BUSINESS MONITOR


How to make a good impression


Producing solid evidence that buying printwear will help customers deliver their marketing message more effectively is proving successful in the US. Paul Clapham suggests the UK industry could benefit from taking this approach.


A


merican businesses generally do more marketing than their British counterparts but in my somewhat biased opinion we tend to do it better. That cannot entirely be said for the printwear industry. I have argued here previously that before printwear can become a fully paid-up member of the marketing community it needs to have some solid research in place and unless someoneʼs hiding their light under a bushel, we donʼt have it.


Please excuse some repetition, but I think this is very important. When you choose advertising, regardless of the media, you want to see some supporting evidence of the numbers of people who will see your ad and take the message on board. Marketing departments - in large companies in particular - are very ʻnumbersʼ conscious. They will apply personal judgement and gut feel to a proposal, but they get very jittery when that isnʼt underpinned by some tangible statistics.


Such a prospective client is essentially asking you a very reasonable question: “Have you got any solid evidence that buying printwear will help deliver my marketing message, something with attached numbers that I can put in a report to my boss?” And the answer is: “No”. Well, not exactly. As above, the Americans are ahead of us on this one and they have gone out and researched it. Indeed, they did so two years ago. The intervening recession


notwithstanding, I would suggest that two-year old figures for the American market are a damn sight better than no figures at all when talking to a UK customer. Letʼs look hard at that research.


It was conducted by the Advertising Specialties Institute (ASI) and involved detailed questioning of 678 respondents. | 26 |


On the face of it, that may not look like


many.


However, as a case,


research into voting


intentions rarely covers much more than 1000 respondents and I can assure you I have been asked to give complete credence to a far smaller sample than 600 in the past. The ASI Impressions Survey also featured a broad spread of respondents both in terms of age and occupation. Iʼd call this solid research. Letʼs start with two key questions asked of those who had been given ʻwearablesʼ (donʼt you just love American jargon?). First, how often do you use the item(s)? Shirts scored 4.3 per month, caps 6.1 per month and bags 9.3. I can hear every bag maker in the country shouting: “I told you so!” about now. My gut-feel is that in the UK caps might be lower since the baseball cap is still far more a part of American popular culture. Those bag makers can now contemplate how many sales they might have made if armed with that data.


Second, they asked how many people they estimated they came in contact with when wearing the item. Bags came top again with an average of 111, shirts scored 84 and caps 79. The commonest number quoted was 26-50 people for each of those three. That, by the way, is each time they were worn.


I would contend that both those sets of figures are impressive and extremely useful in a sales pitch. Put the two together and you get the number of ʻimpressionsʼ – what we would call ʻopportunities to seeʼ (OTS). Bags score over 1000 per month, caps 476 and shirts 365. Incidentally all of these


outperformed other promotional items such as pens and calendars. Those are monthly figures for a single individual, remember. But they would all be a bit tainted if everybody threw their printwear items away at the end of the month. Which of course they donʼt. The average length that an item of printwear was kept was seven months. However, I think the researchers missed an important trick here. The longest period they offered to respondents was ʻmore than a yearʼ (chosen by19%). I would have been interested to see what the figure would have been for ʻmore than three yearsʼ and how that would have impacted on the overall average. (I know quite a number of men for whom the correct box to tick would have been ʻuntil my wife refuses to be seen in public with me when Iʼm wearing itʼ) By way of contrast, glasses and mugs


outperformed printwear for longevity and pens fared worse.


But the bit that your clients will love best of all is brand recognition. Over 84% of respondents could name the brand or business which was featured on their gift and this rose to over 90% for some printwear items. TV advertisers would weep tears of pure joy if they thought that their expensive seconds in the middle of Coronation Street were


www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60