When investing in a logo, make sure that it’s:

•    Unique – you don’t want to get confused with another company
•    Recognizable – a clever logo that looks too abstract might appear pretty but not help people understand what your organisation is about
•    Saying something about your company – a tropical fish company won’t be well represented by a palm tree, even if it’s tropical, and a fashion shop won’t spread the right message by using a well-dressed scarecrow to represent itself.

There’s no point choosing the perfect logo unless you promote it and create a brand identity.  Do this by:

•    Using it on your web site
•    Featuring it on staff clothing
•    Ensuring it is used in any advertising you undertake.

Having your logo screen printed or embroidered onto clothing and other items is the ideal way to spread the word about your brand. If your employees and/or supporters are clad in logo-printed T-shirts, polo-shirts or jackets then will be showing the world what kind of organisation you are. Embroidered logos on caps or laptop or document bags helps your brand develop loyalty. Having your logo similarly printed onto bags means that trendy teenagers, eco-conscious mums and so on will use your bag, and therefore promote your business, every time they go out shopping.

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There are many good reasons for choosing the humble T-shirt as your company uniform:

•    Purchase Cost – buying T-shirts is not expensive, compared to the cost of formal clothing like collared shirts, suits and business jackets
•    Maintenance Cost – this is really low: T-shirts can be hand-washed, washed in a machine, tumble-dried, line-dried, all of which means that the poorest part-time student worker or the most affluent Managing Director will pay about the same amount to wash a T-shirt – the student will do it by hand for pennies and the M.D.’s maid or au pair will shove it in his top of the range washing machine, but the cost per clothing item is about the same. Compare this to the cost of washing and ironing formal shirts or the dry-cleaning costs of jackets and business trousers and skirts, and you can see that the people at the bottom of your company will pay disproportionately more for maintaining their company uniform, because you can’t easily dry-clean your formal business wear at home, especially if you don’t have a washing machine
•    Communication – a lot of companies don’t think about this, and they should. If the T-shirt is your company uniform, you can budget for clothing that conveys a company message to both staff and visitors: a strong bright logo builds your brand image and helps people remember your name, and a slogan or business statement allows your staff to buy into the company ethos. You can’t get that on a business shirt
•    Brand support – it’s much easier to create a strong brand and to have promotional activity on posters, and as giveaways like branded bags, keyrings or other tiny items, if your brand has been strongly established through staff clothing
•    Staff turnover – if you have a degree of staff turnover, such as summer staff, it’s both cheaper and easier to outfit them with uniform because T-shirts come in all sizes and shapes and can easily be held in stock or swiftly re-ordered to meet company needs.

So when you’re planning a company uniform, think smart – think T-shirt!

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The key point in selecting promotional items to be given as gifts is to ensure that you balance the relationship between the client and the promotional item. If you have a loyal customer who’s been buying from you for several years, then sending him or her a T-shirt or a mouse mat might not have the required effect – in fact, you might cause that customer to wonder if you really value their custom!

In such cases it is better to give either a gift of more substantial value, such as a really good briefcase, or to supply a wider range of smaller, cheaper promotional items that the customer can distribute to their workforce – baseball caps are ideal for this purpose as they are small, easily transported and fun.

Then again, you have to balance the costs of your promotional campaign with your projected returns. There’s not a lot of point giving sweatshirts to people you’re trying to persuade to buy chewing gum!

Remember the range of ways that promotional items can be used: you can use gifts to launch or promote a new product, in which case the gift as to reflect the product and create interest in it. Bags with your logo and ‘designed to hold X’ where X is the name of your product are an ideal example.

You can also use promotional merchandise to support your customers. If you make kitchen equipment, why not give a free apron with every order over a certain amount? That encourages your clients to buy from you, gives you a free promotional activity in their workplace and allows the staff to keep their clothes clean – everybody is a winner which creates a happy buzz around your brand image in their minds.

You must also ensure the promotional gift will be useful for a long time. Durable high quality items reflect well on your company, but shoddy clothing or bags that fall apart don’t. Always buy the best T-shirts you can afford, for example and be sure that the printing won’t fade or crack as you don’t want your image to look old, tired and dated. A good supplier can advise you on the best printing options for your promotional campaign.

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The internet is full of companies that claim they can produce promotional clothing – what should you look for in a top-class supplier?

•    Think about the future … what about deliveries and returns and re-orders, or alterations that you need to make to your order – are you truly confident that your communications with an anonymous website is going to deliver what you need, not just in terms of goods but also in terms of a relationship that gets you the best clothing at the best price? Picking a company with a real geographic location and with people on the end of a telephone with whom you can explore all the options open to you, is the best way to ensure your promotional clothing investment isn’t wasted.

•    You need brands … good clothing is essential if staff and customers are going to wear your promotional gear, and that means reliable and trusted brands that convey a message that supports your own promotional message.  Being able to choose from a wide range of recognised brands means that you get exactly the kind of clothing you want, whether it’s budget, luxury or organic.

•    A picture paints a thousand words … and seeing samples and a strong portfolio from your chosen supplier will really help you understand what they can do and whether they have the expertise and skills to deliver what you want. If all their designs look similar or if their customer base seems limited to one profession, be warned, they may not be the best company to support your promotional activity.
•    Comparisons are NOT odious … a really top-notch promotional clothing supplier will be interested in your plans, whether you’re buying a dozen T-shirts for a one day sale in your shop, or a thousand polo-shirts to outfit waiting staff at hundreds of cafes. They will have ideas to share with you, suggestions on what clothing works best for your circumstances and will be able to point out factors that you may not have considered, like special washing instructions, or that your great idea for an embroidered logo has the same colours as another company’s famous brand image, which could lead to confusion. In other words, they are interested in what they can do for your business, not just what your business can do for them, and that means they will go the extra distance to ensure your promotional clothing does what you want it to.

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The British Retail Consortium must be scratching their heads. January’s sales figures rose 3.2% compared to January 2008. It’s the first spending growth since September 2008, and completely against all predictions, which said there would be a slump in January. The debate has already opened on how fast consumers will drop into/rise out of recession spending, and how far the unemployment figures have kicked in/failed to kick in with people’s spending patterns.

An interesting highlight that isn’t being so hotly debated is that those companies doing local, rather than national, promotions got a big spending boost. My guess, from a long time spent watching consumer behaviour, is that this links to coupon—cutting. In a boom, people respond to national advertising on TV and in papers, but in a recession, they react to adverts they see near the ‘money-off’ coupons they find in the local paper. So companies that want to promote themselves can probably reduce their spend on advertising and increase their sales by, running a simple competition – caption ones are good – in the local press, where people write in with a slogan for a company T-shirt or a witty caption for a photograph of something related to your company. The winner gets a good prize, all the other entrants get a money-off voucher.

You can ensure the message gets out by having your logo prominently displayed on your competition, on your advertising space, outside your premises and on company clothing. Because you’ve gone to the effort of ensuring you have a good logo that distinguishes you from the competition, make sure you get some expert advice on how to feature it on your staff clothing, because there’s nothing worse than a logo that blends into the garment, unless it’s a logo that looks strange or hilarious when worn by staff members. Smiling suns, for example, need careful placement on female T-shirts or polo-shirts so as not to appear to emphasise female anatomy!

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Recent case studies have shown what we all suspected – the logo is king. But why?

Partly it’s because a logo, emblem or monogram is not language specific. The ‘golden arches’ appear around the world, and have become so ubiquitous that some people don’t realise they are the capital M in McDonalds! Partly the success of logos is down to human nature – over 74% of people find it easier to process images than sounds or words, and that means an immediately identifiable image that relates to your business creates and confirms brand identity every time it is seen.

Clothing is another corporate identity success story – we can all identify airline staff, chefs, and policemen by their clothing, but did you know that most people can also identify over forty individual corporations from the clothing worn by their staff? Whether it’s the UPS guy or the KwikFit fitter, we have an innate ability to learn corporate clothing details and retain them. Amazingly, people can spot the difference between an RAC and an AA staff member at nearly forty yards, on the motorway, at night. And it’s not the colour of their high visibility clothing that people recognise, because asked to say which company wears orange and which wears yellow, most people have no idea. And that suggests that the emblem of each organisation, even at a distance, is instantly recognisable.

What’s also interesting is that people can identify brands very fast even when they are very small emblems on polo-shirts or even simply monograms on a shirt front. We seem hard-wired for this kind of behaviour and that’s good news for companies hoping to build a brand presence because as well as appearing on clothing, the logo should appear on both internal and outgoing material, intranets, websites and emails.

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