Curious about what to look for when your company wants to integrate sustainable and strategic environmentally friendly products in your next marketing campaign?  You’re not alone!   When working towards promoting green awareness, while still striving for outstanding results from the promotion, it’s often difficult to sort through the often confusing world of “green” merchandise.  As a way to help with that effort, I’ve provided a few tips for sourcing those eco-responsible products.

1. Biodegradable corn plastic:  Used for everything from pens to mugs.
2. Solar-powered technology:  Provides energy for earth-friendly flashlights, calculators and more.
3. Organic cotton, bamboo or hemp:   Makes apparel, tote bags and other products “green.”
4. Recycled PET:   Transforms traditional polyester and plastics into environmentally correct choices for products like coolers, duffels and backpacks.
5. Naturally appealing products like plant seedlings, seed packets and even imprinted walnuts provide a clever alternative to man-made promotional items.

With the thousands of earth-friendly product choices available today, successful marketing campaigns can also promote eco-action and green awareness.  If your return on investment is positive and your brand is associated with making a positive difference for our planet, where’s the downside?    With everything to gain, and nothing to lose, green really is the new everything!

When considering which products best represent your brand at trade shows, customer meetings, recruiting events, and all manner of marketing engagement, it’s important to start with those core items that will serve as the staples for your merchandise program.  Whether that program is a professionally managed on-line e-commerce catalog, or it’s simply a pre-determined line of merchandise that the procurement department has vetted and approved for purchase, those products should reflect both the brand and the audience.

While sifting through the seemingly endless choices of products available in the promotional merchandise industry, there are are 3 key principles to follow:

1. Identify the market that will receive your products
2. Understand the audience
3. Select what the audience wants, not what you personally like

Once the core items are in place, they should represent 80% of the product movement.  From there, keep the program fresh with expanded offerings of a core item, seasonal styles and creative graphics for those favorite tees. “Core” doesn’t have to mean “stagnant”, it simply represents a tightly focused selection of product categories that will speak to your brand messengers.

Concentrate on your core, and the merchandise that carries your logo will communicate the story you want told!

The concept is simple:  RFP’s are issued to find the lowest cost provider that will offer the highest value return.  However, while the concept is easy to understand for both the customer and the bidder, drafting the bid document is a complex task.  After receiving and completing countless RFP’s in my career, it was always painfully clear when an RFP was written without the benefit of even the most basic understanding of what it takes to build a branded merchandise program for the corporate customer.  Bidders put in endless hours to research, analyze and justify the cost of the products and services they offer, but often submit that information knowing the team of reviewers may not fully understand how each respondent will apply their particular set of skills to building a program that meets the unique needs of that client.  The RFP process should bring a clear understanding of how well the winning bidder will perform as a trusted expert advisor, not just as the lowest-cost provider.

If we can all agree that to purchase branded merchandise through a distributor-hosted web site is not the same thing as understanding the complicated process of developing and managing a multi-tiered promotional merchandise program, then we can also agree that employing that level of insight should be one of the most important parts of the RFP process.  If you have a strong partnership with your current provider, that could be the best place to start. As an alternative, an outside consultant with the appropriate industry experience can provide unbiased support for this exercise.  But, regardless of the solution, the need for an educated approach to this very important process is undeniable.  After all, as I’m often told by IT programmers helping me to design a comprehensive activity report for my customers … Junk In, Junk Out!  Consider this is a call to eliminate the Junk from your next RFP!

Please don’t call them chatskis!!  The value of promotional merchandise to help raise brand awareness has plenty of well-researched facts to support the genuine reality that even a budget-friendly pen can leave long-lasting positive impressions with the recipient.

In fact, according to the 2010 industry survey by the Advertising Specialty Institute, advertising specialites beat out prime-time TV, radio and print advertising as the most cost-effective advertising medium available, with a cost per impression at .005 cents.  Bags have the highest number of impressions in a month, over 1,000, and over 1/3 (36%) of those with incomes under $50K own bags.  83% in the U.S. say they can identify the advertiser on a promotional item they own, and 41% say their opinion of the advertiser is more favorable after receiving it.  The statistics go on and on, but the bottom line message for all corporate marketing teams is undeniable … increased brand recognition is the reward for giving good stuff!

(image via ASI)

Companies are generally very good at reaching out to customers when they’re ready to sell their products or services, but often forget about the value of client input when designing market strategy.  The money spent on flyers, email blasts, advertising media and promotional merchandise that raise buyer awareness may be better spent after an audience survey provides insight into customer satisfaction, purchasing habits or lifestyle choices.

No need to rely solely on internal discussions around “what’s the next hot thing” when you can proactively drive your business forward with quality data collected from a focused audience.  SurveyMonkey is an online tool that helps businesses and individuals build and analyze online surveys.  Take the guess work out of new product launches, identify industry specific trends or get a true sense of your customer satisfaction level.  You can even design a survey around company dress code, or plan better events by learning the attendees preferences and interests.  And just so you can prove that the idea you had about putting your company logo on stress balls shaped like Smart Cars was a good one, you can put all data into professional charts and graphs for sharing at the next internal brainstorming meeting.

Ask all the questions you want to know – the answers might surprise you!  If “Knowledge is Power” (Francis Bacon), then why wouldn’t we want our marketing efforts to be more powerful?