The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

Well with our summer holidays not far away and the BBQ being cleaned up ready for action I thought it might be about time to explore some of the summer gifts on the Redbows Promotional Gifts Store. Deck and Beach Chairs might just be ideal at this time of year. Imagine them branded with your company logo and being used at outside events, company BBQs or even provided to employees for use during their breaks. Off course with the fuel strike this weekend it may also be handy to carry one in your car on a long journey…

Golf competitions and tournaments are great promotional events but how do you make sure it is an absolute all-around winner for your clients ? Do you choose gifts for immediate impact or longer term brand investment ? Well our advice is to choose both. OK this may seem a bit cheeky but think of it this way - when your clients arrive at the golf course it is always nice to give them a small box of goodies, say branded golf balls and tees in a golf gift set for the day. Then give them something to take away after the dinner and you get a double impact. Consider a Crystal Award for simply taking part - something that can be put on display in their office or a novelty item like a golf putting set. Above all make sure your day is fun, with competitions around the greens, and remember to pay that little extra for brand pin flags and signs around the course.

I just wanted to write my first blog entry for 2008 and say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone. We are all refreshed from the festive break and raring to go. Everything looks so positive for the new year and we are sure that it is going to be another exciting ride for everyone associated with Redbows. Our new estore is just going live at the Promotional Gifts Store and there are many exciting developments to look forward to. Have a great year everyone and remember to do what we do best at Redbows - Promote Yourself!

The Toy Retailers Association has just announced its top twelve toys for this Christmas. Now it has to be said that with three kids I sometimes do not feel ’smarter than a 10 year old’. I do however have to take my hat of to Noel Edmonds who just seems to have that knack of being able to come up with game shows that catch the imagination. Perhaps after some Nintendo ‘Brain Training’ I will feel ready to tackle their latest craize.

You may have noticed a change to our email sign off this week. We got those nice guys at Emedia to do us an Outlook stationery template. We are very pleased with the result as it gives Redbows a little dynamic. You would not believe the debates we had on whether we needed to rotate clockwise or anti-clockwise. Off course this rebranding is all part of our marketing strategy for 2008.

The final design for the 2012 Olympic Stadium was released this week. Five years seems an eternity but some marketing managers started working towards this event some time ago. I was wondering the other day just what we will see develop in terms of promotional gifts over the next few years. Certainly, this is going to be a ‘big-one’ in corporate land with many campaigns and incentives built around it. If you could predict what the hottest gadgets in 2012 are going to be and which promotional items will be ‘with it’, then you will be onto a real winner. Even with five years to go, I can say for sure that we will see customers ordering at the last minute or should I say last 1/1000th of a second to go! Well no matter, creativity, customer service and express delivery is what we excel in.

Redbows is very pleased to have received a marketing support grant for its new gifts website due for development and scale-up over the next few months. The grant is important because it helps us to invest further in our technologies and customer service but it is also a marker of how our business is developing. Attracting EU funding, which is hard to get at the best of times, means that we have really caught the eye of government as a fast rising business. We are very proud of what we are achieving at Redbows and I believe that our ethos and style is reflected in the numerous emails and letters of thanks we get from our ‘delighted customers’. Thank you.

I was happy to read this morning in The Marketer about the results of a new pay survey by Croner Rewards (remuneration experts) on behalf of CIM. This showed that the pay gap between male and female marketers had closed to 8.6% over the past year. As in most specialist areas, the gap is widest at the top with 10% being a common difference. This (off course) narrows substantially as one moves down the food chain to marketing managers and executives. Whilst these surveys can provide some useful insights, I just wonder if gender comparison is the right way to assess pay scales in this day and age. I would prefer to see performance-to-pay measurements based on something other than gender - perhaps comparing effectiveness in terms of success and impact on their organisations over the last five years.

Oh - the coins - well these are Feng Shui  I Ching Coins. Tied with a red ribbon they symbolise money flowing into your life and have been used for thousand of years as amulets of good fortune. In return for passing them as a gift to others you in return receive good fortune back. So what goes around, comes around - perhaps ?!

This week I came across an interesting article in The Marketer (published by the Chartered Institute of Marketing) which looked at a top ten of cultural clangers to avoid. There have been many classic examples from Kelloggs launching cornflakes into India where cold breakfasts are a no-no, to Pepsico’s translation of ‘Come alive with the Pepsi generation” which in Chinese equated to “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave”. Probably the recent mother of all clangers is the US Army handing out footballs covered in world flags in Iraq - the Saudi flag contains versus from the Koran - simply crazy, insensitive and just primed to back fire.

We live in a world where clangers are common place but fail to take the time to avoid them. Perhaps they are as hard to find as the ones that live in the moon - click Clangers for more info if too young to remember. It is simply a question of understanding cultural diversity and the heterogeneity of of the target audience. So often a marketing campaign is geared towards the masses rather than more honed strategies focusing on the specific needs of smaller niches. Niches which themselves can prove far more rewarding.

With many organisations planning their Christmas gifts campaigns we always stress at Redbows the need to employ some”visioning”. Profile your target audience and then imagine yourself receiving the gifts you are considering. Try some negative brainstorming - think about how you could kill your promotional campaign and make it missfire. You can be surprised what these creative skills can uncover.

And why the clangers? Well the image is of Mother Clanger. Now my mum knew she had 30 minutes to do what she wanted any time the Clangers came on to TV when I was a kid. OK so I am showing my age but click on the hyperlink and listen to the jingle - I swear it will have a calming effect and make you smile if you are from this generation. A surreal experience and one for the deep memory experts and psychologists to figure out.

I was with a PR company the other day and we decided that promotional gifts are one of the best ways to reinforce a brand name. However you have to be so careful to match the gifts to the client and their marketing message. We decided that as it was approaching Christmas and a time of year to reward clients, that probably Xmas themed gifts would be ideal. From Redbows we decided to offer a range of chocolate baubles, gift hampers, wines and some of our latest engraved champagne flutes and wine glasses.