NIU

promotional items

Posted by Stacy on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 9:24 PM

There are certain things I hate in life. These include dandelions and certain birds. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against nature or plants or animals. In fact, I love to see nature and hope to live in a wooded area or next to the sea one day in the future. But dandelions and birds are different, since they leave remnants of themselves everywhere. Whenever my friends and I have a barbeque in the park, I find a ton of dandelion floaters on my socks that found their way onto my body while I was traversing through the grass. Also, birds love to shed their feathers all over the street and over my car and sometimes even in my hair. I think that if nature wants to be nature, it should stick to holding its nature-like qualities to itself, rather than giving out sub-standard samples to other things around them.

This is exactly why I hate promotional gifts. Whenever my friends would get back from a career fair, they would bring back bags of pure junk. Of course, this junk was emblazoned with a ton of gaudy company logos, but it was junk nonetheless. I never saw what was so wonderful about having purple or pink colored promotional pens lying all around the house. I understand that promotional items are a form of advertising, but I see them more like mass junk mail rather than a valid form of advertising that gives useful products to potential customers.

But back to promotional pens - I really don't like them. Usually, the companies make them too large for them to be practical. Also, they love to use flashy, ugly colors in which to encase the pen (which, by the way, runs out of ink in like two days.) If companies use promotional items, they should make them at least somewhat useful for those who will receive them. I think there would be some payoff if companies expended a little more effort into developing useful promotional products. Perhaps then potential customers would use the item more and associate it with the company, thereby spurring sales.

Also, promotional gifts should be just that: gifts. Nobody wants to receive an oversize pen for a gift, especially if it's a weird color. But if the promotional pen were more useful, it could be quite useful for advertising. If I had a really good promotional pen, I might even consider buying from or working for the company in the future!