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Themed Promotions A Sweet Deal!
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| The key to making a promotion more memorable and successful isn’t all that complex. All it takes is coming up with a solid, appropriate theme, and then matching it with the proper product and distribution strategy. Sound like a lot of work? It isn’t. And your counselor can help ... |
You’re in a bank, restaurant, bookstore, pizza place – some sort of business. There, on the counter, is a box of pens, magnets, bookmarks, or keytags with the name of the establishment imprinted on them. “Take One.” Sure, promotional products with a name, logo or ad are a great way to get exposure and reinforce a particular message, but this mode of presentation and distribution leaves a lot to be desired, wouldn’t you say? In certain cases, just putting stuff out there on the counter or table may be the best way to go. But more often than not, there’s a lot of wasted opportunity with such strategy. You can do better. For instance, suppose the bank didn’t just give pens to anyone who happened to walk in, but only to customers who ordered new checks or started new accounts in the spring? And suppose it bundled those pens with checkbook holders picturing plants or flowers? Suddenly, the pen is no longer simply a gift; it’s part of a theme. And it has a higher-perceived value – and more impact – because it’s part of a conceptual package. “Anyone can just hand out a product; that’s easy,” says counselor Lezlie Ann Kinney. “Doing something interesting and exciting – that’s what stays with people.” What’s A Theme? Basically, a promotional theme is a recurring concept or idea carried through an entire ad campaign. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. For example, when Kinney wanted to generate more business for herself, she developed a theme to showcase her creative abilities. “In hopes of capturing more orders for Nurse’s Day celebrations, we delivered cakes decorated with text reading, ‘For a slice of creativity, give us a call’ to nursing departments in hospitals and nursing homes,” says Kinney. “The accompanying literature asked recipients to call for ideas. We also included ‘idea sheets’ for healthcare products.” Thematically, the promotion worked because it had a solid concept, and it followed through with an appropriate item – the cake. In another instance, counselor Leanne Welk was asked to create a promotion for a large company party. “The firm had recently purchased a large commercial cleaning company and was having a welcome party for the new management team at a well-known restaurant that also hosted murder mystery parties,” she explains. “My client wanted to give all new and existing managers a gift, and I suggested we coordinate it with the murder mystery theme.” The final result was a black cardboard coffin containing two evidence bags marked “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit B.” One bag held a letter opener engraved with the company’s logo; the other contained an engraved bullet-shaped pen. Both items were placed inside the coffin on a bed of colored packing paper. A coffin was placed on the seat of each attendee after the last act of the murder mystery. “The impact,” Welk notes, “was excellent – far greater than it would have been if the same products had simply been handed to guests instead of being part of the entire evening’s murder mystery theme.” Getting Started To get started on a theme, simply examine the subject of the promotion and ask yourself some basic questions. What is the concept? What message needs to be hammered home? What makes it special, unique or interesting? Are there any recurring terms, subjects or elements? Discuss the answers with your counselor, and some type of theme will begin to suggest itself. “You need to look at the event or idea you’re trying to promote and figure out what kinds of things make sense,” Welk explains. “Sometimes it takes a little brainstorming, but there’s always an opportunity to find an interesting way to do a promotion.” When one of counselor Joseph Scott’s clients, a manufacturing company, created a new wood/plastic polymer, the firm targeted a major national building-products distributor as its first potential customer. “Unfortunately, after almost closing a deal, the company’s decision-maker was replaced, so they had to start the sales process over again,” Scott explains, adding that he figured the best way to make the introduction was to use it in the promotion itself, in both a physical and conceptual way, to make the point. In this case, the promotional theme became the product. Rather than reintroducing the product in the typical manner, Scott came up with something different. “We took two pieces of the [client company’s] polymer board, routed one out to hold business cards and the other to hold self-adhesive notes, and laser-engraved them with the firm’s logo and the new decision-maker’s name,” he says. A week after the items were sent, the new manager called the manufacturer to work out a distribution deal. Moving Right Along After considering the subject being promoted and finding one or more unifying elements, the next step in theme development is to examine how to convey the concepts with something tangible and practical. As noted earlier, both can be relatively simple yet engaging and memorable. Case in point: When the marketing team at cable channel Turner Network Television (TNT) wanted to create a recognition program for its clients, it contacted counselor Kevin Bush. Since TNT’s tagline is, “We know drama,” Bush decided to put together gifts with a dramatic theme to piggyback on the network’s slogan. He called the items “dramatic occasion gifts,” using the idea of sending them out whenever TNT clients had a “dramatic” event in their own lives, such as the birth of a baby, wedding, anniversary, birthday, promotion, etc. “We set out to find products to fit properly into the ‘dramatic’ kits,” says Bush. “We wanted to find products that would form a cohesive package, a sort of basket of gifts that we could logo or not logo in order to express the right dramatic value.” Bush and TNT ultimately settled on three separate kits – a birth kit, a wedding kit and a “mar-TNT-ini” kit for general celebrations. The “birth kit” featured a diaper bag, imprinted bibs, specialized picture frame, imprinted baby singlet and children’s icepacks. The “wedding kit” included his and hers robes imprinted with “Drama King” and “Drama Queen,” a set of similarly imprinted towels, an imprinted picture frame and a imprinted scented candle. The “mar-TNT-ini kit” – basically a travel bar – held four Z-stemmed martini glasses, a cocktail shaker, cocktail sugar, coasters and a bottle of cranberry juice. The attention to detail is what really made the promotion interesting. All products were done in TNT’s colors and were color-coordinated to fit into each kit. For example, imprinted, color-coordinated “We Know Drama” ribbons accompanied the packages. And the dramatic theme flowed through the promotion in other subtle ways as well. “There was a pewter charm around every martini glass, and each charm had little colored beads around them – black, yellow and red, which are TNT’s colors,” Bush says. “Each was embossed with the TNT logo on one side and a different dramatic word like ‘action,’ ‘suspense’ or ‘drama’ on the flipside.” Needless to say, TNT and its clients were very pleased with the campaign. In fact, TNT’s management team liked it so much they decided to add some of the items – such as the robes and towels – to its retail store. Concept, Not Dollar, Is King Obviously, budget is a key element with themes, and even the best ideas can be hamstrung if a theme exceeds finances. But not every theme has to involve a high-end promotional item; sometimes the most effective themes focus on nothing more complex than a T-shirt. The Attic, a nightclub in the small college town of Greenville, NC, understood this. The club’s former owner, Tom Haines, now a promotional counselor, created a T-shirt-based promotional theme to boost business at the bar. “We’d been [open] from Wednesday through Sunday, and we were dark on Mondays and Tuesdays,” he says. “I thought we should open on just one Tuesday, give it a special name, build it up and have a special icing on the cake – something people wouldn’t expect.” Haines decided to throw a bar bash called the “Spring Zing Wing Ding Fling Thing.” “We made an event out of it,” he says. “Since it was in the spring, we just decided to rhyme all the words in the title. We wanted to give the night a crazy concept, so we did everything backwards. The band played facing the wall instead of the audience, and our employees wore their clothes backwards. The prices were backwards, too – it was cheaper to get in, and the drinks were really cheap.” To help push the point home, Haines ordered T-shirts – a lot of them – to promote the event in advance. He made sure all Attic employees (most were students at nearby East Carolina University) wore the shirts to class to help spread the word. As a result, that first Spring Zing Wing Ding Fling Thing was a huge success. All told, the club attracted more than 1,100 patrons that night. And it marked the start of many special events to come, each promoted in advance with a special T-shirt. “What made the nights work was creating events everybody could look forward to,” says Haines. “Each year it would change a little. One year we let people pay whatever they wanted to get in. We had these types of events for 18 years.” The Wrap-Up As you can see, a theme can be as involved or as basic as you or your budget dictates. What matters most is having the theme match the promotion in a way that catches attention and is remembered. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when talking with your counselor:
As always, your counselor can help you with everything. Just ask. |
