The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

Over the last three years Redbows has grown dramatically - we have got busier and busier, employing more staff with an ever more complex supply chain to manage. Now, my team want me to update my little old diamonte clam-shell phone to something called an iPhone. So I can be always in touch, on demand and have everything at my finger tips. Well I am no techno dummy but I just could not fathom what the fuss was all about till I went into my local O2 shop. Wow! When you see this gadget in the flesh and touch that screen you can see that it is an absolute winner. Sadly for me (and my team) the catch is that it is not a G3 phone and so therefore only really becomes powerful when you can connect to a wireless hotspot of which there are over 7000 in the UK - unfortunately there are very few where I live. So for now I am going to rely on my little clam phone. It does exactly what it says - it phones and when I do not want to talk it clams….well it gives me that little bit of strategic thinking time that all busy working mums, internet entrepreneurs and senior executives need from time to time.

Just as I was looking at our budgets and projections for 2008 I heard the first enquiry come in for next year’s Easter Eggs. Well done! This year Easter falls early on Sunday 23rd March and so we can expect a very busy period just after Christmas for this product line. Back to the sales graph and once again it shows the busiest periods for a promotional gifts company as March, May and November with peak sales in these months. Whilst we do not have a true Walls ‘Bangers and Ice Cream’ strategy, it is fair to say that with over 6,000 promotional items we are getting to a similar stage of development and our new e-commerce website will mean that we are always open and ready to process an order and deliver on-demand.

Please let this be true! Alan Shearer is being touted as the potential England Manager. After Wednesday’s awful result I read this morning that Alan Shearer could throw his hat into the ring . This would be absolutely fantastic - a leader who can inspire, motivate and work some magic both on and off the field. I just hope that the job goes to a home-grown Englishman like Shearer and that we have the guts and commitment to give him the time to work through the problems in the England football camp and come out fighting for the next World Cup.

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.

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.

How was your bonfire night? This is one of those dates that once get to it, you know that you are on the count down to Christmas. It is also one where the gifts associated are very time limited - being either explosive or edible. For our party, I do have to admit to sneaking in some moulded chocolates that I managed to get my hands on and rock sweets. They all went down really well with our neighbours, friends and family. Not unlike the penultimate firework that my husband tried to let off. He managed to get a large rocket to explode 3 feet above the ground rather than at its cruising height of 100, because of a lack of a launch tube. One day…

Robin was having dinner earlier this week with a colleague who suggested we look at the creative potential of social blogs like Myspace. The dinner guest manages an Indie/Rock group called Spiked in his spare time. Now this all-girl band are relatively young but the sound they produce is exciting and Myspace offers them a place on the Internet to post-up information on the band and some sample tracks. They probably recorded their work on an Apple Mac-based system and are a generation who have been brought up alongside technology - quite simply they are techno and media savvy. So what does this mean for a company like Redbows ? Well quitely simply we are a business within an industry (promotional gifts and marketing services) that has to be just as technologically orientated and media savy. Our industry is one in which we have to continue to develop our marketing skills, invest in our technologies and people and keep up with the latest trends across the whole plethora of socio-economic, political and cutltural groups. It is a huge ‘ask’ but one that means we can have a better understanding of our customers and be in a better position to differentiate ourselves through customer service.

Last Sunday, I took the family down to Covent Garden in London. It was a warm, dry November morning and I have to say that the area lived up to all expectations. The street performers were quite simply amazing. One, a juggler commented that his was the purest form of entertainment. He had been doing it for nearly 13 years and was so successful he still worked on the streets! Well this got me thinking back to the foundations of the promotional gifts industry. What are the purest gifts we supply, which can create the ‘buzz’ that this street entertainer had with an audience of over 300 people passing by? The truth is that there is no one gift that falls into this category. They all can. It just comes down to finding the right product and message, and delivering it in the most informative, interesting and educational way possible - at the right time. Just like the street juggler in Covent Garden that morning.

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 ?!