outdoor promotional items: Airscape canisters?

Airtight containers from Airscape would make stylish, high-quality promotional items. According to Cool Hunting, Missoula, Montana company Planetary Design has created this product in the style of a French press coffee maker, using a plunger to seal the container and keep contents like coffee grinds as fresh as possible.

As a very picky coffee drinker, I would love to have one of these on vacation or while camping -- whenever I don't have access to my grinder. It would make a great promotional item for traveling business execs or a gift for clients at the holidays. Now that I think of it, coffee accessories are a largely untapped genre of promotional items. What about French presses or a bag of gourmet beans with your company logo?

Promotional items for a rainy weekend

I wrote an entry on here a few months back about promotional items for a sunny fall weekend. How I long for that weekend! Tomorrow and Saturday have been forecasted as rainy with highs in the 50s and 40s. This is Atlanta, people!

To keep myself in a good mood, I've thought up a Rainy Day Promotional Items pack:
--umbrella and poncho
--booklight for curling up on the couch
--lighter for starting a warm fire

And here's my list of things to do on a rainy weekend:
--cook stew and grilled cheese sandwiches at home
--pull the blankets out of the linen closet and snuggle under them on the couch
--pick out a pile of books and movies to keep you happy and cozy all weekend

Hopefully soon I'll be making a list of hot summer weekend promotional items.

This American Life: new logo, new promotional items

This American Life, one of the best-known and just best radio shows on public radio or any radio, has a new logo designed by Number 17.

This American Life is inventive, curious, and profound. Ira Glass is the perfect host -- intrigued and intriguing, bright yet approachable. I am a proselytizer of the show. When I listen to it in my car I am disappointed to arrive at where I was going.

When I saw this new logo I instantly imagined it on promotional items, and I think the logo will look great on t-shirts and coffee mugs. But it also strikes me that I've seen a lot of promotional items with logos like this. The vertical block capitals seem trendy, and I'm wondering if all their new promotional items won't begin to look outdated soon.

a promotional items testament

This morning I got in the car with a promotional item that is almost 6 years old: a travel mug. My college IT department went around the freshmen dorms on move-in day and gave these promotional items to all the new students. They would pop in the room, ask if you were having any trouble connecting your laptop to the school's network, help you if you needed it, and give you a coffee mug with their logo on it.

I lent mine to some guy from another hall and never saw it again. My current roommate, who also went to my college, somehow ended up with two. And years later Emory I.T. is still with me, in the form of everyday promotional items.

Use promotional items to stand out

Blogtrepreneur has a post today about the importance of being different and standing out. During tradeshow season, companies are all looking for promotional items that will make them stand out among the hundreds of booths at their industries' trade shows. When shopping for promotional items giveaways, look for products that will stand out in the sea of people moving across the trade show floor. Get USB drives in your company's signature color -- they run as low as $9 each (search "norcross" on our website).

Or, attract attention to your booth by giving away high-value promotional items like Alternative Apparel t-shirts or travel mugs to people who answer trivia questions or participate in games.

promotional items for social media geeks

Check out these social media promotional items -- pillows, stockings, business cards and more -- on Penn-Olson.com. Pillows can be bought for $19.99 each on the Etsy store Craftsquatch.

I love the idea of using one form of marketing -- promotional items -- to advertise your love for virtual marketing -- social media.

I remember seeing a pillow like the one above on the top left in the photos of Twitter's headquarters. It can't be too hard to make your own.

What other social media promotional items could you D.I.Y.? Caps, stress balls, dish towels... the RSS symbol would look great on a couch cushion.

Coachella promotional items

Coachella recently released their lineup for April's festival, including but not limited to:

-Jay-Z
-Grizzly Bear
-Passion Pit
-The Avett Brothers
-MGMT
-Hot Chip
-Devo
-Pavement
-Phoenix
-Matt & Kim
-Yann Tiersen
-Miike Snow
-John Waters (?)
-and "Thom Yorke???"

Woot! Too bad I won't be there. Although not THAT bad, since music festivals can be a bit of a nightmare. They aren't even good places to get promotional items from your favorite bands, since every single thing for sale inside those gates is overpriced. You're better off buying promotional items from ebay or at a smaller show. You'll probably enjoy the band better that way, too, when you aren't delusional from dehydration and absurd crowds aren't causing you to have schizophrenic episodes.

Or you could design your own bootleg promotional items and try hawking them outside Coachella.

Promotional Items Inspiration: This American Infographic

Someone named E. J. Fox has resolved this new year to create an infographic for every episode of This American Life ever made. Fox listens to the weekly radio show hosted by Ira Glass on Chicago Public Radio, then expands on the episode by researching data points of interest and presenting them in graphical format.

The infographic was inspired by the "Christmas" episode, and charts holiday spending alongside unemployment rates in order to determine a pattern.

Fox found inspiration in a radio show. What inspires your promotional items? I've already suggested using design blogs to think about color with promotional items. How can stories inform your promotional items choices?

overhaul promotional items, slowly

On this blog I've been goading you to rethink your promotional items campaign and possibly even rebuild it from the ground up.

But that advice comes with a caveat: rebranding should be gradual.

I know it sounds like I'm telling you to change promotional items and at the same time don't change promotional items. In a way, that is what I am saying.

See Dominos (pizzaturnaround.com), Coca Cola (New Coke), and Tropicana (new packaging). These companies made the mistake of changing the thing that made them great in the eyes of customers, to disastrous results.

Then again, all three companies are still kicking. Don't they say that any press is good press?

vintage ads inspire promotional items

I love these old posters from Vintage Ad Browser. You can search for certain terms or browse by topic and decade. The database is nearly endless. Looking at these old ads reminds me of how creative advertising and marketing can get. When I get bogged down in the everyday tasks of selling promotional items I tend to forget the enormous creative potential in this field.

I can't help but notice how passionate these ads are about what they're selling. It's hard to hold onto that passion, but I think that summoning it can make me better at marketing promotional items. I'm going to be working on promotional item descriptions for the next few days, and I'm going to make them as creative and passionate (and, I'm sure, ironic) as possible.

stop arranging your promotional items bookshelf

Glimmer Site has a great article today about why small actions are more important than big plans. GlimmerGuy urges us to stop arranging the bookshelf and start doing. You can never know everything about a topic, so it's more important to get started affecting change.

Unfortunately taking action can be difficult in bureaucratic institutions. Are you the promotional items buyer for your company? How many hoops do you have to jump through and how many forms do you have to get approved before you can order promotional items?

We know that beginning is the most important part, with promotional items and everything else. So what's keeping you from beginning?

avoid CADD with promotional items

What is CADD? Not computer aided design and drafting, but Customer Attention Deficit Disorder, according to the blog Get Elastic. They used the term when talking about You Tube videos on product pages, and the distractions embedded within them that pull customers' attention away from the product, like ads and related videos.

In order to avoid CADD, your promotional items must be simple and consistent. Instead of overwhelming visitors at your trade show table with a thousand chotzkies, choose a single attractive giveaway that will get people talking.

Don't let promotional items choose you; that's when you fall for gimmicks. Instead, go shopping with a plan in mind. Know what you want out of your promotional items. If you stay focused, your customers will too.

Animal Collective Brother Sport video: promotional items converge!

Since I've talked on here about promotional items for Animal Collective's Animal Crack Box and I've talked on my company blog about Where the Wild Things Are promotional items, I thought I'd post this music video for "Brother Sport," the closer on Animal Collective's 2009 Merriweather Post Pavilion. Great song, great video.



The person who tweeted the video (@RaleighBoomBox) called it "better than Where the Wild Things Are." I haven't seen Wild Things (other than their tear-inspiring, operatic trailer soundtracked by Arcade Fire), but I agree that this video is pretty sweet. Merriweather Post Pavilion is also a great album.

Now if only we sold Animal Collective promotional items at my company.

what to do with excess promotional items

At Pinnacle this week we had several dozen spare travel mugs sitting in our lobby. As our office manager encouraged us to take them home, we started talking about what we could do with all these promotional items. Eliza mentioned that she was hosting her book club this week and could take a few promotional items and give them as gifts.

What a great idea. We often think of marketing as direct and deliberate, organized and tracked on spreadsheets with the intention to sell, always sell. But why not take advantage of your existing audience? Market your brand organically to friends and family by bringing home promotional items or showing off your new website. The people already close to you may not be 5-star customers, but they may have friends who are. Make them your brand champions.

design books for promotional items inspiration

Do your promotional items need an overhaul for 2010? Try looking to design books for inspiration.

Apartment therapy offers this list of books on interior design. I love the monochrome colors of A Life of Design and The Well-Dressed Home. What about choosing blood red or cerulean blue for all your promotional items this year? Repetition of color will make you stand out from competitors at tradeshows, and customers will get a clearer image of your brand's identity.

Have any favorite design books on the shelf? Pick them up and flip through, letting your eyes land on whatever catches them. Take notes on how they can inspire your next promotional items campaign. It'll be a fun but worthwhile exercise in thinking visually about your marketing plan.

What are you afraid of? Take risks with your promotional items.

Seth Godin has a great blog today about fear. "We're inundated," he says, "about ways to avoid this pitfall or that risk." Do you promote fear in your work place? Do you "[remind] people that an idea will never work, that the market is in failure, that all hope is lost?" If so, what good is that doing? Or is it only harming productivity and stunting ideas?

It's easy to play it safe with promotional items. To know exactly what the R.O.I. will be. But what about using promotional items to do something evocative, something exciting? What about waging a radical campaign? What are you afraid of -- that you won't be able to predict the results?

Promotional items aren't stagnant. The way you are using them is.

Alternative Apparel tees make hip promotional items

Alternative Apparel has been around since 1995, making fashionable and comfortable tees, simple but stylish and well-fitted. I have a few that I got for a bargain -- about $10 a piece -- and I wear them several times a week.

As branded promotional items, Alternative tees will cost you a bit more than your standard Hanes, but depending on your customers they may be worth the extra cash. Alternative's plain shirts have been showing up on celebrities and in designer boutiques -- I saw one in Baltimore for over $30 -- so as customized promotional items they have great exposure. Alternative is also offering a sustainable line, so look to Alternative Earth for promotional items for the hip, trendy, eco-conscious customer.