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The good news is that the weak pound has caused a surge in export orders, meaning that the manufacturing sector in January saw its swiftest growth for a decade and a half according to the PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index) but while that may mean a quicker lift out of recession, there are still tough decisions to be made in business.
As everybody tries to limit spending, whilst wooing new customers or trying to persuade existing ones to increase their order books, corporate gifts and promotional items can play a substantial role in helping create an atmosphere of growth and hope. There are three steps to creating a cost-effective promotional scheme:
1. Be sure about the target audience – you need to identify the right people (CEOs or purchasing managers? Mid-level decision-makers or top level executives?) and then choose a promotional item that meets their daily needs. High level executives will not use promotional pens but might see value in a top quality printed bag bearing your company details, while frontline staff will use all the pens you can supply them with but giving them bags would be an over-investment that probably wouldn’t bring enough return on your expenditure to be worthwhile.
2. Refine the message you wish to project – and bear in mind that this isn’t just the slogan you use, but the medium that carries it: an organic fair-trade T-shirt tells a story about your company’s values and aspirations even before you label it with a message. Baseball caps convey speed and youth, so if you’re in the business of fast service, giving embroidered baseball caps as promotional gifts could be an excellent idea.
3. Set your ROI and measurement systems – how will you know
• Who received your promotional item?
• What use they made of it?
• Whether it converted into a new or enhanced income stream?
Offering a range of promotional clothing as business gifts can be good for business as it helps you deliver a promotional or customer loyalty campaign by providing a worthwhile reward to customers without having too much effect on your budget.
There are two classic ways to run campaigns using clothing as rewards or incentives. They are:
Scaling up incentives
This is where people get a reward of increased value depending on how much they spend. The lowest reward might be some sweatbands or a visor, then, for a higher spend, a baseball cap or an embroidered beanie hat. At the next level of spend you might reward your customer with a printed T-shirt and at the top level of spend they might receive a custom printed hoodie or fleece. This kind of incentive can also run as a loyalty campaign where the customer gets to save up ‘stamps’ or ‘vouchers’ for each purchase they make and then trade them in for a promotional clothing item. The more loyalty tokens they have, they better the garment they get as a reward.
Launch campaigns
To create media and customer interest you can use promotional items around the launch of a new product or service or to promote an existing one. Media goody bags can be a good idea here, but journalists are very unlikely to use promotional clothing so cans of soft drink overprinted with your promotional message, notepads, pens and gifts like printed umbrellas may be a better idea, all packed into a screen-printed bag that carries your launch message.
Take care to ensure that you don’t spend more on a promotional campaign than you will get back in increased publicity that you can convert into sales and make sure that any loyalty scheme rewards are durable and of good quality as customers soon feel cheated if you’ve given them shoddy clothing that doesn’t last.
It’s fascinating to realise that many people will judge your company or business by the promotional items you give away.
There are two forms of judgement – rational and emotional.
1. The first is when people decide if your post-it pads are cheap and nasty or smart and useful, whether your brand-printed baseball caps are stylish or tacky. It’s largely value-free and based on facts.
2. The second kind of judgment happens when they use their emotional intelligence to estimate your company by nature of the promotional items. For example, do they feel flattered or insulted by your offering?
This is particularly important when opening new business contacts and relationships – if you give them a mug with your business details on it, are you saying they are the kind of person you expect to be always stuck in the office? Alternatively, does a vest imply that they are sporty and maybe slack off work to go running or to the gym? Does the screen-printed bag you gave them suggest they are a valued customer or are you saying that you think they are the kind of person who walks around with a rubbishy plastic bag they should replace with your gift?
When picking out the perfect promotional product for a certain occasion, you need to consider the emotional intelligence that your clients will bring to bear. Some items: key rings, pens and calendars, sweatshirts, and memory sticks, are emotionally neutral while others: intimate garments, literature, cosmetics etc are very personal and may carry a heavy emotional load.
It’s important to pick the right kind of promotional materials to support your business – there’s an almost limitless range of promotional gifts, giveaways and goods on offer, so how do you know which will work best for you?
Begin by thinking about your customers as well as your business – what item would be most valuable to them? Examples include:
• Insurance/finance/customer service based businesses – these can give away desk best items such as calendars or post it pads.
• Retail businesses – for retail operations, giving away reusable printed bags can be a fantastic way of building loyalty in customers and getting free advertising as people carry them around everywhere.
Then think about what would most help your staff to develop and support your business:
• Promotional clothing can be used as part of an employee appreciation programme that encourages good staff performance – printed polo-shirts that bear the company logo and job title of the employee can also be used to indicate status – a better quality polo-shirt can be attained by delivering a certain level of service or making an agreed number of sales.
• It can also be used to promote your business to customers by giving it as promotional gifts especially if you can use to as prizes for customer competitions or as an incentive to get people to visit your stand at exhibitions or trade fairs. Baseball caps are a great incentive for this kind of customer attraction scheme.
The England team have revealed their new 2010 World Cup strip, which is based on the 1966 World Cup winning shirt. It’s a red jersey with the standard Three Lions logo which has above it a raised red embroidered star, to celebrate England’s one World Cup victory.
Using embroidery in this way is a classic style that adds intricacy without making a garment look too fussy. Standard uses for embroidery include:
Promotional wear – like the England strip described above. Because embroidery has a long pedigree, it carries echoes of tradition and ceremony. But as contemporary embroidery is designed and carried out using computer technology, there is no limit to the size, shape and colour of the text that can be sewn to a garment and still be legible.
Brand images – company logos and monograms are commonly used on work clothing – where a personalised uniform may carry the staff member’s name as well as the company logo.
Monogramming – famously, young women embroidered their initials on sheets and pillowcases in their ‘hope’ chests and then, when they found a husband, rushed to add his initials to their monogram before the wedding. Today monogramming is seen on everything from plush towels in a spa through to the pockets of the smart shirts worn by City traders.
Embroidery is one of the most durable ways to decorate clothing, as well as being one of the most impressive looking, which is probably why the England designers have chosen to embroider the single red star, for the 1966 win, so elegantly over the England symbol on the football shirts they hope will be worn in another victorious final.
Most of us are familiar with the kind of promotional clothing used by fun runs and other events, like concerts. Right now the internet is packed with a variety of T-shirts that have been designed to raise funds for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. But many items of promotional clothing, like printed or embroidered T-shirts, have more value than just their fund-raising potential.
• First, these items of clothing commemorate an event or person – this gives them a sentimental value.
• Second, if they are well-designed garments, they also have a chance of developing ‘collector’ status – this is where something that was designed to recognised a current event ends up becoming a nostalgic emblem.
• Third, items like embroidered caps or printed messenger bags have recently developed cult status: this happens when the design is iconic and much copied, but the original item is coveted for its rarity and brand status.
A business can’t necessarily aim to develop these kinds of value in their clothing, but it can always aim to choose designs, colours, styles and qualities of clothing that might help it achieve added value in its chosen staff uniform or promotional clothing.
2012 means Summer Olympics, for the UK at least. Sports clothing retailer JJB is relying on the Olympic boost to pull it out of a slump, in part by appointing four times Olympic Gold winner Sir Matthew Pinsent as anNon-executive director.
But all businesses, not just sports retailers, can benefit from the ‘Olympic effect’. Choosing to invest in the buzz that comes from the Olympics is a good way of building teams and creating new energy in your business. There are two ways of doing this:
1 – picking champions
You may already have sports-people in your organisation – at a much lower level than the Olympic standard. But investing in them and setting up support systems can encourage all your staff to see that you believe in their talents and personal development. Companies can do this by:
1. Sponsoring a local event like a fun run, or a youth football team, or offering to pay for branded sports clothing for an amateur sports team, whether they are darts players or netballers.
2. Getting staff involved in supporting a local football or other team by organising visits to watch matches and investing in promotional clothing that says ‘X business is supporting Y team’ which can be worn in the workplace.
3. Funding a skills development day for local sports people – bringing in a trainer to help sporty types to improve their performance and setting up a stall about your business and what it has to offer alongside the sports work.
2 – making champions
Getting an entire business involved in healthy activity can sound impossible, but if you make active life part of the personal development of all your staff, it bring rewards because they take less time off, have more energy and a great team spirit. Companies can do this by:
1. Picking a range of sports: swimming, running and a ball sport are the best options, and offering staff a range of ways of engaging with them. Some companies offer an extra half hour lunchbreak once a week for people who go to the local pool and swim during that time. Others set up after work ball games and provide printed T-shirts and sporting equipment for staff to take to the local park.
4. Some businesses sponsor a charity and get all employees involved in a fun run or sponsored walk with special motivational branded clothing that links the business to the good cause and creates recognition in the public of the way the company is supporting the local community.
At present, many winter uniforms seem to be lacking enough clothing, with many companies rushing to order jackets and coats for their staff and even sending desperately short-notice orders for fleeces which chilly employees can wear over their uniform shirts or even, for the truly unlucky, branded T-shirts! Hats, scarves and gloves for those working outdoors have also become important, and several major industries in the UK have been handing out insulated turn-up hats to employees who have to travel between warm premises and the cold of outdoors.
Embroidery is the ideal form of decoration for both winter jackets that have a chest logo and for hats, with the added advantage that a hat with a logo on the middle front is easier to get the right way round on your head! Embroidered clothing for outdoor wear gives a strong image to a company and because embroidery is durable it copes well with the rigours of being worn outdoors in all weathers as well as coming up fresh after frequent laundering.
Many employers have wised up to the advantages of providing a uniform that allows for a number of layers such as a printed T-shirt to be worn under a shirt, fleece, jacket or overalls, along with a long-sleeved sweatshirt or hoodie that can be worn alone, with a T-shirt under it, or layered with a fleece to provide extra protection in low temperatures. The same T-shirts can be worn in summer, with lightweight trousers so that instead of moving from winter to summer wear on a given day, staff can choose from a range of clothing that meets the demands of the changeable British weather.
Using promotional tools such as social media, competitions, and printed or embroidered clothing bearing details of special offers or promotions is more likely to offer a sustainable route through the recession than discounting prices for businesses, recent research suggests.
The reasons are that cost-effective branded clothing has more benefits for a company, such as promoting unity in the workplace and building brand recognition in actual and potential customers.
Whether you choose to invest in custom printed T shirts or embroidered polo-shirts, or just promotional bags with your website and logo, the return on your investment will be greater than simply slashing prices because you get a longer return for investment than the short-term gain obtain from cutting your profit margin.
Visibility is key to maintaining brand recognition and company uniform is a great way of delivering this at the same time as promoting a sense of belonging and loyalty in your staff team. Wearing printed promotional clothing to trade fares or other networking events also allows you to pass a subliminal message even to the people you don’t get to meet face to face, as the image of your logo will impress itself on their subconscious.
Famed British psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman has suggested four ways that people can stand a better chance of keeping their New Year’s Resolutions. They are:
1) Break your goal into a series of steps, focusing on creating sub-goals that are concrete, measurable, and time-based.
2) Tell your friends and family about your goals, thus increasing the fear of failure and eliciting support.
3) Regularly remind yourself of the benefits associated with achieving your goals by creating a checklist of how life would be better once you obtain your aim.
4) Expect to revert to your old habits from time to time. Treat any failure as a temporary set-back rather than a reason to give up altogether.
It all makes perfect sense, but how can businesses adapt his tested methods to achieve their own resolutions?
1. Work with your team or staff to identify the sub-goals that lead to the big result. If dispatch need to be processing 25% more orders a year, can they work faster, or smarter by finding streamlined ways of doing their job? If sales need to sell 25% more can it be achieved by up-selling, cold-calling, converting more queries to sales? When you’ve identified each sub-goal, give it a deadline and have it printed on T-shirts for your team so that they know what they have to do to meet the goal.
2. ‘We’re getting orders out by 3pm this month’ or ‘In February we’ll beat our competitor’s deals by 5%’ is a message your staff can wear and your customers can understand. It makes them accountable to everybody they meet and they will know they’ll have to answer questions on that target and how they are getting on with busting it, and that provides motivation. When they meet those sub-goals, give them celebratory T-shirts to show that you know they’ve done what they committed to.
3. If you’re going to host a dinner at a local restaurant, or give everybody a productivity bonus when they hit their target, get that printed on T-shirts too: put the restaurant’s menu on the front so every team member is reminded when they look at a colleague that they’re working for something they really want. Alternatively, print aprons with the restaurant logo on and hang them up around the department to remind everybody of the great reward ahead. If it’s money you’re giving, have the amount embroidered on a cap that each supervisor wears so that the team get a constant incentive to work towards success.
4. If a monthly target is missed, don’t yell and shout, just give the team a ‘better luck next time’ reward such as a vest or sleeveless T-shirt that thanks them for trying and encourages them to achieve more next month.
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Customised Uniforms | Promotional Clothing | Embroidered Polo Shirts | Printed T-Shirts | Embroidered Shirts | Personalised Sweatshirts | Promotional Fleeces | Embroidered Clothing | Screen Printed Clothing
Transfer and Cad Cut Printed Clothing | T-Shirt Printing | Cheap Clothes