HOLIDAY TIME!!!!!!

The holidays are right around the corner, and this is an important time for the promotional marketer! It is the time of year where we start to thank our clients and customers for everything they have done for us over the course of the year. These days, almost every company does a special holiday gift for these key clients, usually in the form of a gift basket, box of chocolates, or some other very unhealthy but delicious gift!

If you are going to spend the money on a gift like this, why not also do it with a promotional goal in mind. There are many of these types of gifts that can be branded, logo'd, etc. Now you can say thank you to your key people with a reminder of your brand for them to keep in their office, take home to their families, and for other individuals to see as well.

You could do a jar of candy, promotional chocolates or peppermints, or any other of what is sure to be hundreds of options that not only say thank you, but also promote your brand!

Event Marketing...Visual Marketing's Best Friend!

One of the fastest growing wings of the marketing field is event marketing. Companies are seeing the value in things like PR events, trade shows, mobile marketing tours, and other types of public promotional events where consumers can be exposed to a brand or product through and experience. These types of events are extremely important to your visual marketing decision-making, as an important part of the event is the take-away. Our homepage has a graphic showing environmental impressions + takeaway impressions = $$$. What does this mean?

An environmental impression is the experience a consumer has at an event where the logo or product makes an impression on their subconscious. This could be a billboard or banner, a staff tee shirt, or a product sampling, among other things. Basically it is all the various ways a consumer experiences the product/brand while at an event experience. All of these impressions are making a mark on that consumer, and hopefully influencing their purchase decision at some point in the future. When you can follow up these environmental impressions with a strong takeaway impression, you make the likelihood of purchase that much greater.

The takeaway impression is the giveaway a consumer gets when they leave the event. It could be a tee shirt, water bottle, or just about anything else under the sun. What is important though, is first, that it is desirable to the recipient, and most importantly, that is has a logical connection to the event. If your event is centered around sports, than you should do some sort of sports giveaway, but something that is different and memorable, or extremely useful to the demographic you are targeting.

Each time the consumer uses the product, they are taken back to the event, and all those impressions become stronger. The stronger and more "front-of-mind" the impressions are, the more likely you are to induce purchase at some point. The moral here is to use your events to your advantage, and think about how to manage your promotions so they coincide with the same goals and missions of the event being planned. These two marketing initiatives should be thought about simultaneously, not in their own respective vacuums.

Targeting Consumer Demographics in the Promotional World

For any experienced marketer, demographics are one of the most important things to consider when launching an ad campaign, whether it be print, tv, or otherwise. However, demographics are just as important when considering a giveaway or promotional item. In my opinion, all too often, we think internally when it comes to promotional items, rather than thinking with our end recipient in mind. We think to ourselves, "I would love to have a water bottle with our logo on it," so we produce water bottles and assume that our potential customers will respond positively to it.

As we have said before, we are trying to get our customers to think just as strategically with regards to promotional item spending as they do with traditional advertising spending.

When you are doing your next promotion, make a note to yourself about a few things. In one column, write down all the ideas you and your team are considering producing for your promo. Then in another column, write down some adjectives about who is going to be receiving the promo. How old are they? Are they receiving the item in a more casual or professional environment? What other interests do these people have? When you look at some of these questions, and then look at your first column, you are going to be able to eliminate a few things right off the bat. The promo does not always have to be a direct tie-in to your company. For instance, if your a beverage company, you don't just have to do a drinking bottle, because it fits. You can do something totally divergent from the beverage world, if it fits.

Thinking demographically can give you a nice advantage when producing your next promotional item, and can be a major help in designing your next apparel giveaway.

And as always, Rollout can help!

how do customers SEE your brand?

You can logo just about anything...

THE SCOPE OF THE PROMOTIONAL MARKET

When people think about promotional products, there are a few key products that come to mind. Think about it yourself, and on a side piece of scratch paper, write down the first 5 things that come to mind when YOU think of the promotional market. Ok, have your list? I bet you that your list includes some of the following: pens, note pads, water bottles, key chains, stress balls.

Why is this? I personally think the main reason is that people do not put as much thought into promotional product spending as they do other marketing spending. They simply go for the tried and true, top of mind type promotional items, many of which I just named. Pens are probably the number one most ordered promotional item in the world, and for just that reason, I feel, are the number one most overrated promotional item as well. Check the pens around your desk. I bet at least a few of them have a logo on it, and before today, you did not even know it.

Promotional products are a very wide open market. There are options people never think about. I believe being creative in your promotional item spending can be very effective for you, especially if you can product an item that is not only innovative and different, but also useful and "cool" to the recipient. Another important part of this thinking is matching the item to your company.

One good example of this is a gym. Water bottles are the item of choice for gyms, and water bottles are a good promo. However they are not unique. Something we have done for gyms recently are things like pedometers and frisbees. Pedometers are a great gym tie-in and frisbees are something involving an active lifestyle, which also ties in nicely.

Sometimes the tie-in is not as important as the unique factor. We have done things like hand sanitizer which are extremely unique, and thus are memorable.

So what is the moral of this story? Instead of starting your thinking by coming up with promos you have seen done in the past, start your thinking in reverse. Think of items and products that match your goals and business and then come to a promo company (Rollout Marketing Solutions is a perfect one!) and ask them if they can logo it!!! I guarantee you they can, or they can come up with counter ideas that match what you are looking for!

Until next time...

how do customers SEE your brand?

VISUAL MARKETING VS ADVERTISING???

Some of you might be thinking to yourself, what is the difference between visual marketing and advertising? At the very least, isn't all this visual marketing stuff just a subset or a category within the overall advertising spectrum? My answer, maybe. You could look at it that way, but there are a couple things to consider when comparing these two, in order to make a case for their separation. The American Marketing Association defines advertising as:

The placement of announcements and persuasive messages in time or space purchased in any of the mass media by business firms, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and individuals who seek to inform and/ or persuade members of a particular target market or audience about their products, services, organizations, or ideas.

There are a few parts of this definition that do not work for visual marketing, as we have discussed it. The first being that advertising is "announcements and persuasive messages," while visual marketing is subconscious brand messaging. The second biggest area the two concepts diverge is that advertising looks to "inform" and "persuade" the consumer to act upon the brand being advertised. Visual Marketing has no call to action in its purpose, and is more pointed at brand awareness and future action by the consumer. So by definition there are some easy ways to distinguish the two from each other. However there are some other things to consider when discussing why it is important to keep these two concepts seperate.

The world of advertising is, and has been, changing rapidly. One of the oldest and most tried and true forms of advertising is the television commercial. With the onset of the DVR, though, commercials are becoming less and less important to advertisers, and things like product placement are becoming more popular in the realm of TV advertising. Another area of marketing that has been booming in recent years is event marketing. Event marketing almost didn't exist some 10-15 years ago, and now it stands as the fastest growing form of marketing used by companies today.

With all of this change occurring in and among the marketing landscape, it is all that much more important for visual marketing to carve out it's niche, and stake it's claim to being a more recognized form of promotion. Visual Marketing works closely with event marketing, and as one grows, I believe you will see the other grow as well.

You Can Never Have Too Many Tee Shirts...

If you are like me, you probably have a drawer or spot in your closet that holds your dozens upon dozens of tee shirts. Tee shirts are one piece of clothing people feel like they can just never have too many of. They are also a piece of clothing that people hold onto for roughly a lifetime. We get rid of pants, shirts, jackets, etc as they begin go go out of style, but those tee shirts just keep piling up and up and up. What is stranger is even though we have enough tee shirts to outfit an army...we wear the same 10 tee shirts over and over again.

Ok, so what does this little monologue on fashion have to do with visual marketing? One of the most common promotional items we produce are tee shirts. We produce tee shirts for events, tournaments, brand promotions, staff...just about anything really. The purpose of these tee shirts, however, is always pretty much the same, brand awareness. If the tee shirt features an event logo, it's goal is to increase brand awareness for the sponsors of the event, or for the event itself, trying to gain more attendance for subsequent years. If the tee shirt's main focus is a simple logo of a company, then that company is trying to gain brand awareness for themselves.

The tricky part of this, though, is that none of this can be achieved if the recipient does not wear the shirt. Now remember, this shirt is going into a tee shirt pile and fighting for wear time among dozens of other contenders! So how do you make sure your shirt is one of the lucky ones.

That is where a key visual marketing partner comes in. If look at the fashion and tee shirts now-a-days, there are alot of brands that are designing their shirts to be more fashionable, and making it "cool" and "hip" to wear that brand. There are distressed designs on soft, comfortable feeling tee shirts on the shelves of Targer, Walmart, Kohls, etc for brands like Mountain Dew, Coors Light, Corona, John Deere and many more. There are also brands like Rockstar Energy Drink that have perfected this "cool factor" among branded tee shirts, partnering with other clothing companies and selling co-branded tee shirts in surf stores like Pacific Sunwear.

You do not need to be a gigantic brand such as the ones listed above to capitalize on this trend, however. We help brands come up with cool and fashionable ways to display their brand or logo on a shirt, that will make the shirt less likely to go into the "abyss" of the other tee shirts, and more likely to make it into that 10-12 shirt rotation we all have!

The two main keys are creating a unique looking, stylish logo/design, and then putting it on a comfortable, fashion style tee shirt that people want to wear. Here is the tough part though...the shirt might cost a bit more. However here is something to think about. You can spend less money, and give away a shirt that no one is going to wear, thus making your return on investment value go down, or you can spend 10-15% more but increase your return on investment by 50% or more by creating something people want to wear, and will wear proudly.

Keep reading, as I will go into this topic more and more over the course of the next few weeks/months, and as always...

how do customers SEE your brand?

What is visual marketing anyway?

Ok, I know what you are thinking....visual marketing? Isn't all marketing visual? Well, the answer is "sort of." For instance, you do have certain marketing techniques that are auditory, like radio ads or musical marketing techniques, but for the most part, you would be pretty much correct that most marketing is in essence a visual stimulus. For the purposes of this blog, I want to define what I will be talking about when it comes to visual marketing, as this term, I believe, will become more and more prevalent in marketing in the coming years, as the techniques utilized are growing in popularity as the marketing environment changes.

Visual Marketing is defined as "the use of static brand images to enhance awareness and increase recognition in the mind of the consumer." Pretty fancy language, right? Think of it this way. Think of all the ways you see logos throughout your normal day. They are seen on packaging, on tee shirts, on different giveaway type items, etc. All of those logos you see throughout the day are brand stimuli. You do not even realize it, but when someone walks past you in the mall wearing a Nike tee shirt, you were just hit subconsciously with a brand image. These things happen all day long, without us even knowing it most of the time.

Visual Marketing is the most subconscious form of marketing, and differs from other marketing techniques such as commercials and billboards, because when we see one of those ads, we know the company is trying to get us to buy something. We all love the E-Trade baby, but the E-Trade people are not just trying to entertain us while we wait for the game to come back on, they want us to buy their service!

So now that we know what visual marketing is, let's talk quickly about what this blog is going to be about. What I want to do here is help educate marketers on how to utilize Visual Marketing effectively in business. I also want to help people realize how effective Visual Marketing can be when put into practice correctly, and with a little bit of thought.

So please check back here from time to time, as I will be posting a new major topic on the first of every month, and other ideas and notes in between as well. I want this to be a place to come and learn a little bit, but also maybe laugh a little bit.

If you have questions, feel free to email me at jonathan@rollout-marketing.com.

And as always...remember..."you can never have too many tee shirts..."