fred o 300x300 Promotional clothing: Chickens and Turkeys

How many promotional T-shirts do you own? How many has your company produced over the years?  Do you, and your customers wear them with pride or are they now used as wash-rags for your staff’s cars?  The gap between success and failure for promotional clothing is all about getting marketing campaigns right. And that can depend on the business you’re in – a firm of builders would be insane to promote itself the way that an office temps company does. Here’s a couple of campaigns that show how it should, and shouldn’t, be done.

WKD, the vodka-mixed RTD (ready to drink) has launched a cheeky Christmas campaign called Stuff turkey, Chicken rocks – the idea is to raise a grin from recession-hit drinkers and thus promote sales.  Pub staff will be given promotional gear to give to customers who buy the drink: such as hats shaped like chicken heads along with (man-sized) t-shirts with the slogans I’m a leg man and I’m a wing man. Will it work?  Who knows … the evidence will be available in February’s sales figures.

FalconStor taught  the world how NOT to use promotional clothing to promote a product in September. Their product is virtual storage, and of course they need to distinguish themselves from all the other virtual storage companies out there (if you don’t know what virtual storage is, don’t worry, it doesn’t affect the moral of the story) so they ran an event at the VM World Conference, giving away day-glo orange FalconStor Teeshirts and telling everybody to come back to their booth at the end of the day, with their Tshirts, for the draw in which one tee-shirt recipient would win a Segway: a two wheeled personal transport device.

At the end of the day there was a sea of orange clad tee-wearers around their stall and yet, when the draw was made, the winner wasn’t wearing a FalconStor tee – instead he produced the still packaged T-shirt from his bag. After consultation, the promotional team said he’d won fair and square, because the rules said the winner had to have the T-shirt, not that he or she had to be wearing it.  End result – furious teeshirt-wearing people who’d hoped to win indulged in a mini-riot, ripping off their FalconStor promotional tees and flinging them back in the faces of the FalconStor staff … and you can guess how many people in that crowd will ever have anything to do with FalconStor again!