkscreens are selling at top dollar -- $130 -- and are being promoted as collectors' items. The studio also designed a cassette tape for the Dirty Projectors' 2009 album, Bitte Orca. It remains to be seen whether the long-outdated cassette tape will be considered a promotional item.