I like to refer to promotional products that people carry from place to place as walking billboards. After all, they work like billboards that can be seen wherever they happen to be carried and used. This offers tremendous advertising space for many types of businesses.
Let’s look at Stu who is the manager of a popular hotel near an exclusive golf course. His hotel is in the Highlands of Scotland where it is often quite windy and rainy. His hotel also offers a popular bar and restaurant.
Given the fact that many of the people in the area are from out of town, he chose to order 50 umbrellas with his hotel logo and the restaurant on alternate panels. As he was on a budget, he chose the cheapest umbrellas he could find which he let hotel guests use during their stay.
Can you guess what happened next?
Within a week, the majority of the promotional umbrellas were either sticking out of bins around the golf course or simply discarded along the road.
Cheap promotional gifts have their place. Inexpensive t-shirts are great for promoting school clubs and those budget umbrellas will work fine if you happen to sell products in a tourist area where people may run into your shop for a low cost umbrella to protect them from a sudden rain storm.
If you are promoting your business, however, it is always best to go for quality. Stu’s umbrellas, regardless of how cheap they were, did him absolutely no good because they were not fit for purpose. In fact, they may have even given a negative impression of this hotel and restaurant.
He would have been much better off looking at good quality storm umbrellas. There are some really nice promotional umbrellas on the market that will last for years and get people into his restaurant and hotel!
Do you want to carry around a broken umbrella? How about your shirt? Would you still want to wear it if it began to show threads or fade?
Promotional clothing and umbrellas can help increase brand awareness. If they are good quality they could be doing their job of attracting customers for years.
Let’s look at it another way. If Stu purchased 50 £5.00 budget umbrellas and they lasted on average for 5 Days he would have been paying a pound per day for very little.
If on the other hand he invested in 25 top quality umbrellas at £20.00 each he could expect them to do their job for months if not years.
By Dan Toombs
Tags: polo shirts, Promotional t-shirts, Promotional Umbrellas