ACTIVATION
The missing ingredient in your marketing mix?
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People still love promotional giveaways
How will you measure love this Valentine? and should one even attempt such a cold, clinical exercise? Well, naturally someone has.
Commercial goodwill is a bit like love. You know it when you feel it but it’s tricky to quantify.
Now Accountants, bless them, prefer everything to be measured, recorded and eventually written off. Trouble is, the best things in life don’t really fit with that approach.
And yet during the process of business acquisitions and mergers, goodwill very often commands a significant premium. Suddenly, someone somewhere decides that the immeasurable can be measured and subsequently valued.
Ultimately the point of promotional marketing is to create goodwill of differing sorts. It’s very existence is predicated on the assumption that people want more for less and prefer those who give it to them.
From special offers to loyalty programs, premiums to freebies, the point of promotional marketing is to effect change for the commercial benefit of the promoter. Promotions improve.
Within promotional marketing, promotional items remain a popular medium for generating goodwill. The original attraction, which goes back hundreds of years, was their relative low cost and high impact. Merchandise can give you a lot bang for your buck.
Then as the market matured the range of promotional products increased as did the methods of branding. It’s now possible to create a product which fits your theme, campaign and budget perfectly. All you need is some creative thinking.
Promotional items have become a mainstay of the marketing mix and have not been as greatly impacted, as in the case of print advertising, by the advent of digital marketing.
However, in these challenging economic times marketers have naturally looked again at the effectiveness of promotional items. In an environment where the ROI of other activities can be measured as exactly as the above algorithm for love, a medium unable to offer instant real time statistics can initially appear outdated.
But promotional items are tangible and offer a return no more immeasurable than say B2B social media activity. Sure you may have a screen full of analytics and 326 followers and friends, but what difference has it made to your bottom line exactly?
Some things can’t be digitized and nor should they be. Business is about people and relationships. Human interaction. Contact.
So can you really measure love, and can you live without it?
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