Promoting your business through custom designed branded items is a perfect branding strategy and an intelligent step that offers real value for marketing in return. However, you cannot introduce just about anything or everything for promotional purposes. That is because the offering should capture the interest of the consumer instantaneously and unless the product is extremely desirable and useful the target of propelling a value-based-marketing campaign cannot be fulfilled.
What is Brand Strategy?
According to Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) brand strategy is a long-term plan for the development of a successful brand in order to achieve specific goals. A well-defined and executed brand strategy affects all aspects of a business and is directly connected to consumer needs, emotions, and competitive environments.
How ordinary items promote big brands?
The more public an item is the more attention it will grab. For example, medical practitioners use customised pens and prescription pads containing the name of the latest drug or vaccine so that public awareness is created effectively yet effortlessly. This sort of branding strategy has proven to be more fruitful than highly expensive commercials and billboards. This occurs due to three factors. Firstly, lots and lots of consumers feel compelled towards buying common items because of their handiness and essentiality.
Secondly, people are becoming excessively brand conscious and therefore, would use a product that has a reputed brand’s name engraved on it. Thirdly, ads and prints cannot be displayed forever but an everyday item remains a part of the consumer’s life on a daily basis, which means more exposure and long-lasting publicity for the brand.
Selecting the perfect product is crucial
The appropriateness of giving away promotional products is an important issue. To create the perfect impact, you need to present the most suitable item. Such as a coffee brand should offer branded mugs, spoons, paper-cups, portable cup-holders, and lids, etc. instead of a laptop cover.
In this context, items like mugs, covers and umbrellas are commonly introduced and almost every well-known to low-scale brand has adopted this strategy to gain financial prosperity and public adulation. Promotional umbrellas, mobile skins, ball pens and mugs are being contemplated as the perfect options in the list of giveaway branded items. These seemingly ordinary everyday, promotional goods are powerful enough to easily amplify the impact of your brand identity; these can change your company’s reputation from unknown to a household name immediately.
Things to remember while devising brand strategy!
Creating a merchandise item that manages to fulfill the motive is not an easy job because not only should it be unique but must project the brand slogan and message in a clear-cut manner. Just like Apple company, they have a notable brand slogan.
A printed umbrella is the most difficult to create in this regard because not much change can be made to its overall designing apart from a few fixes here and there. Although a mug can be shaped uniquely but even then there are certain restrictions that need to be recognized.
There are some effective solutions to such problems though. You can opt for a unique pattern on the branded products you are creating. This will perfectly suit everything be it a mug, umbrella, pen holder or even calendar. Matching the color of your products with that of the packaging or label of your brand is another interesting way to create a personalized brand identity.
The quality of the material you are using make a big difference since if you have created a low-quality umbrella, then your entire campaign will suffer badly creating a negative reputation for your brand. On the other hand, high-quality and durable promo merchandise will enhance the relationship you share with your consumers. It can be said that the approach you have employed while creating the product for marketing your brand name will eventually create a long-term or short-term relationship with the consumers.
Similarly, the occasion of distributing promo products is a key aspect of this kind of brand strategy. You cannot giveaway mugs made from china during a carnival or trade show, because it will definitely get broken.
So create the most feasible item in a wise manner to promote your brand if you expect to obtain the desired results from your marketing campaign.
This blog post was written by Paul Beswick, Home Based SEO Specialist/Consultant for Concise Media Branding Ltd.