How Will You Get Your Business In Front of a Customer Where They Make Purchasing Decisions?

Two strangers, Ed and Fred, run into each other at a bar and soon learn they are in the same business—sort of.

It quickly becomes clear that Ed is at his favorite watering hole to drown his sorrows. He is a media buyer with a large ad agency that has lost its biggest account. This makes him expendable. Fred, however, is celebrating. A promotional products guy, he has just knocked down a $75,000 order for imprinted wearable’s and 10 gross of higher ticket writing instruments. It takes all the restraint he can muster to refrain from telling the bartender to keep ’em coming.

Reach is an advertising measurement that has always bedeviled Ed because his work seldom involved the promotion of universal products—the things that everybody buys. Toothpaste and toilet paper are among the most frequently cited examples. No, he has had to apply mass media to push products to market segments and niches. He’d be absolutely lost without the audience breakouts and demographics he gleans from SRDS, Arbitron, Yankelovich Monitor lifestyles, Claritas Prizm and those Nielsen People Meters. Ed is beginning to think his future is in the new media—cell phones, PDAs, the internet with its banners and blogs, or product placement in Hollywood blockbusters. Can’t you just see Sharon Stone, once more legs crossed and lighting up a Virginia Slim in Basic Instinct 3?

But Fred is with the old media. After all, promotional products was a thriving endeavor at least 50 years before Vladimir Zworykin remarked, “Gee, this is a cathode ray tube. I think I will invent television.” Although he doesn’t have to mess with all those voluminous reports like Ed, don’t think Fred doesn’t know his research. He’s aware that reach can be a problem for him, too. Put the wrong promotional item in the hands of the targeted audience, and the message or impression is wasted. Fred will have seen his last $75,000 order. Consider the client who says, “I want my company’s name right in front of buyers where they’re most apt to make their purchasing decisions”—like in their office. Fred can respond by presenting a catalog of desk and office accessories. He confidently announces that 38 percent of business people refer to these items at least once a day.

Is Fred making up this stuff? No, he’s referring to page 25 of Promotional Products: Impact, Exposure and Influence, the DFW Airport Study published by PPAI. Like I said, Fred is into research. If you want to be authoritative, you’ve got to be an authority.

Usage Of Desk/Office/Business Accessories

Frequency             Percentage

Once a Day                38%

Once a Week             39%

Once a Month            10%

Once in Six Months    13%

Never                          0%

Abridged from Promotional Products: Impact, Exposure and Influence, report on research by LJ Market Research, San Diego, and published in 2004 by PPAI.