When promotions turn bad

I was given a pack of promotional pens the other day by one of my clients.

Half of them disintegrated on use.

I had a friend sit in my lounge last Friday and pull out a promotional pen he had been given a week before to find it had run out of ink.

Everybody knows this story. Promotional pens are mostly crap! Don’t buy them because you are just wasting money because they:

1. Never work well.
2. Consequently damage your brand.
3. Normally get binned within a week.

Just because websites like Alibaba allow virtually anyone to become a supplier of promotional items doesn’t mean you should buy cheap rubbish.

I have in my possession a mechanical pencil that was given to me when I joined a German company called Vossloh-Schwabe around 20 years ago.

The pencil has an octagonal profile, was machined from aluminium and as is anodised black.

You could punch holes in bricks with it –admittedly I am not sure why you would want to do that but it sounds cool.

The point is that you keep quality promotional products for a long time.

Cheap t-shirts get used as rags, quality t-shirts get worn until they die. 

Cheap folios and bags get thrown out the same day but expensive ones get used for years.

Cheap backpacks go in the bin, quality units get used for storage of my kayaking gear on top of the bookcase in my study.

And as already mentioned cheap pens don’t last a week and just irritate everyone.

Next time you sign off on a marketing spend don’t get seduced by large quantities of cheap promotional products.

It’s the same as throwing money in the bin. Buy less, buy quality.

The friend who sat in my lounge relayed a disturbing story. 

He recently sat at a round table with a group of 10 local CEOs.

They were each given a pad and a promotional pen to take notes.

Not one pen at the table worked.

They discussed it and ridiculed the company supplying the promotional pens.

Not a desirable outcome!

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.