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Today, we are looking at a really great idea for a promotional item, mugs! Mugs and cups are used by pretty much everyone, whether it’s drinking their daily tea or coffee or just used for drinking water. The use of mugs as a promotional item can be a sure way to be sure your company logo is always in sight. The great thing about Mugs is that they are durable and last for a really long time, unless they are dropped or damaged. Another great feature of promotional mugs is the sheer amount of space you have for your company logo, slogan, website and all other varieties of information.

The mugs we have come in 2 varieties: First, you have kitchen mugs for use indoors or at the office, then you have travel mugs; which can be used on the road, in the office or basically anywhere you want.

Kitchen Mugs

Let’s look at kitchen mugs first. They come in a wide variety of materials, shapes and sizes. Some of my favourites are:

Curved Engravable Mugs

These mugs simply give a classy and smooth look; they are really durable and will last the client a lifetime! The engraved logo looks really great and will be sure to promote the image of professionalism and good quality.

Ottawa Flared Mug

This classic and simple mug is a great way to get your image out there, with your logo sitting on the front; you can imagine your potential customers and clients using this mug on a daily basis. Also available in a variety of colours

 

Colourful Steel Double Wall Mugs

 

These are great mugs available in all kinds of colours, you’ll be sure to find one that matches your company logo. The sturdy steel construction and great looks will make sure that these mugs are used single every day.

If any of these designs aren’t what you are looking for, take a look at the mugs page and you’ll see a much greater selection.

Travel Mugs

Bohemium Custom Branded Travel Mug

 

What a great travel mug/flask this is, with your company logo displayed prominently on the front with a great silver looking finish; this is a great promotional item. What client wouldn’t love to use this on a camping trip or even out on the road when they simply don’t have time to stop for hot coffee?

Arabian Bottle Mugs

 

These are great giveaways for those clients and potential customers who love exercising or just a way to drink water conveniently. The high quality translucent plastic finish really stands out, and with your logo, you’ll have a great eye catching and useful product.

There are a number of different mugs available both for travel and kitchen/office use, with each of these different designs and colours, there’s no excuse not to order a few today. Your clients and customers will love you for it!

USB sticks are the modern equivalent of floppy disks or perhaps a small hard drive, used to store data files, they range in capacity (generally ranging from 1Gb up to 32Gb). The beauty of USB sticks is that they are so portable and can be used for a wide variety of purposes. In any situation where you need to give data to clients or staff, USB sticks are a great choice. Not only that they fit the purpose but they can then be reused over and over, this is a gift people will use for years.

USB Designs:

USB sticks come in all shapes and sizes, from the basic model to a number of novelty and brand image ideas. For example if you’re a company concentrating on green resources, then why not give your customers a wooden or bamboo USB stick? The idea is novel; mixing modern technology with wood or bamboo. What’s great about this is that your clients will associate this with being both green and high tech, a great combination.

If your company happens to have a square logo, why shrink it down to fit on a small rectangular USB stick, when you can get a much better square shaped or even simply a bigger stick. This will allow your logo to fit perfectly and give a very unique looking USB which customers can use for storage again and again

What about a company specializing in dealing in gold or precious metals? Well, you can even give out USB sticks shaped like a gold bar.

 

Other items that would combination for a business selling beverages, a book shaped USB for a company dealing with books or large amounts of data. How about a key shaped USB for a security company? There are a large number of choices suitable for different corporate events and company images.

How to use the USB sticks effectively:

There are promotional ways that you can use USB sticks. A good example could be a corporate event, such as a presentation to clients or a tradeshow. You can give away these USB sticks with a selection of images and information about the products and services or perhaps a video presentation. These can be powerful tools, as not only will the client be informed, but (on branded models) they will now have your company logo in their pocket. This could be used for any kind of company really, providing that the USB design matches the corporate branding that you are trying to convey.

Let’s now look at something more specific, such as a software company. It would be simple enough to provide demos or trials of the software on USB stick. By delivering the software demo in this way instead of a download link or a CD, you are making the experience memorable, and the client is more likely to test the software as all modern computers have USB ports, whereas some do not have CD drives.

USB drives are great in the way that the can be used promotionally for both passing information and as a highly reusable item that will remind the client of your company every time they need it. Even going for a more traditional USB drive simply putting the company name and logo on it can make a big difference, novelty designs even more so.

 

Office clutter is a common enough sight in many work places. It certainly is in mine…. on my desk especially. It cannot be helped sometimes. No matter how often I try to organise my desk, there simply are days when no amount of organisation seems to work! My desk drawers are filled to overflowing with many training materials, books, brochures, user manuals, product guides, price lists etc. that everything else has to go on top of my desk.

I have two business card holders. One seems to belong to everybody else because they gravitate to it whenever they need to find somebody’s contact information. The other one contains paper clips, key chains from several business trips, fridge magnets, some colorful marbles and a few months’ worth of change.  Both card holders are precariously perched on top of a stack of old ring binders.

I also have 3 coffee mugs from different corporate events that are too tall to fit inside my desk drawers.  They sit against the cubicle divider. I filled them with novelty pens, letter openers and my chopstick collection. It was (in my humble opinion) a cool way to “dress-up” my work area. As my clutter grew however, all attempts at personalising my desk were rendered useless amidst all the chaos.  

 

Everything changed when I won a charming little fishbowl in an office raffle. My workmates were sure the fish would die from stress if I put it in my cubicle. They gave me a week! I didn’t care what they said. I have been visiting the raffle display corner and have been staring at that fish for a few minutes every day since they announced the raffle. I didn’t even know at the time what kind of fish it was.  It wasn’t particularly pretty, kind of yellowish blue (hard to imagine yes, but that’s how it looked to me). The round tank itself was incredibly clear and very easy to look into, unlike others that looked as if they were made from thick and ugly prescription glasses.

The very next day after I won I cleaned out my desk of all the dust traps that I have been keeping. I put all my books into four storage boxes and had them moved to the stockroom. When all that’s left on my desk were my laptop and my 3 decorative coffee mugs, it was finally ready to welcome my new-found motivation for a clutter-free desk, my new fishbowl! I certainly didn’t want my fish to think it fell into a sewage tank! I wanted to give it a nice, fresh-looking environment!

Over the next few weeks, I covered my old cubicle walls (boring grey upholstery) with beautiful underwater-motif fabric, added miniature plant jars in the corner and had some lighting fixtures custom-made for my tiny aquarium. I also bought two smaller replicas of my fishbowl, filled them with lollypops and toffees and placed them on the other end of my desk between the coffee mugs.

    

Oh, and the not so pretty fish was a blue tang (remember Dory from Finding Nemo?)…. It gradually turned the rich blue that Dory was in the movie.

I have since installed a bigger fish tank in my apartment, with a variety of fish in it. Watching the fishes flash in and out of the rocks and the water plants gives me a peculiar sense of peace and contentment. It sort of refreshes my tired brain. Nothing however compares to the feeling that I get each morning when I greet Darius (Yes he’s a hunk so I can’t have named him Dory) as I begin my day at work and each night as I leave for home.

You might be wondering about the clutter.... Well I have managed to keep them to the barest minimum. My priority now is to keep Darius’ environment as pleasant as possible. He’s in a much bigger fishbowl now. The little guy turned me from a slip-shod to a fairly neat and mindful person, it’s the least I could do, really.

Does anyone know how many coffee mugs they’ve received as gifts over the years? We have them in all shapes, sizes and colors…. We’ve lost some (probably without even noticing it)…. We’ve also kept some, especially those with the most unique designs or those from extra special events.

Coffee mugs are amongst the most common freebies or giveaways during corporate events because they’re readily available, easy to customise and very affordable. For these same reasons the coffee mug is under-appreciated by most of us. We’d much rather receive something else at the next office party, right?

At Work

The lowly coffee mug is actually multi-functional and versatile. Use it to hold all your pens and pencils and it becomes a pen holder. Use another one as a paper clip holder, a coin bank, a candy jar, a flower vase if you have one deep enough or you can even park your mobile phone in it! A few coffee mugs set side by side can become your very own unique and decorative desk organiser.

For the Family

Take a few of your mugs home and assign one to each member of the family. You don’t have to buy and settle for a set of identical (boring) coffee mugs when everybody can have their own; distinct from everybody else. Personalised mugs don’t necessarily have to bear somebody’s name. Give the strawberry-shaped mug to your carefree and fun-loving daughter; the lemon-colored one that looks more like a bowl to your spouse; the plastic Spongebob cutie to your little one whilst you keep the classic black for yourself.

Around the Home

• Coffee mugs that you’ve been keeping for a few years and are now cracked and discolored with age can be turned into charming seedling planters or mini herb pots to line your kitchen windows.

• There are mugs that would make really nice candle holders to safely catch all the wax drippings.

• Fill a few old mugs with aromatic oils and turn them into improvised oil lamps at strategic spots inside your home.

• Every time a button comes loose, drop them into a designated button mug. Control the clutter by using your old coffee mugs as receptacles for various knick-knacks that would otherwise be left lying around.

• You don’t need a fancy toothbrush holder when an ordinary coffee mug will do the trick just as well. Whilst toothbrush holders don’t actually cost too much, your coffee mug came absolutely free, courtesy of your last corporate party!

For Friends

Need a new way of packaging your gifts? Presents these days do not always come in a box. All you need is a little imagination and some creativity. An old coffee mug can be stuffed with some gourmet chocolate, dressed-up with oversized ribbons and voila! You have a cute and innovative treat for your friends!

Try to find fun and inventive uses for all those souvenir mugs you’ve collected over the years. Instead of letting them gather dust on your desk or around your home, why not transform your coffee mug collection into whatever suits your fancy? A coffee mug by any other name…. is entirely up to you! 

In the wake of the global crisis, Australian businesses had no choice but to cut back on overhead costs in order to stay afloat. First to be slashed is usually the marketing budget and many of these businesses relied on promotional products as their main advertising medium. This is perhaps the reason why a recent report from IBISWorld revealed a slight annual growth in the online corporate and promotional giftware sales industry.

It is really not surprising if the industry enjoyed a positive growth when promotional products have always been considered to be quite effective in boosting brand recognition and recall. Plus, they are a lot cheaper and can reach more consumers as compared to print ads or television advertisements in the long term. For instance, a promotional calendar can be on display for the entire year or a branded laptop bag can be used for several years.

The numbers do not lie. If you are a business which wants to take advantage of the benefits that these promo items offer, then do not waste any more time. In the next couple of years, household consumption is set to rise and you need to bet your brand out there by handing out promotional merchandise customised with your brand name or logo. 

One of the perils of putting up a business is not generating much consumer interest. Obviously, no customer means no profit. So for those of you who are still straddling the fence so to speak with regard to promoting your brand, you should realize as early as possible that is it a must.

With the many competitors out there, you need to stand out and get consumers’ attention. In fact, a study conducted at Baylor University in the US revealed that promotional merchandise can boost consumer response rate by as much as 75 percent. A separate study from the same university showed that customers who are gifted with promo items are 14 percent more likely to offer sales lead as compared to those who did not receive anything. There is no doubt that an advertising campaign using promo products is valuable to any business.

If you think about it, the money spent on personalised merchandise is nothing compared to the exposure your business is going to enjoy. For example, a custom refrigerator magnet can be seen at least 14,000 times by a family of four members. This is certainly quite cost efficient than other mediums of advertising such as television, print or radio. So, browse a catalogue and make sure your brand is known. 

Promotional products have been around for almost 200 years and until today, they are considered as the most cost-efficient marketing strategy. They are a favourite during product launches as they can increase brand recall and recognition since customers usually take the items home with them. If you must know, a typical promotional product is kept for an average of 7 months. That is certainly a lot of time for your brand to be exposed!

So what are the best promotional to give out during this important event?

For starters, consumers love wearables which include most apparel such as shirts, caps and jackets. When worn, these products will be seen constantly which means continuous brand exposure for you. Of course, you cannot deny that classic items such as pens and stationaries are still a huge hit among consumers. A lot of brands still include them in their list of promo merchandise.

Other popular promotional giveaways are bags. With the “green” movement, gaining momentum, eco-friendly bags are becoming quite popular and it would be good for your image to be seen as environmentally-friendly. Lastly, there are the calendars which can be put up on the wall or on desks. These calendars are sure to be on display for 12 months, which is certainly a long time.

Any business, new or old, knows the importance of advertising. Some companies have enough capital to launch a full marketing campaign while some needs to be practical and smart with the advertising strategy they choose. If you belong to the latter group, you should know you will never go wrong with promotional merchandise. There are a number of reasons why these personalised products work including the following:

High Visibility – this is because most of the items are used on a daily basis, such as lanyards, mousepads, coffee mugs and USBs. Constant exposure can create brand recall and you would certainly want to enjoy this when the time comes for the consumer to make a purchase.

Cost Efficient – because you can order items in bulk, you can reach as many consumers as possible for a fraction of the cost of high level marketing such as television spots or print ads.

Personal Touch – promotional merchandise allow businesses to connect to their customers on a personal level. This is probably the reason why they are more effective as there is interaction between your business and the consumers. They use items which you have given them as gift or souvenir and it makes them feel connected. 

As a new business, it would be understandable for you to worry about increasing brand awareness to generate a lot of consumer interest. After all, it is not enough that you offer excellent services or products. You would still need to introduce yourself to the market and nothing makes this easier than handing out Promotional Products.

Aside from being able to order in bulk at an affordable price, promotional products are usually stuff you use every day such as mouse mats, phone holders and pens. The only difference is these items are now acting as marketing tools, bearing your corporate logo or artwork and working to boost brand recognition.

With the many promo products to choose from, you can surely find one which you know can easily represent your business. For instance, if you are in the health and wellness business, you will most likely gravitate to custom stress balls. On the other hand, you will never go wrong with office supplies such as printed sticky notes, custom lanyards or calculators. You might also want to consider branded business items such as personalised compendiums or go green with eco-friendly products.